Curiosity is a skill that you can develop. Francesca Gino is a behavioral scientist and, the Tandon Family Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School says this about curiosity, “Most of the breakthrough discoveries and remarkable inventions throughout history, from flints for starting a fire to self-driving cars, have something in common: They are the result of curiosity. The impulse to seek new information and experiences and explore novel possibilities is a basic human attribute.”**
Asking questions because of your curiosity is much better than telling everyone why they might consider buying from you or following your suggestions if you are in a leadership role.
Because you are curious, questions are authentic instead of rehearsing what your Sales VP or sales trainer taught you to ask. Why did the future client change suppliers so often in the past? Why did some departments miss the mark with your objective and others didn’t? Who are your best managers? What makes them different? Who are your best customers? What makes them the best?
Who are your most productive employees? Why? How can we drive improvement without everyone thinking, “OMG, they never stop pushing us?”
Curiosity can become a part of your culture by teaching it!
How do you teach it?
Create cross-team communication“One of the keys to breeding an environment of curiosity is to provide employees with exposure to as many different ideas as possible through cross-team communication. One of the most popular ways to build this type of communication across the company is by physically opening up the office, allowing people to interact with parts of the organization they may not normally come into direct contact with. If opening up the physical space isn’t possible, businesses can also turn to new communication channels such as Slack, which allow for workplace bonding and discussion across not only workplace boundaries but also physical distances, bringing offices from around the country (and the world) together like never before. In companies with several different offices, it’s helpful to maintain all-hands-on-deck meetings or even to install visual live-streams into each office to contribute to that connection,” says Zohar Dayan.
I agree with him. I have seen employees from non-related areas develop amazing ideas by asking questions because they don’t know anything about that particular area. What seemed like a dumb question in a banking operations department led to a new processing method that saved thousands of hours of overtime monthly. Everyone in the department was astounded that it took an outsider to discover that. It was curiosity that drove it.
I’m curious, are you thinking about how curious you are? Wouldn’t it be a great topic for your next sales meeting or the next leadership meeting?
I know I would have lots of questions for you.
Below are the links to the full articles that I used for parts of this blog.
Hopefully, your curiosity gets the better of you and still I ask, “do you think curiosity killed the cat?”
Gratefully yours,
Steve
**https://hbr.org/2018/09/the-business-case-for-curiosity#from-curious-to-competent
