If you’ve opened up this blog to read more we are off to a good start – hopefully that in itself is an indicator that your curiosity got the better of you and you wanted to find out more!
Recently I’ve been a coach/mentor/trainer for a number of managers and it made me realise that I talk about being curious whether they are enacting their management responsibilities or their leadership responsibilities. Why is curiosity so important?
Firstly, in discussing curiosity in relation to management and leadership, how am I differentiating between the two? While there may be a few ways to do this, for this blog, I’m suggesting that as a manager we are focusing on consistency, quality, and delivery now – keeping on top of planning and resourcing, ensuring our teams have the conditions to do their best work, and supporting their engagement and performance. In terms of the leadership responsibilities of our work, this is more future focused, making sure we are future fit as a team, being aware of the wider context and perspective, making strategic decisions that enable the success of the wider organisation.
Curiosity as a manager
As a coach, the issues that managers most often seem to bring to coaching, particularly those with less experience, tend to relate to ‘people issues’. For example, being unsure and nervous about addressing issues with team members relating to work quality or timeliness of delivery, or behavioural issues. Often this relates to not having strong, trusting relationships with team members where giving recognition as well as constructive feedback is a week in, week out occurrence.
This is where CURIOSITY is a great behaviour to channel as a manager. Creating time each week to check in with team members and being curious about what is going on for them creates the foundations for team members to feel a sense of care and that their opinions count. Curiosity about their career and development aspirations enables you as a manager to link any recognition or feedback to these aspirations which provides motivation to the team member to address them. If they know that your intentions are to support them in performing well in their current role as well as set them up for future success they are then more open to receiving constructive feedback.
Image by StockSnap from Pixabay
Finally, and this takes us back to the ‘people issues’, when preparing to give constructive feedback to a team member, let them know clearly what you are there to discuss between you (i.e. it is two way). Also, when giving feedback, use a framework so that you can be specific (like SBI). And then, be curious. Rather than telling them what you would like them to do differently, firstly be curious about whether you’ve understood the situation using words like ‘I imagine that there are other factors at play in this situation that I may not be aware of so before we talk through together what’s next from here, I’m keen to understand your point of view.’ Once you understand the situation fully, you can use curiosity again to ask them ‘what ideas do you have about how you’d handle this differently in future?’
Curiosity as a leader
When fulfilling our leadership responsibilities, we need to make space and time to create the future – whether that is in terms of future services, products, the culture of our organisation, or something else.
Being curious enables us to remember to look outwards not just inwards – to see what future trends are predicted, to understand what other organisations are focusing on in the future and why, to be aware of threats or opportunities and consider what they mean for us.
It is also a helpful lens when thinking about our own careers. What do we want from our roles in the future? How have others made that happen for themselves? Who might be good to speak to in support of future opportunities?
Finally, a couple of questions for you:
- When were you last curious, either in respect of your management responsibilities or your leadership responsibilities?
- Where do you feel you could be more curious in support of great management or leadership?
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