PACT
People, Attention, Context, Timing
Author: Professor Gillian Stamp
Published: July 2015 (first version published 2012)
Listening to leaders in different organisations across the world as they think about the way they see
themselves and their work, sharing their reflections on their successes and their failures, has helped
me to think of the key ingredients of effective leadership under the headings People, Attention,
Context and Timing. Happily this makes PACT and also captures the spirit of the relationship
between leaders and the people they work with. In the word ‘PACT’ there is something of
mutuality, a shared commitment that picks up the two-way interactive relationship that effective
leaders create and sustain.
When you look carefully at what actually happens around effective leaders, you find that leadership is
done with people rather than to them.
Effective leaders i) treat people as people and not as things; ii) know that attention is their most
precious resource and that where they place it is the most powerful signal they send; iii) read and
provide external context for opportunity and risk and internal context for work to be done and
people to flourish iv) have an acute and astute sense of time.
I expand on each aspect briefly below:
People as people are creative and willing and all the more so when they are expected to use their
judgement and are working in conditions that encourage them to do their best work.
People grow (they ‘appreciate’) and as they do so, they seek wider challenges; people feel
appreciated when wider responsibilities are paced in line with their growth. This creates mutual
benefit for them and the organisation.
When you treat people as people, you quickly realise that there are five ‘Ms”. People are i) makers
of meaning (hence the power of storytelling) and of decisions (hence their need to use their
This essay has been published by Windsor Leadership as a part of our 20th anniversary activities
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judgement); ii) members of teams, professional associations, families, communities; iii) each person is
an irreducible mystery; iv) “treating people as people is messy” and v) it is magic.
People create, need and work in relationships. And those relationships are most satisfying, most
effective and least costly when they are based on trust.
People inside and outside the organisation require Attention, the leader’s most precious resource; if he or she gives time but not attention, people will
sense that immediately.
Good leaders also give attention to governance and accountability; to resources, cost and allocation
of capital and to adding or losing value.
They give attention to tone/ethos/culture and to communication.
They give attention to appropriate detail (at strategic levels this means being clear about the
difference between value and cost).
A good leader gives attention to him or herself because as a Quaker scholar Parker. J. Palmer said
“A leader is a person who has an unusual degree of power to project onto other people his or her
shadow or his or her light…A leader is a person who must take special responsibility for what is
going on inside him or herself lest the act of leadership create more harm than good”.
And good leaders give attention to Context; they read, shape and provide context externally and internally; they ‘join the dots’ and
provide trustworthiness.
They are “contextually intelligent” and reach out into external context with courage especially when
it is unpredictable, critical and/or aggressive.
Reaching out into context builds insight and foresight - as one leader wrote “the failure to foresee is
an ethical failure because serious ethical compromises today (when the usual judgement on ethical
inadequacy is made) are usually the result of a failure at an earlier date to foresee today’s events and
take the right actions when there was freedom for initiative to act. The action that society labels in
the present moment is often really one of no choice. …. Foresight is part of the lead that the leader
has”.
Good leaders also encourage people at every level in the organisation to reach out into the context
of their work even when it is difficult to do so (because they are busy ‘delivering’, because they feel
misunderstood or criticised by individuals or media or because the context is just too full of
uncertainty and confusion).
Timing – good leaders see time as a resource; they judge when to speed up, when to slow down,
when to take the moment. They know that sequence can be momentum, that sometimes they can
push it harder; at others it is best to leave time to its own rhythm and use patience to the advantage
of the organisation.
They understand and can communicate timeliness. As one CEO put it “Even though someone might
not like the consequences of a particular decision, they feel that I make decisions in a timely way and
that I am not afraid to face the music (if there is a negative outcome) or that I got the timing just
right (when there is a positive outcome)”.
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They judge well the moment to encourage, the moment to criticise. As one CEO described from his
experience in football “a key aspect of the captain’s leadership role is about encouraging everyone
for so long as they are on the pitch. If a player has had a bad first half, you do not shout at him: you
put your arm round his shoulder and say words that will give him the confidence to do well in the
second half. If I am asked what aspects of my sporting life had the greatest impact on my leadership
style in business, it is this one. It is necessary at times to have hard but fair conversations with
people because they are not pulling their weight or delivering what is needed of them: in some cases
it is even necessary to tell them that they are in the wrong job”.
Good leaders have a remarkable capacity to manage time and to manifest this in always giving time
to thank and in the courtesy of almost immediate responses to emails, texts, voicemails. Through
this they signal respect for people as people – and we are back at the beginning.
Professor Gillian Stamp is Director of Bioss and an Academic Fellow of Windsor Leadership.
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