I almost never teach leaders how to come up with solutions.
That’s because the leaders I work with are all quite skilled at coming up with solutions on their own. They’re technical experts — left-brained people with careers in disciplines like engineering, law, or software. They’re used to putting forward ideas, arguing for them on their technical merits, and then seeing them put into practice.
This is a great approach for a certain kind of problem. The challenge is that, at some point, leaders start working on complex, socio-technical problems, such as changing the way groups collaborate or empowering front-line employees to make judgment calls about what’s most important in their work. These are problems where there isn’t a right answer.
Answers aren’t real!
They’re passé.
They sit in email attachments, spreadsheets, or memos that make a case but don’t necessarily promote the changes needed to solve complex problems.
Answers only become real when people act on them. That action is what creates possibility, and you don’t get possibility without bringing people along on your journey.
For many senior leaders, it can be daunting to work on complex problems. Throughout their career, they have spent much of their time coming up with answers (and being rewarded and promoted for doing so).
Traditional views of leadership posit that leaders know the answer, and their job is to tell subordinates what to do. That approach works in contexts where we’re trying to refine existing practices or exploit existing capabilities, but our most important and high-stakes problems require a fundamentally different stance than simple ones. Instead of coming up with the answer, leaders need to make space for creative disagreement, experimentation, learning, and thinking.
Curiosity helps us explore ideas with others. It helps us understand their perspectives (especially when those perspectives differ from ours). And it helps us enter a relationship of mutuality and co-creation, one where we are standing shoulder-to-shoulder with others, influencing and being influenced, in pursuit of a greater collective objective.
A lot of my work revolves around curiosity: how I can use it myself and how I can support my clients to reach for their Swiss Army knife of questions when it might be useful.
If you’re used to whacking problems with your solutions hammer, you might be skeptical. At best, the solutions hammer gets you compliance. Curiosity, on the other hand, gets you co-creation.
Curiosity is simple — but it’s not easy. Even the most effective executives I work with — whether through one-on-one coaching, consulting, or my group coaching program, Lead Curious — make practicing curiosity a priority for themselves and their teams.
That’s because they see practice and experimentation as central to solving their organization’s most important problems.
Are you curious about what curiosity practice looks like?
Join me for my free Lead Curious Open House.
It’s on December 8th from 9:00-10:00 AM Pacific Time (12:00-1:00 PM Eastern US Time).
You’ll get specific tools, practice with a group of peers, and tangible takeaways to help you make curiosity central to your approach to leadership.
Spots are limited (and I typically only run these events once a year) so reserve your spot today!