If you’re not learning, you’re not leading to your full potential. Hall of fame college basketball coach John Wooden said, “A leader who is through learning is through. And so is the team such a leader leads. It’s what you learn after you know it all that counts.”
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Cultivating a habit of curiosity should be a one-step process: learn.
But most of us know this discipline isn’t that simple. Deadlines, PTA meetings, church gatherings, neighborhood barbecues, and baseball practices stretch us like a medieval rack. Under the weight of a busy schedule, nurturing curiosity requires creativity and intentionality. Here are some tips for developing this habit in your life:
• Think before you ask. Ask great questions. As Claude Levi-Strauss commented, “The wise man doesn’t give the right answers, he poses the right questions.” Questions are critical to curiosity. Asking great questions keeps you informed, in touch, and aware. But how many of us invest time in developing good questions? Most don’t, but all should. Set aside ten minutes before your most important meetings to jot down critical questions you would like answered. Make sure they are open-ended and seek to uncover new information or explore a new angle. Asking great questions is most often way more strategic than providing great answers.
• Listen more than you talk. Move your mouth less, and tune your ears more. Constantly getting better and improving means being quick to hear and slow to speak. Leaders don’t learn when they are talking; they learn when listening. The more you listen, the smarter you become. Great listeners immediately gain credibility and earn the right to be heard. Get good at creating conversation. Be the person that listens way more than speaks. Your posture should be that of inquire rather than esquire. Calvin Coolidge had it right, “no man ever listened himself out of a job.”
• Seek out different. Spending time with people who are unlike you is a learning accelerator. Most leaders, however, huddle with those who are similar to them in pedigree, education, and career field. As Bill Taylor, cofounder of Fast Company, wrote, “Ask any educator and they’ll agree: We learn the most when we encounter people who are the least like us. Then ask yourself: Don’t you spend most of your time with people who are exactly like you? Colleagues from the same company, peers from the same industry, friends from the same profession and neighborhood?”2 Find people who are so different they make you uncomfortable, and then spend more time with them than you’d prefer to.
• Surround yourself with smarts. Many influencers lead from a place of insecurity. As a result, they often hire people who are less talented or intelligent than they are. If you’re the smartest person in the room, after all, you don’t have to worry about someone stealing your job or making you look bad. But this creates a staff dynamic where leaders stop learning. Make sure to surround yourself with people who are smarter than you are.
