There are a thousand definitions of leadership floating around in the tech world.
Some are about vision. Some about influence. Some about decision-making.
But lately, I’ve been thinking about leadership in simpler—and maybe more human—terms:
Leadership is the ability to capture, hold, and responsibly steward the attention of other people.
That’s it. Attention.
In a world where people are exhausted, distracted, multitasking, and context-switching into oblivion, the rarest commodity is not money, not talent, not tools.
It’s focused, sustained, purposeful attention.
And if you can gather it, hold it, and guide it toward what matters—then you’re leading.
Why Attention Matters in Quality Work
When you work in testing or quality engineering, you’re constantly trying to direct attention:
Toward a weird edge case you just found. Toward a known gap in automation that everyone keeps working around. Toward the end user, who won’t care how elegant the code is if the “reset password” link doesn’t work.
But calling attention to something doesn’t guarantee action.
You have to earn attention.
And once you have it, you have to steward it carefully.
That means:
Not crying wolf. Speaking with clarity, not clutter. Choosing the right moment and medium. Knowing when to press and when to let go.
Because in a healthy team, leadership isn’t just about making decisions. It’s about helping people notice what they’ve been trained to overlook.
Capturing Attention ≠ Demanding It
Some leaders try to capture attention through pressure or fear or volume.
But servant leadership offers another model—one rooted in trust, empathy, and relevance.
If people trust that when you speak, it matters, they’ll lean in.
If they’ve seen that you protect their focus, they’ll give it more freely.
If they feel that your attention is on them—not just your own agenda—they’ll respond with loyalty, not compliance.
That’s what stewardship looks like.
It’s not grabbing attention for your own sake.
It’s curating it for the sake of the team’s well-being and the product’s integrity.
What This Looks Like in Practice
In a standup, it might mean skipping your usual update to draw attention to a creeping risk in the integration layer. In a retrospective, it might mean gently steering the team away from blaming bugs and toward improving test strategy. In a design review, it might mean naming the accessibility edge case no one has brought up yet—not to win points, but to protect users. In a quiet moment, it might mean noticing who’s overwhelmed and redirecting team energy to give them room to breathe.
In every case, the question is:
What are we paying attention to?
And is it the right thing?
Holding Attention is Sacred Work
It’s one thing to get attention.
It’s another thing entirely to hold it—and to hold it well.
Greenleaf, in his writings on servant leadership, talked about the burden of awareness. Once you see something, you’re responsible for it. And once others see it—because you pointed it out—you carry some responsibility for what happens next.
That’s a weighty kind of leadership.
But it’s also a deeply humane one.
Especially in testing, where pointing to a bug, or a gap, or a systems-level fragility can change the course of a project—or protect a user from harm.
The Kind of Leader I Want to Be
I don’t want to lead because I have authority.
I want to lead because I help people pay attention to what really matters.
To slow down when we’re rushing.
To look again when something doesn’t feel right.
To raise our standard—not because we’re trying to be perfect, but because someone’s trust is on the other side of this release.
If I can help shape that kind of focus, if I can be that kind of steward of attention—then maybe I’m leading well.
Even without a title.
—
Beau Brown
Testing in the real world: messy, human, worth it.
Testing Tester 
Leave a comment