Our lack of curiosity is reinforcing bias, the status quo and limiting our employees.

It's a fact: Managers are killing curiosity and ideas.

Ask yourself these three simple questions:

How do you know what your employees need?
How often are you curious at work?
How much is presumption limiting results in your team or business?

Need to explore more
As kids we ask up to three hundred questions/day. But by the time we reach adulthood we ask about twenty. And at work there are real barriers to asking questions and being curious. Questions are seen as obstacles to action rather than clarification or exploration.

In a 2018 survey of 3000 employees, 24% said they felt curious regularly. But 70% of employees said they experience barriers to asking questions in their teams. So how do they know they are on the right track?

You are the problem
As leaders we are the biggest barrier. If we aren’t listening or exploring other options, then we limit our people and our own results.

Francesca Gino (HBR 2018) says that many leaders “seek efficiency, to the detriment of exploration”. Gino also shows in her research that curiosity and ideas drop off with employee tenure by as much as 20% in the first six months. Thats huge!

Most of the leaders I chat to feel that questions, discussion and curiosity waste time and slow down action. The reality is that listening deeper, and exploration of alternatives reduces inefficiency and can lead to better processes and more productivity.

Exploring the views of others also reduces our own bias, enabling the views of others to be considered, not limited.

And you are the solution
If we commit to listening more and being more curious, we can experience magic.

Encouraging ideas and curiosity can unleash magnificent results. That’s not to say we should sit around asking questions all day. But as leaders we can model the behaviours that encourage deeper thinking and solutions in our team. Invest a day each quarter or month finding new or more novel ways to get stuff done.

You can start with a simple thought: better questions, lead to better answers.

Try using these at your next team meeting:
• How can we make these results 200% better?
• What else might we consider?
• What other options/processes/solutions are there?

PRESUMPTION is killing your results