Your best employees may be the ones ignoring your constant Slack messages

I spent years in environments where the stakes of misplaced attention were immediate and visible: helping Jay-Z build enterprises at Roc Nation, then alongside the very talented team at Westbrook. What I watched in those rooms, and later confirmed as an investor, is that the people who moved the needle weren’t the most available. They were the most present. There’s a difference. And many organizations are quietly, systematically, rewarding the wrong one. We have built workplaces that optimize for responsiveness over results. The employee who replies in 30 seconds reads as engaged. The one who takes two hours because they were deep in a problem worth solving reads as checked out. That inversion is not just a management failure. It’s a competitive one. The Attention Economy Has Moved Inside Your Company The conversation about attention, who captures it, who monetizes it, what happens when it fragments, has dominated the consumer world for years. What I’ve watched play out in startups and portfolio companies is that the same dynamics are now operating inside organizations, and most leaders haven’t caught up. When a team member is context-switching between six Slack channels and a strategic challenge, the strategy suffers. The work that requires genuine presence, reading a room, building a relationship, solving a problem that has no template, cannot survive in an environment designed to continuously interrupt it. Training for the Olympics taught me something that translates directly to this: consistency matters more than intensity, and recovery is just as important as effort. You cannot perform at the highest level if you are never allowed to fully focus. The same is true for the people doing the most important work in your organization. A 2023 Microsoft Work Trend Index report found that 68% of workers say they don’t have enough uninterrupted focus time during the workday, and that those who struggle most to find the time and energy