Why It’s Important to Lead With Curiosity
Throughout my engineering career, I have tried to approach many situations with curiosity. Curiosity helps me battle imposter syndrome, it avoids people getting defensive or putting their guards up, it breeds humility, and it helps set the right culture on a team.
In this article, I’ll explain what leading with curiosity means and provide examples of what has worked for me over the years.
Battling imposter syndrome
I’ve often experienced imposter syndrome, especially when I join a new company. More specifically, this was true when I joined Stripe and GitHub. Of course, being surrounded by exceptionally talented people does not help and makes you wonder if you deserve your spot.
When joining a new company, there’s a ton of new information to assimilate: a different technology stack, new processes, learning about a new industry (e.g. fintech), different customer base, etc.
You’re essentially drinking from the firehose for the first few months. It’s a perfect recipe for feeling like an imposter and like you don’t know what you’re talking about. Of course, it’s not the only situation where folks can experience imposter syndrome but it is one of the most recent experience I can relate to.
On top of this advice for new hires that I have shared in the past, I over index on being curious. Being curious not only helps me push through imposter syndrome but also to come out of it stronger.
More concretely, what this means for me is that I have a living document to keep track of 3 main buckets:
Questions and unknowns that I want to dig into further
Notes and thoughts I had but haven’t looked into yet
People I should reach out to next
As I go about my day-to-day tasks, I add things into the 3 buckets above.
The first bucket, Questions and unknowns, is essentially the questions that I have for folks and what seeds the basis of my curiosity. I use items from this bucket to learn from others and approach my work with curiosity. For instance, I could frame questions as follow: “Can you help me better understand what X is?” or “For my own education, can you tell me more about why we do Y this way?”.
The second bucket, Notes and thoughts, represents items that I want to dig deeper into and may end up surfacing more questions that I have for others. It can also result into me writing a short-form blog post, proposal, or a list of notes that I share with others and ask for their feedback on an area that I’m currently thinking about (i.e. What’s top of mind for Wissam). I have found that writing a draft and sharing it with others for feedback is a good way to request input and learn from others.
The third bucket, People, is a collection of folks that I want to connect with based on suggestions from peers or from proposals / initiatives I was intrigued by and want to learn more about. In my experience, colleagues appreciate when I reach out to ask and learn more about a specific initiative they’re leading. It also creates a good opportunity to connect around a mutual interest and build my network within the organization.
Leading a new team
In my experience, managers who lead with curiosity tend to be empathetic, compassionate, and humble leaders. Curious leaders have a growth mindset rather than a fixed mindset. They’re aware that they don’t have all the answers, they are open to learning more, and are willing to challenge their own beliefs.
I found this to be especially true for leaders who join a new organization. One of the biggest mistake a new leader can do is to make changes immediately after joining a team. Instead, they should approach this opportunity with curiosity and spend time better understanding how things currently work. There is a reason why things are built or done a specific way (for better or worse), but leaders will never get a chance to understand the history of things if they make sweeping changes based on previously held beliefs or experiences.
My suggestion to leaders who join a new company or team would be to make it explicitly clear that they are approaching this new challenge with curiosity and willingness to learn. For instance, a statement like this can go a long way to set a good tone right off the bat:
For a brief while, my goal is to listen and ask questions so that I can learn more about our past decisions, better understand where we are today, dig into what good looks like for our team, and how we are going to achieve our goal of XYZ.
Being a better listener
A critical part of being a manager is being a good listener, but more specifically, to listen with a curious and open mind. This means learning to ask good questions and to dig further into what your team is saying.
Leaders should prioritize coaching over solutionizing.
A leader’s job is not to have all the answers but to help their team come up with the answers. And to achieve that, leaders need to actively listen and repeat back what others saying, and to ask questions to dig deeper into what they’re saying.
Here are questions you can use to dig deeper into topics and to lead with curiosity:
“What are you optimizing for in this context?”
“What led you to this conclusion?”
“What are the different options that you’ve considered?”
“If we were to do your recommended approach, what are the tradeoffs that we are looking at?”
“What would be the best case scenario for you? What would be the worst case scenario?”
“Is my understanding correct that…”
Conclusion
Being a good leader requires curiosity because it helps cultivate an environment where people feel valued and really believe that you have a true interest in their success. This leads to more functional and successful teams that operate with a high sense of trust and psychological safety.
Furthermore, leading with curiosity and asking thoughtful questions has personally helped me battle through imposter syndrome and to come out of it as a better leader.
Finally, it’s important to keep in mind that:
You don’t know everything and no one expects you to know everything.
Yours peers should generally appreciate answering questions and helping out (especially with new hires).
You can promote a healthy team culture when you lead by example.