Episode 6. Curiosity: The Teacher
Curiosity is the one leadership quality you don’t often see getting bandied about. It may have killed the cat, but it sure as chips makes a great leader.
You can read about vision, strategy and resilience in the books, but it’s a blank page for curiosity. It’s weird that it gets overlooked, as it’s the thing that makes leaders want to be better leaders. That desire to keep learning. To understand how to do things in a better way. To adapt. To grow.
I've always been curious. Not in a nosey way, more a “What’s that then” or “How does that work then” kind of way. I’m just interested in stuff going on around me, especially if it involves someone doing something that blows my mind like baby tomatoes on a grill.
Work-wise, I'm a generalist, so I know a bit about a lot, rather than a lot about a bit. When I work with subject matter experts who go deep on their specialism, it’s grilled baby tomato time. The technical knowledge they hold and are able to articulate is fascinating. But my curiosity enables me to ask questions that help me to bring clarity from the complexity in my own mind. And that helps me grow.
When I work with other generalists, especially teams who are client facing, I’m curious about the different approaches and methods others use. How facts and data are presented. How they hold themselves in a difficult room. How they've dug into a problem from a different angle to find the real root cause rather than the obvious one. And that helps me grow.
But it’s not just inside work that being curious helps. It’s the everyday interactions. Some of the best nuggets of gold I’ve ever heard has been over a pint or two in a pub with friends. Being curious about what they do and how they do it. Sometimes their answers open a different route around a challenge you’ve been chewing over for a while. And that helps me grow.
Curiosity builds something, and it builds it over time without you noticing. Everything you learn through curiosity goes into your little life library that shows up in the most unexpected places when you need to call on it. You use your experience and knowledge to know where you’re going, but staying curious helps you find a better route.
If EQ is sensing what's inside, curiosity is sensing and learning from what's outside. From what's around you, what excites you, and what piques your interest,
And that matters in leadership. Leaders who stop being curious don't suddenly become bad leaders overnight. They just start coasting because they’ve decided they've seen enough, learned enough, and know enough, so they rely on what used to work in a world that's moved on without them. They no longer ask what, how or why.
Life is a journey of learning. The best way to travel it is to stay curious. To keep building your little life library and to be smart enough to realise that the library always needs more books.