Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it is an essential element of human leadership that underlies many of leadership’s most important attributes like listening, engaging, empowering, and getting the best out of the people you lead.
By tuning in your curiosity, you improve your ability to relate to and engage other people, and you will learn more and come up with better solutions than you will without being curious. Without significant curiosity, your emotional intelligence (EQ) will never rise above a mid-grade, which is a significant handicap for any leader.
We love the idea of making curiosity a core value. What better way to ensure that your organization will be a learning organization that is able to survive in a VUCAH world?
Curiosity’s many benefits for leaders include:
- Supports an innovative organization committed to continuous learning and improvement
- Enhanced listening – helps you close your mouth and open your ears so you can listen to understand
- Curiosity through questioning is the core of coaching – that’s why we like it
- Helps you stay focused
- Shows you care
- Shows you are interested
- Make others feel noticed and understood which builds trust
- Required for root cause determination
- Leads to creativity and innovation
- You learn more from more people, and to a greater depth
- Make fewer big mistakes
- Leads to more aligned decisions and actions
- Improved emotional intelligence
- Makes you a better strategist
- Pulls ideas from others which means the ideas are better, and it fosters an inclusive culture
- Shows that you are real, not just putting on a show
- Keeps a leader on task – having all the answers is not a leader’s job; their job is to facilitate solutions from others
- If you want to remain in the lead, you better be curious as to what’s coming next
Tomorrow when you wake up, tell yourself that you are going to be curious all day long. If you’re not pleasantly surprised by the outcome, give us a call and we will buy you lunch because we will be very curious to know what happened.
References:
- https://www.forbes.com/sites/forbesbusinessdevelopmentcouncil/2023/01/27/how-the-art-of-curiosity-transforms-leadership/?sh=27254d284e98
- https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/curiosity-core-leadership-value-rachel-powers/
- https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity
