Leveraging Your Curiosity

 As a leader, you are presented with new information each day.

This process of continually receiving and synthesizing information helps you to make informed decisions in order to support your team and achieve the company’s overall vision.

Sometimes it may feel like you have too much to work with and other times, it may feel like you don’t have enough.

To compound the waves of data, as the leader, you are viewed as having “all the information”, so it might feel like saying “I don’t know” is not appropriate.

The thing is that although it may seem like you are expected to know all of the answers, you won’t.

You are expected to know how to get the answers and be clear with what is happening on your team or project, even if that means you know you need to learn more.

So how to do work with the information that you have?

I suggest leveraging your curiosity by accepting that you won’t have all the answers, but that you will be open to learning.

How might you go about leveraging your curiosity in order to gather the information you do need? Here are a few tips:

• Ask open ended questions
• Get different perspectives
• Read
• Listen to a seminar, webinar or podcast on a topic you want to learn more about
• Embrace what you don’t know
• Be open to learning
• Encourage others to embrace their curiosity and see it as a way to strengthen your team
• Make a decision to try something new
• Take action, even if it seems like a leap of faith, and try something new or different
• Learn from the outcome

Each idea is one way for you to leverage your curiosity and learn, which will only strengthen your leadership skills and better support your team.