Stay Curious About the Leader You’re Becoming Leadership development often focuses on becoming better at something: communicating more clearly, making stronger decisions, building trust, managing conflict, or navigating change. We learn models, develop skills, gain experience, and gradually form ideas about what good leadership looks like. Along the way, however, we can also become increasingly…
Curiosity offers another way to think about leadership development. It also has an important
relationship with understanding. Curiosity keeps understanding open. When we remain curious, we
leave room for something we have not yet noticed, considered, or learned. That matters when we
are trying to understand an organization or another person, but it matters just as much when the
subject we are trying to understand is ourselves.
Being curious about your leadership does not mean questioning every decision or abandoning
practices that have served you well. It means remaining interested in what the experience of
leading continues to reveal about you. What situations bring out your best leadership? When do
you become less patient? When do you listen longer, and when are you eager to move toward an
answer? What has changed about the way you lead as you have gained experience?
There is also a difference between being curious about leadership and being curious about being a
leader. Leadership can be studied through books, models, courses, and the experiences of others.
Being a leader is personal. Responsibility, authority, uncertainty, success, disappointment, and the
expectations of others can influence how we think and behave. They can change how we see
problems, how quickly we reach conclusions, whose voices we seek out, and how comfortable we
are saying, “I don’t know.”
Curiosity can become especially important as leadership experience grows. Early in our careers,
we expect to learn because so much is unfamiliar. With experience, we naturally rely more on
judgment, patterns, and lessons accumulated over time. Those are valuable, but they can also
make familiar responses feel inevitable. Curiosity creates a small interruption in that certainty. It
allows a leader to ask whether a response still fits the situation, whether another perspective
deserves attention, or whether experience is helping them see more clearly—or simply helping
them reach a familiar conclusion more quickly.
That makes curiosity more than an interest in becoming a better leader. It becomes a way to
understand the relationship between leadership and the person leading.
One of the risks of experience is that familiarity can begin to look like complete understanding. We
have handled this kind of situation before. We know how our team operates. We know our
strengths. We know what kind of leader we are. Those conclusions may be accurate, but they do
not have to be permanent. Curiosity gives us a reason to look again.
The people we lead change. Organizations change. Circumstances change. We change as well.
Leadership development, then, is not only about adding another skill or learning another approach.
Sometimes it begins by becoming curious again about something very familiar: ourselves. The goal
is not endless self-questioning. It is remaining open to the possibility that there is still something
about our leadership worth discovering.
Perhaps the question is not simply whether you are becoming a better leader. It is whether you are
still paying attention to the leader you are becoming.
This Month’s Coaching Questions
What are you learning about yourself from leading others?
What are you curious to discover about yourself as a leader?
