What Happens When Leaders Lack Curiosity?
Leadership and Curiosity
Leadership, the ability to build and direct high-performing teams and organizations, has been associated with a wide range of attributes. Some, such as good judgment, integrity, and vision, are clearly indispensable for leading effectively. Others, such as confidence, charisma and political skills, are more useful for advancing leaders’ personal careers, than for improving their teams’ performance. Yet in our view there is a fundamental ingredient of leadership that has been largely neglected, namely intellectual curiosity – a leader’s willingness to learn, also known as learnability.
Why is Curiosity so Important?
First, curious leaders are more open to new experiences, which enables them to approach problems (and people) in a less prejudiced way. In fact, the single best thing that companies can do to promote diversity and inclusion is to hire leaders with high openness scores. They will not just be more willing to understand and connect with people who are different – both demographically and psychologically – but also create more diverse teams and inclusive cultures. Conversely, when leaders lack curiosity they will hire in their own image, creating homogeneous teams where differences are stigmatized rather than celebrated. In short, leaders’ personalities are a major force, shaping the culture of their teams and organizations. Open leaders create tolerant and free cultures. Closed leaders create narrow-minded and authoritarian cultures.
Second, curious leaders are more tolerant of ambiguity, which helps them manage the nuances and complexities of modern work life, and cope with uncertainty. As behavioural economists have shown, most of our everyday decisions are carried out under suboptimal conditions. Real-world problems tend to be ill-defined, and lack a clear-cut solution: e.g., should I sign this deal; is this person the right talent for tomorrow, should I change careers? Regardless of the question being asked, a curious leader will be more likely to consider a wider range of answers, and pay attention to data and facts, before deciding. They will also be more willing to accept their mistakes – as opposed to blaming others or being in denial – when things go wrong. In contrast, when leaders lack curiosity, they will have a high need for closure, which will result in a tendency to make categorical, and overly simplistic, interpretations of reality, driven by their general discomfort with ambiguity and uncertainty. In fact, uncurious leaders are more interested in maintaining a positive self-concept than in understanding reality. Their desire to shut down any version of truth that refutes their preconceptions, beliefs, or core values, is an unconscious strategy to validate their own self-esteem. If acknowledging that “X is wrong” makes them feel stupid, then “X is right.” In essence, uncurious leaders are psychologically conservative, for they seek to conserve (preserve) their existing beliefs, as opposed to challenge them.
Third, curious leaders are more likely to nurture curiosity in their teams and organizations. This infectious quality of the hungry mind is easy to understand: when leaders are open to new information, ideas, and innovation, they will encourage others to deploy their own curiosity in the pursuit of knowledge and experimentation. To curious leaders, employees are yet one more vehicle through which they can develop and feed their own hungry mind. This quality can obviously backfire if taken too far. Excessive curiosity in leaders may translate into an inability to focus, an un-pragmatic disregard for targets and results, and failure to opt for simple and effective solutions at the expense of unusual and risky ones. On the other hand, leaders who lack curiosity will tend to repress and suppress the curiosity of their teams. By implementing tight processes, and being overly focused on tactical matters and results, they will obsess with employee productivity to the point of seeing curiosity as a toxic distraction. Why – they may ask – give people time to learn and question existing approaches if it can slow them down and distract them? This idea is based on the common misconception that curiosity has no inherent ROI. Yet, extensive evidence suggests that when employees are given autonomy over their jobs, and opportunities to enhance their competence and expertise, they will be both more engaged and productive.
What Does a Curious Leader Look Like?
Here are five behavioural characteristics that signal curiosity in leaders:
So how do you spot a curious leader? Ideally, using validated assessment tools, such as scientifically valid personality tests or well-designed 360-degree surveys. However, in the absence of such data it is possible to infer leaders’ curiosity from their reputation. For example, scientific studies have shown that public records of U.S. presidents can be used to estimate their intellectual curiosity, and that such estimates predict their presidential performance.
In brief, at a time when AI and automation are injecting a big dose of ambiguity into the future of human careers, it is critical that our leaders have the curiosity to learn and adapt their workforce for the challenges ahead. Curious leaders will enable their companies to navigate complexity and be future-ready. Uncurious leaders will hold on to tried and true methods and create stagnation.
About the Author:Dr. Tomas Chamorro-Premuzicis a Professor of Psychology at UCL and Columbia University, and the CEO of Hogan Assessments. This article can be found at: https://www.forbes.com/sites/tomaspremuzic/2017/03/06/what-happens-when-leaders-lack-curiosity/