I’ve been fortunate to work with some of the most successful and effective CEOs in the world of tech, and time spent with these executives nearly always leaves me inspired and impressed. Each of these tech leaders has mastered a critical skill called presence, and they demonstrate its power in meetings. For many, meetings are simply a time suck. For successful leaders, however, meetings are an effective tool that can quickly remove barriers, spur critical thinking and drive results.

Unfortunately, presence is misunderstood. While our brain represents only 2% of our body weight, it consumes 20% of our energy. When we multitask, we tax that energy and harm our productivity. As humans, our problem is not a lack of resources but a lack of focus.

Presence is the ability to master attention control and swat out distractions. This attention control is increasingly hard to maintain because of the ubiquity of communication and the growing expectation for quick responses. According to a Stanford University study, multitasking, especially with electronic media, negatively affects IQ and degrades performance. The rise of this constant multitasking also impacts how our cognitive processing works. Now more than ever we need to practice cognitive control rather than breadth-biased thinking that favors distractions over depth.

Attention control is the superpower many effective leaders have learned to harness. Through my own experience as well as several interviews I conducted with successful CEOs, presence emerged as one of the most important executive skills to foster. For example, I recently had the opportunity to sit down with Thomas Kurian, the President of Oracle (which acquired my company in 2014). I learned from him that presence is the single most important way to show respect. “It’s really a gesture of politeness and courtesy that if you’re with somebody, they have 100% of your attention,” he said.

Maintaining your presence in meetings is a learned behavior, not a magical capacity we are born with. Improving your presence requires being logical about how you structure your meeting process. For example, think through the impact of having remote employees. If your remote employees have any temptation to be disengaged, they will likely do so. By moving to video, everyone will see each other and feel obliged to stay engaged instead of multitasking. When remote attendees aren’t on video, the degree of multitasking and disengagement is very high. If you fix this one simple issue every participant will have to be part of the discussion. The advantage of total engagement is that if there is something to fix, your remote employees will now help create a solution instead of just disengaging.

Another process solution is to enforce a no laptop rule during key meetings. Despite some beliefs to the contrary, the act of note-taking, especially on digital devices, serves more as a distraction from providing the speaker with your full attention. Most users have notifications streaming through the screen while they are taking notes. That forces their brains to focus elsewhere and explains why tools such as AI assistants that take notes for you are in high demand.

The next way to ensure your presence is to use a relationship-centric (rather than a transaction-centric) lens to your interactions. CEOs that take a genuine interest in the person they are speaking to make personal connections that deliver exponential results. Think about those execs that go beyond the pure content of the discussion and are able to foster a real connection. One of my mentors (and an official advisor to Voicera) is Dave Morgan, who is now CEO of Simulmedia. He would always train his customer-centric teams to understand that companies don’t buy things, people do. Relationship-centric views of a discussion help us become better listeners. This, in turn, helps us foster empathy, which is a skill many hard-charging executives lack.