As a leadership practitioner, author, coach and trainer, I’m regularly in conversation with leaders and teams around how important the skill of curiosity is. Yet, there are still many naysayers – from leaders and team members.
So, what does the research say?
I took a look at some of the more recent research in the area of curiosity and came across a great set of articles from Harvard Business Review - September 2018. In that edition, they cited the research and article written by Francesca Gino who has studied the area of curiosity. Read her article and study here.
Out of those surveyed, 70% of employees indicted that they faced barriers to employing more curiosity.
She cites in her article “The Business Case for Curiosity” five ways to encourage more curiosity:
- Hire for it.
- Model it yourself – inquisitiveness.
- Emphasize learning goals. Many leaders today focus solely on performance goals. While not abandoning performance goals, what can you do cultivate and allow for more of a focus on learning goals?
- “Let employees explore and broaden interests”. As someone who was schooled as multi-disciplinarian, I have seen throughout my career how a broad knowledge base becomes an asset, rather than a liability in times of change and complexity.
- She also encourages days where people explore the questions: Why? What if? How might we do that?
Individually, each one of these suggestions could have a ripple effect on the way people work, without detracting from core functions.
What are the benefits to starting to integrate some of these approaches in your team meetings and ways of working?
Best,
Jennifer
Leadership | Teamwork | Business Success
Author of multiple books including Effective Virtual Conversations (2017), PlanDoTrack (2018) and From One to Many: Best Practices for Team and Group Coaching (2013)
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