Curiosity In Leadership Is A Performance Superpower
- Andy Goram
- 2 hours ago
- 34 min read
Curiosity in leadership is often talked about as a “nice to have” — something that’s useful, but optional. Yet in today’s complex, fast-moving, and increasingly AI-driven world, curiosity may be one of the most important capabilities a leader can develop.
In this episode of Sticky From The Inside, Andy Goram is joined by leadership strategist and researcher Dr Debra Clary to explore why great leaders don’t succeed by having all the answers, but by asking better questions. Drawing on decades of experience inside global organisations and years of research into human behaviour, Debra makes a compelling case for curiosity as a strategic leadership skill — not a soft one.
Why Curiosity Feels Natural — Until It Doesn’t
We all begin life curious. As children, we ask questions constantly — not to challenge authority, but to understand the world around us. Curiosity is how we learn, how we connect, and how we grow.
But as Debra explains, curiosity doesn’t usually disappear overnight. For many people, it’s slowly crowded out. Schooling, professional training, and workplace norms often reward certainty, speed, and expertise over exploration and inquiry. Over time, asking questions can start to feel risky, inefficient, or even unwelcome.
Why Curiosity in Leadership Is Not a Soft Skill
The turning point in Debra’s work came when a CEO asked her a deceptively simple question: can curiosity be learned, or is it innate?
That question sparked years of research and led to a powerful insight — curiosity can be learned, measured, and developed, and it has a direct relationship with leadership performance. Organisations don’t benefit from curiosity because it’s enjoyable; they benefit because it drives better thinking, stronger relationships, and more sustainable results.
In other words, curiosity isn’t about being nice. It’s about being effective.
When Leaders Stop Asking Questions, Curiosity Fades
One of the most common ways curiosity is shut down at work is through efficiency. Leaders are busy. Problems are brought to them. The fastest route is often to provide the answer and move on.
As Debra points out, this might feel productive in the moment, but it comes at a cost. When leaders stop asking questions, they miss opportunities to build confidence, capability, and ownership in others. Leadership becomes about short-term efficiency rather than long-term development. Great leaders, by contrast, play the long game. They ask questions not because they don’t know the answer, but because they want others to learn how to find it.
Why Feeling Seen and Heard Drives Engagement
Debra shares research showing that disengagement often has little to do with perks or policies, and everything to do with contribution. When people feel unseen, unheard, and under-utilised, motivation drops.
Many employees — particularly those closest to the work — want to contribute their thinking, not simply be told what to do. Curiosity is the bridge. Leaders who are genuinely interested in their people create environments where ideas surface, trust grows, and engagement follows.
The Curiosity Curve: Exploration, Creativity, Openness, Focus
At the heart of Debra’s work is the Curiosity Curve — a framework that describes optimal curiosity through four drivers: exploration, inspirational creativity, openness to new ideas, and focused engagement.
Crucially, curiosity isn’t about endless questioning with no action. It’s about balance. Knowing when to explore and when to execute. Knowing how different people show up on the curve — and how that affects how teams work together — allows leaders to improve performance without sacrificing momentum.
Curiosity, AI, and the Power of Discernment
In a world increasingly shaped by AI, curiosity becomes even more important. AI can generate answers at speed, but it can’t replace judgement, context, or discernment.
As Debra notes, AI does nothing until a question is asked — and it still takes a curious, thoughtful human to decide whether the answer makes sense. The leaders who thrive won’t be those who outsource thinking, but those who stay inquisitive and reflective.
Three Sticky Notes for Strengthening Curiosity as a Leader
To close the conversation, Debra offers three simple but powerful leadership behaviours:
Set the intention to create a culture of curiosity
Reward people who ask questions
Celebrate those who challenge the status quo
These aren’t complex interventions. They’re signals. And over time, they shape culture.
🎧 Listen to the full episode using the podcast player below to hear the complete conversation with Dr Debra Clary.
📄 Prefer to read? The full episode transcript follows this blog post.
Full Episode Transcript
[Andy Goram] (0:10 - 3:35)
Hello and welcome to Sticky from the Inside, the employee engagement podcast that looks at how to build stickier, competition-smashing, consistently successful organisations from the inside out. I'm your host, Andy Goram, and I'm on a mission to help more businesses turn the lights on behind the eyes of their employees, light the fires within them, and create tonnes more success for everyone. This podcast is for all those who believe that's something worth going after, and would like a little help and guidance in achieving that.
Each episode, we dive into the topics that can help create what I call stickier businesses, the sort of businesses where people thrive and love to work, and where more customers stay with you and recommend you to others because they love what you do and why you do it. So, if you want to take the tricky out of being sticky, listen on.
Okay then, curiosity. If you've ever spent time around a small child, you'll know just how natural curiosity really is. Everything is a question. Why this?
Why that? What happens if I do this or I touch that? What's over there?
It's how we learn. It's how we make sense of the world. It's how we grow.
And for many of us, that curiosity doesn't disappear, at least not straight away. We carry it through school, into early careers, into learning new roles, new skills, meeting new people, finding our feet. But somewhere along the line, especially at work, things can start to shift.
Not for everyone. Some people manage to hold on to that sense of exploration and questioning. But for many others, curiosity slowly gets crowded out by expectations to have answers and pressure to move faster, or maybe a fear of getting things wrong, or perhaps workplace cultures that quietly reward certainty over inquiry.
We're told to be decisive, to be confident, to look like we know what we're doing. And yet at the very same time, organizations say they want innovation, creativity, adaptability, and fresh thinking. So which is it?
What do they want? My guest today believes curiosity isn't a nice-to-have or a personality quirk. It's a leadership superpower, and one that's becoming more and more critical in a complex, fast-changing, AI-driven world.
Dr. Debra Clary joins me today, and Debra is a leadership strategist, researcher, TEDx speaker, and former senior leader at some of the world's most iconic organizations, including Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniels, and Humana. She's spent decades studying what really drives performance, growth, and connection, and it's led her to one clear conclusion. The best leaders don't have the best answers.
They have the best questions. And today, we're going to explore why curiosity sometimes fades at work, what happens when leaders lean into certainty instead of inquiry, and how curiosity can be protected, strengthened, and used as a genuine strategic capability and superpower. Debra, welcome to the show.
[Debra Clary] (3:36 - 3:37)
Thank you so much for having me.
[Andy Goram] (3:38 - 3:48)
Great to have you here. What a fascinating topic on its own, just the curiosity. I mean, I have so many questions about curiosity, but I guess that's the point, right?
[Debra Clary] (3:48 - 3:49)
Absolutely.
[Andy Goram] (3:50 - 4:06)
Debra, will you do me a favour? Before we get going and start getting into this topic today, I've tried to give a little bit of an introduction to you and your background. Can you tell us what's really been going on?
Explain. Tell us about your background and what you're focused on today.
[Debra Clary] (4:06 - 10:13)
Yes. Yeah. So, I have a bit of an interesting background in the sense of right after business school, I went to interview what I thought was going to be my first manager's role.
I was so excited. I was on my way. This was the trajectory.
They did offer me a job, but it was a route driver in the city of Detroit. So, Frito-Lay believed that everybody needed to start on a truck, meaning start at the bottom and really understand the business from the bottom up. I did that for the first nine months and then spent a whole decade at Frito-Lay in various sales, marketing, and operating roles.
But I have a deep appreciation from understanding the business at the beginning and understanding what does it take to connect with the customer? What does it mean to load your truck? I was also a Teamster.
So, I was a part of the local union. So, I had an appreciation for what unions do. Then I was recruited away by Coca-Cola.
So, I spent the next decade at Coca-Cola in various operating roles. Then I took a new role at headquarters in Atlanta, Georgia. I was a global marketing executive.
That's where I got my experience in international and understanding that business is done differently in different countries. There's different cultures in addition to language. So, it really broadened my idea of what the world was about and how you do business around the world.
Then I went to the hard stuff. I went to Jack Daniels. I was their vice president of strategy.
But interestingly enough, I was over their wine division. So, I wasn't in the hard liquor, but I was in the wine division. There, I learned about a new product, which was wine.
I'd been marketing snacks and soft drinks. I began to understand the legislation that goes around how you market and promote wine. But I gained a great appreciation for the vintners, the growers, and the passion they had about the grapes and the terroir that went into actually making a beautiful bottle of wine.
While I was there, I got deeply interested in human behaviour. I wondered what made leaders great and what made leaders not so great, or what made great cultures and not great cultures. I had this huge benefit of working for Fortune 40 companies, where they had really honed their leader development.
They'd really honed culture. I began to try to put my finger around what makes that. I decided to go back and deeply study it.
So, I got my doctorate in leader development and org design. When I finished that, I don't know that I understood human behaviour any more than I had going in, but I had frameworks in terms of how do you develop leaders, how do you develop a culture. That's when I went to work for Humana, one of the largest healthcare companies in the United States.
There, I stood up their leadership institute. We worked with the top 600 leaders in this organization. The organization was moving from being a transactional organization to a transformational organization, meaning that they had realized that they were being very transactional with their clients, their members.
They said, we know that we have to begin to build a relationship with them and give value in different ways. With that comes our leaders need to shift as well. Then I spent the next 18 years in leader development at that large organization.
Then one day, my CEO turned to me in a meeting and he said, do you think curiosity can be learned or is it innate? I went off and I did a little bit of research. I came back and I said, oh, by the way, curiosity can be learned.
He says, oh, okay, that's really interesting. That was it for him that had satisfied his curiosity in the sense that curiosity could be learned. For me, Andy, that was only the beginning because I began to realize, one, there wasn't enough research on the power of curiosity in organizations.
I was just very intrigued by this hypothesis that could curiosity be the missing link in organizations. Organizations, you know, they ebb and flow, they have growth, and then they stall, and they have innovation, and then they don't have innovation. For fun, I did this totally on my own because, you know, I like to have fun like this.
I commissioned a group of MIT researchers to answer this one question. The question is, what is the relatedness between leadership performance and curiosity? Was there a direct correlation?
Of course, they came back to me and said, oh, we can ask this, and we can ask that. I said, no, I'd really like to understand this one correlation. When we get that, then maybe I'll move forward on that, but I want to know the answer to that.
Three months later, they came back and said, how'd you know? And I said, I had a hypothesis. You know, having spent three decades navigating complex systems, you know, having been in the midst of it, it was, I think this might be it.
And once I got their research back, I said, I'm called to go share this with the world in a way that we can teach curiosity, we can measure curiosity, and we're not doing it because it's fun. We're doing it because it actually drives performance. And why are organizations in business?
You know, to make money.
[Andy Goram] (10:14 - 10:53)
Well, where do I begin with that, Deborah? Because you had me at human behaviour, culture, and leadership, and then you chucked in that we can learn curiosity. I'm in.
I'm totally in. And I was going to ask a really daft question, because I'm sure I'm not the only one who, listening to you, can hear it. I mean, I think you have described to me previously that curiosity is your absolute passion.
Was there a point that you noticed that it was that all-consuming thing for you, that it was the real driver? Was it on the back of seeing that first piece of research? Was it, was it, was there some other happening where you really kind of like felt it bubbling away in your soul now that this is, this is my jam?
[Debra Clary] (10:54 - 14:10)
Yeah, so three things happened in pretty close order for me that had me even begin to say, wow, we need a deeper dive. First was, I was on a train from Rome to Florence, and it was this beautiful fall day, and I'm just taking in the scenery, and this Italian man next to me says, hey, are you American? And I go, why, yes, I am.
And he goes, oh, I've got the best American joke. He says, what do you get when you ask an American a question? I don't know, what do you get?
He starts laughing. He goes, you get an answer. And I laughed politely in the American way, like I smiled and nodded, but I didn't get the joke.
And so as I was spending more time in Florence, I began to observe Italians and other Europeans, and the way that they were having conversation was different from the way we had conversations in America. It wasn't just, you ask a question, it would be, well, why is that question important to you? They'd want to, they'd want to understand where you were coming from that.
And I just thought, well, that's kind of interesting. Then that next week I go back, my CEO asked me that question I told you. And then the third thing happened that later that week, Gallup, who measures engagement across the world, released their report.
In the history of measuring engagement, they've never seen it so low. So I had these three points that began to say, hmm, what's happening here? And then I got the data back.
And then I said, people need to know this. People need to know that what has happened to us. Now, you had mentioned that, you know, as toddlers, we ask a lot of questions, and then it gets lessened.
You know, and you think about, as toddlers, a group of researchers actually out of London, some neuroscientists, they determined that toddlers ask 298 questions a day. Now, you might be saying, come on, they can't even talk that much. It's like, if they pointed, that actually determined that that was a question.
So now what happens to us, right? We've got 298 questions. Then we go into school.
Children are to be seen and not heard. You know, children are to be in their seats and raise their hand. Now, my daughter's a teacher, and she says, come on, Mom, we can't have mayhem in the classroom.
And I said, yes, but I wonder if we've indexed too far. And it's, in addition to that, it's how we're socialized. So, you know, don't open Pandora's box, right?
Curiosity killed the cat. So we become, we are taught to be incurious. And let me pause there and just talk about curiosity killed the cat.
I put it in my book that was released in October. And before, as we were doing final edits, the editor said, Deb, I need you to cite curiosity killed the cat. I'm like, yeah, my mother.
And he's like, no, no, I go, well, Ms. Erickson, no, no. So, you know, I didn't really want to do it. She'll be able to take it out or you got to cite it.
So guess what? Curiosity killed the cat is only the first part of the sentence.
[Andy Goram] (14:10 - 14:12)
OK, go for it.
[Debra Clary] (14:12 - 14:23)
It's attributed to William Shakespeare in 1589 and the full sentence is curiosity killed the cat, comma, but satisfaction brought it back.
[Andy Goram] (14:24 - 14:25)
Wow.
[Debra Clary] (14:26 - 14:27)
Nobody taught me that.
[Andy Goram] (14:27 - 14:45)
No. Do you know what? I've never heard that.
And I, goodness me, I have studied so much Shakespeare at school and I've never come across that sentence. There are probably Brits all over the airwaves here shouting and screaming at me, but I haven't heard that before. I mean, that changes the dynamic entirely, right?
[Debra Clary] (14:45 - 15:18)
It does. So my whole point is, is how we're how we're socialized. Right.
And then then we go to the university and we become accountants or medical doctors or lawyers and we go into the workplace or hospitals or clinics and we are rewarded for our expertise. And oh, by the way, we have so much time constraint. There's so much we have to get done.
It doesn't allow for us to necessarily be curious. And so for all of those reasons, you know, we show up in midlife and being incurious.
[Andy Goram] (15:19 - 16:24)
Because that's why I wanted to ask you in all of the work. I mean, we will come into what the book The Curiosity Curve has to say and the framework particularly that that you've worked on. And I'm fascinated by the fact that we can teach this as a as a skill.
But why else do you think we've got this kind of dichotomy of all the things that both of us have said about what businesses need and desire in this world we live in right now? It seems obvious we need to ask more questions. At the same time, it's almost it's almost discouraged.
It's almost given a performative permission. But actually, I mean, a number of times, I guess, as a manager and leader, ineffective at times, people coming to me and asking me questions when I'm busy. It's annoying.
And I just wanted to kind of get them out and get on with what I was getting on with. Is that the sort of like context that you're seeing in business and why we've got this kind of like weird, we want it, we don't want it thing going on?
[Debra Clary] (16:25 - 18:52)
Yes, you described the typical scenario in a business environment in that, you know, the managers in their office, the employee comes in and they set the problem on the table. And both the leader and the employee are looking at the problem. And the leader, like you said, well, I'm already working on something else.
You're really bothering me. We are just efficient and we give them the answer and we send them along their way. Now, is that efficient?
Absolutely. But are you actually building that individual's ability to solve the problem on their own the next time? Have you built their confidence?
And the answer is no. And so that's typically what happens. You know, in an ideal world, the best leaders I know is when the problem comes and sits on the table, they don't look at the problem.
They're looking at the employee and they're asking them questions about, you know, have you solved something like this before? What are their ideas that you have? And you're building their confidence that they can actually solve problems.
Now, some people say, well, I don't have time. It's just going to be easier for me to do that. And I would say leadership is playing the long game, not the short game.
You know, the short game, you're being a manager. The long game is I'm developing people that could eventually run this organization or take my jobs. I'm, you know, I'm developing people.
You know, and I want to go back to that engagement report that Gallup had released about the lowest engagement ever recorded. And so we pulled together a group of millennials because they make up a significant amount of the workforce and they also are 65 percent disengaged. So a big part of disengagement.
Now, millennials are between like 29 and 40. Now, why are they an important group? Because those are the people we would be developing to take senior roles in the next decade.
And they're signalling to us we're not interested. So we pulled them together and we said, you know, what's the source of your unhappiness? Those are my words.
The researchers did it in a more lovely way. But what they came back with was surprising. They said, my leader doesn't know me and doesn't care to know me.
Like, hey, that's so simple. And we're like, so when you say know me, does that mean like you have a dog and you like to hike? No, they don't know what I can contribute to the problem.
I'm the closest to the problem and I'm least consulted. I'm told what to do versus getting my input. And I want to make a contribution.
I don't want to be told what to do. I want to make a contribution. And I'm like, wow, those are things that leaders can learn to do.
[Andy Goram] (18:53 - 20:39)
Yeah, that contribution piece is coming through loud and clear. I mean, that's exactly the same in the UK with that particular age group wanting to feel like I am contributing and I want to be involved. And the things you talk about here in questioning, I mean, that's the fundamental of coaching, right?
When we're trying to get people to think for themselves, growing confidence, we're asking them questions. We're trying to show that they can think a problem through rather than smash their head against the wall because they don't have the immediate answer. Right.
And I guess in that process as well, the fact of not just giving them confidence, but we are reinforcing the fact that actually taking some time to think things through in as logical a fashion as you can, or maybe as a creative fashion as you can is a worthwhile exercise. Absolutely. And I think this is another thing about the tension between the short term, long term stuff.
We see this friction in business across many different aspects, don't we? You know, even in culture for itself, will I invest in really doubling down my efforts to create a great culture here, which means it will pay back in the future? Or am I just going to tell people what to do right now because I need a result today?
And we see these tensions all the way. I'm really interested in this teaching aspect. So it's one thing getting a report that sort of says, Hey, curiosity is linked to performance.
There's, there's no doubt you can connect the dots between various bits of information from Gallup and all the rest of it to sort of say, look, there's a, there's a need for this sort of stuff. So what was the process of taking that genus of an idea? Curiosity is a good thing.
It leads to great performance. So now we need to be able to teach it. Talk me through how that evolved.
[Debra Clary] (20:41 - 22:30)
Yeah. So I, when we were doing this initial research, I went out to some of the largest consulting firms and I, there was three in particular and I asked them what do great organizations need? And they listed just what you would imagine.
You know, they need a vision, they need to be able to execute that type of thing. And I said, okay. So we did our research and I came back and I was kind of boastful.
I went back to all three of them and I said, well, you're missing something. You're missing curiosity. Like look at our research and you need to be talking about this.
And they said, well, can you measure it? And I went, I'll be back. And so I went back to the team and said, you know, this is so critical.
How do we know what current state is? And then how do we, how can we drive performance to improve it? And so we created a diagnostic tool.
It's validated. And that people can take their assessment, 26 questions, and what's their current level of curiosity. And there are four drivers that make up our assessment.
It's from exploration, openness to new ideas, inspirational creativity, and focused engagement. Now it's wonderful in the workplace to know what your current level of curiosity, but if you want to maximize it, you take it as a team and you understand the current level of the team's curiosity. Also in our research, Andy, we found out that a leader's level of curiosity impacts the entire team.
So you see a curious leader, you're going to see curious employees, and then the reverse is true. So why this is so important is that you begin to understand those that you're working with. And just like any assessment, knowing self and knowing others is how we can create better relationships, trust, and then of course, better performance.
[Andy Goram] (22:31 - 23:08)
Yeah. I think I was going to say that the two things in there, the personal diagnostic, the environmental almost within the team, and I guess this leadership thing of being or being given permission to be curious, to ask questions. It feels like a late question in this conversation, but what does curiosity mean to you, by the way?
Have you honed a specific definition of that that's unique? Are you taking just a dictionary perspective of what it is? What does it mean to you for something you're so passionate about?
[Debra Clary] (23:08 - 25:06)
Yeah. If you look at it just from Wikipedia, the dictionary form of it, I mean, they define curiosity as being genuinely interested in self and others' situation. So you think about emotional intelligence, it's connected to that.
And it's also what the millennials were saying is missing. I want someone to be interested in me. So the reverse of this, let's take a look.
I was talking with an attorney yesterday. He's a litigator, a very famous litigator. And he says, yeah, I like getting people on the stands, and then I start asking them questions.
And I said, that's very different from what I'm teaching. I'm teaching a scenario where you're actually in a work environment and you're trying to improve performance in team. When you're litigating someone and you've got a witness, you're trying to get an answer out of them.
That's not what we're doing when we're in the workplace. It's a very distinct difference. You're actually, as an attorney, and I went to law school for one quarter and I quit.
My parents said, why are you quitting? And I said, because they said never ask a question you don't know the answer to. And I go, I don't want to live my life like that.
I want to live my life in an open explore type of a mode. And the other nuance to this too is, I mean, there are times you're in a crisis, you don't have time to ask questions. You need a commander that is giving the directions in terms of something that might have just happened.
And it could be a natural disaster. How do you protect your employees? Or there could have been a huge fraud case or something like that.
As leaders, you have to be able to shift into that. This is a point where I need to give direction so that we're protecting our brand, our company, or our employees. So that's very different from what I'm talking about as well.
I'm talking about in a normal work environment, when you're trying to enhance performance, curiosity is your key.
[Andy Goram] (25:07 - 26:14)
I think this is what's really fascinating because, I mean, in some respect, some of the answers have been in previous Gallup surveys, because the number one reason why people still leave organizations is the relationship that they have with their manager, with their line manager. We've still got that huge drop-off and tension within that piece, which comes back to just what the millennials are saying. But I don't think it's just them in that having somebody that understands me, having someone that sees me, having someone that listens to me, having someone that backs me.
And our ability to do that is enhanced or hampered by the degree to which we understand and know somebody or how much we trust them and how much we can be bothered to get to know them. So I think it all comes from understanding, which I think is amazing. So I think we ought to have a look at this curve, right?
I'd love to understand the title of the book is The Curiosity Curve. What is that then? So talk us through that, because I think we need to go there first before we think about how we can teach this stuff, right?
[Debra Clary] (26:15 - 31:02)
So the curve represents optimal curiosity. So going back to the four factors of our curiosity is exploration is the first one. So you know that you're talking with someone that's in the explore mode when they're looking up and saying, I'm wondering about, have we thought of this?
Have we thought about that? I mean, they're reaching out there to say, what have we not yet thought about? Right?
That's someone that's in the explore mode. And I'll give you an example of where I didn't have the language around this, but this was happening to me when I was at the Coca-Cola company. I had this lovely role called chief of staff, and it was a developmental role.
So you get to work for the president, but you're getting to learn so much about the organization. And every Monday I would go in and sit down with Tom and he would be going out here, let's about this. What about that?
And I was writing it down thinking I'm meant to go execute or I'm meant to go research. And this went on for like three, four weeks. Every time I'd go back, he'd give me new things.
I'd go back new things. And I'm like, I'm failing. I called the previous chief of staff and I said, man, I'm just really failing here.
And he goes, well, what's happening? And I said, well, I go in on Monday and he's like, has all these ideas. I write them down.
The next week I come back to give him some information and he's already onto the next thing. And he goes, oh, I'm so sorry. I should have told you.
Unless he asked you three times, take no action. See, Tom was in explore mode. I was in execute mode because I got to show that I'm worthy of this role.
So those are people that are in explore. And you can see where people would get, like I did, like, oh, I'm supposed to go do these things versus if I knew he was an explorer, I would have, when I left that meeting, I would have said, Tom, is there anything you want me to take action on? Yes or no?
Otherwise, I mean, I was wasting time. So the next one is inspirational creativity. These are people that can take different industries or different sources and begin to put ideas together.
So they might be saying, I was reading the Wall Street Journal and then I was reading People magazine and I had this idea. So inspirational creativity. I have a former colleague, Dr. Joan Kelly. She was working at Yale Medical during COVID and there was no answers. There was no playbook. There was no framework.
And so she began to think about how do I keep my patients and my staff safe? And so she said, well, wait a minute. The airline industry, they've got to keep clean air.
How do they do it? And so, of course, during COVID, airlines weren't flying. So there were executives that were available to have conversations.
And what she ended up doing two things because of those conversations and it became a best in class in the United States. One is, first thing she did is she put in new air filtration systems that they had not had before. They tapped on what the airlines were doing.
And it did two things. One, it cleaned the air in a very different way. But two, when it kicked on, the staff felt safe.
It was a reminder that our administration, they're taking care of us. And then the next thing they did like in airports is they had kiosks. Hospitals didn't have kiosks.
So she put one in an emergency room. So you would drive up in your car, you would go in, you would put in your information and you'd go back and sit in the safety of your car. And when it was your turn, you would get paid.
It's now time to come into the ER and then they would take you back. So that's what I was saying is she took a different industry and said, how are they doing that? The next one is openness to new ideas.
I'm sure we have all worked for leaders that have said, oh, we've tried that before. That's not going to happen. Someone that's open to new ideas and saying, tell me more, tell me more.
So that you're really listening to what is it they have to say. And who knows what ideas that might spark to continue on the conversation. And the last one is focused engagement.
And what focused engagement means two things. One is when I'm asking you a question and you're responding, I'm totally locked into what you're saying. I'm listening to what you have to say.
And the second meaning behind that is, is when we make a decision on what direction we're going to have, you got to go focus and get it done. So that's why it's called optimal curiosity. If we are always exploring and not getting anything done, that doesn't benefit the organization.
And so it's finding out this balance and it's finding out the people that you work with, what are their curiosity factors and how do you both, how do you work well together?
[Andy Goram] (31:03 - 31:51)
Yeah, because it feels like we've probably got biases and preferences in our behaviour, right? Within some of these quadrants, some of us. And because I'm just triggered by openness to new ideas, because if I think about the work that I would do with behaviour stuff and the big five psychological traits, you know, openness is one of those big things.
And that is about accepting of stimulus and other views and all those sorts of things. And we're on a little sliding scale of those things. Some of us are bang up for that and others are like, nah, not for me.
And I wonder within this quadrant piece in the research, in the work that you do with people, we've got preferences, right? About where we like to sit perhaps, or we think you've got perceived strengths maybe in different quadrants than others. Is that right?
[Debra Clary] (31:52 - 33:27)
That's absolutely right. You know, we have preference. So, you know, to be a successful, curious people, you need all four, right?
And all four can be high. It's just knowing when am I doing which of these activities, right, that's going to really drive the performance, my performance or the performance of the organization. And I'll give you an example.
I was working with, it was 160 people within an organization and within that 160, they had teams, right? So there was the marketing team, the operating team, legal and on and on. And so we, they got their individual scores and then they got their team scores and then they got the overall organizational scores, right?
And we put them into their particular teams to say, how do you feel about your score? What would we do differently? You know, and then let's write an accountability plan.
Well, the operations team, um, they were very high on focused engagement and low on all the other factors. And they were very proud of that. Like they were doing report outs and said, we're really proud of that because, you know, we are strict, we follow the rules there and on and on and on.
And it was the, I think the CEO who said, I'm wondering though, if we could be more open to how we could do things better. But they, they saw it in a very narrow way of, you know, we're keeping the wheels on the bus. You know, we keep the trains running for this organization and we're very proud that we don't get messed up in these other parts of curiosity.
And it was this sense of, you know, having this awareness and saying, oh, maybe we could do better.
[Andy Goram] (33:28 - 33:54)
Just even perhaps seeing that, that quadrant thing laid out will be a stimulus in itself to expand our thinking or try something else. Right. Do you see in the research, I don't even know if this is an interesting question or not.
It's just, it's popped in my head. Do you see any generalizations in, in organizations and businesses in the application of those quadrants? Are there, are there stronger biases than others that are more normal?
[Debra Clary] (33:56 - 34:13)
Um, I don't know if this will get after your question, but it might. So we have, we have 800, uh, completed surveys. And in those 800 surveys, we also have the, the demographics.
So some of the things that were interesting to me is that there are no difference between a male and female curiosity.
[Andy Goram] (34:13 - 34:15)
Oh, okay. That's good. Yeah.
[Debra Clary] (34:15 - 35:19)
Women are equally curious or less curious. Right. But the thing that was interesting is the people that are most curious in organizations are those that are have seniority, like they, they, they might be in their fifties and sixties.
And I, I was going in thinking, oh, it's going to be the people right out of college. Right. There's, they're fresh with ideas.
I really want to learn. It's actually the other end of that. Now that came as a surprise to me.
And so we did a small smoking, a spokus group with those people that had that tenure and they thought about it and they said, I think it's because I have a lot of confidence because I've been in the workplace for a long time. And I'm also, I'm not afraid if you fire me. Right.
Right. In a sense of that, like, like we have security and in that kind of that sense. So those are some of the things that surprised me.
But when we look at the different disciplines, so like if you're in marketing or you're in finance, we don't see any differences that there are people all over the map as it relates to their scores.
[Andy Goram] (35:20 - 35:37)
I love that it shows it's just such an individual thing. And I think that that age demographic thing is really interesting. And if I just think about it for myself, I probably feel like they've got permission to think rather than do all of the time.
Maybe there's a bit of that within there.
[Debra Clary] (35:38 - 35:39)
Yeah. I think that's, that's well said.
[Andy Goram] (35:39 - 35:57)
Yeah. Okay. So we started this show saying, well, you revealing we can teach this stuff.
Right. So on the back, on the back of the curve, how do we go about teaching? How do we go educating it, helping people get better and stronger and more confident in being curious?
[Debra Clary] (35:58 - 37:04)
Yeah. So in the, in the book, you'll find, you know, significant amount of frameworks and tools and ideas to like that. But for example, it's one of, I mean, the best way to do it to, to begin to start is to take the assessment and I offer it free on my website.
So you can go and take that. And you have an understanding of where do I show up curious and where do I not show up curious, but all of it boils down to one thing is, you know, curiosity is rooted in questions. And so going in and having this mindset of, you know, I might've been around for a long time, but I don't know everything.
I'm going to, I want today, I'm going to show up and I'm going to ask questions so I can learn. And I'm not talking about leading the witness. I'm not like I'm pretending to ask you a question, but this mindset of how might I better understand where this person is coming from?
And so it starts with the mindset and then it starts with open-ended questions and then it's listening.
[Andy Goram] (37:05 - 37:26)
I've just written down on my piece of paper as I, as I'm listening to you speak, listening has to be a partner skill within the ability to ask the right questions, right? If you can't actually hear what someone is saying or perhaps even interesting what they're not saying, how can you even begin to ask reasonable, useful questions for either of you?
[Debra Clary] (37:27 - 38:03)
Yeah. And what I remind people is just because you're asking questions and you're seeking to understand them, doesn't mean that you have to agree with them, right? I think some people, especially, you know, around the holidays when you're sitting around with an uncle and you know, you don't see them every very often, but yet they has a different political view or different view of the world.
And you're each trying to convince each other that you're right. And so let that relax. And you're, no, one's trying to be right.
You're not trying to be right. You're just simply trying to understand where they're coming from and have this, this appreciation from they have, they have a different view than I have.
[Andy Goram] (38:04 - 38:51)
I think that whole premise of understand first before you do anything is, is, is a pretty basic requirement that we just seem to gloss over. Sometimes we're so hell bent on getting something done. We don't take a breath to listen and understand and then take the right course of action.
Right. Well, I think we've all been guilty of that. I wonder as well, we mentioned in the intro, the kind of chaotic, get it all done quickly now world that we're living in and we can't avoid the topic of AI anywhere at the moment.
Do you think that is having a negative impact on curiosity or do you think it's actually fueling our ability to sort of ask questions and find answers? Just interested in your perspective on that right now.
[Debra Clary] (38:51 - 39:26)
Yeah. My, my position today is, uh, is that I think it fuels curiosity. You think about AI does nothing until you ask it a question or ask it to do something.
And then it comes back with something and you have this discernment to say that looks right or that doesn't look right. And you go back and say, I, I, I don't think this quite right. This is what I'm looking for.
So for me, it, it, it spurs my curiosity and it, it accelerates my, my ability to research in a short period of time.
[Andy Goram] (39:27 - 40:02)
I just wish more people would second guess what some AI is spitting out in occasion. We seem to, there's too many examples, I think at the moment that I, that I'm seeing with people just asking a question and, and assuming the gospel that comes out according to chat GPT is the definitive answer on something. And I think the minute you start scratching the surface and realizing, and even really, is that, is, is that true?
You're making stuff up because it's an aggregating model is trying to average stuff. You know, I think, I think again, being curious about what AI is telling you is also an, an important thing to do, right?
[Debra Clary] (40:03 - 41:00)
Yeah. And that's where the, the discernment comes in. Um, you know, like, so for me having been on this planet longer than other people in, in the sense that I have this experience to know that doesn't sound right, or that sounds right.
Right. So, cause I'm usually using AI for, um, you know, business examples. And I'll say, that's not right.
This one time I asked it to give me a case study on something and it came back and I'm like, wow, that's phenomenal. And then I said, I need to cite it. And he said, oh, I made it up.
And I'm like, oh, you know, I, I need it. I need to cite it. No, you know, cause also as a researcher, you know, you, you always then go look for the primary research, right?
So even if you're reading a book and it cites somebody else's research, go, I'm going to go look at that research. And then when he came back and said, I call him, he, uh, he made it up by, well, thanks for being honest, but I can't go to press with something made up.
[Andy Goram] (41:00 - 41:25)
Yeah. Not helpful. Not helpful.
Thank you very much for that. Yeah. Well, I just, I do think it's an interesting topic right now.
Um, and I think we, there is so much more opportunity to find stuff out now than perhaps ever before. And the skill of curiosity right now, I mean, we've got so many amazing tools. If we are a bit more curious, we can find out some amazing things, right?
We can, we can really do some good stuff.
[Debra Clary] (41:26 - 41:46)
Absolutely. I am taking a physics course and my daughters were like, what are you taking physics? Like at your age?
And I go, yeah, it was something I've always been intrigued by. My brother was an engineer. He is an engineer.
You know, he talks about physics and I'm like, I'm just going to go learn it for myself. I'm having a blast learning physics.
[Andy Goram] (41:47 - 42:48)
Wow. I mean, that's not a sentence I would ever say. Um, it's fascinating.
I just don't understand this. I'm just not clever enough. I'm fascinated by those things, but our ability to find out stuff, if we just ask some questions today is, it is untold.
And I have, I've been fascinated listening to this one topic of curiosity right today and just how big and expansive it can be and the role it can play in performance. And in a world where we're really trying to push for performance, um, it's such a vital tool. And I always like to try and leave the listeners at the end of a show with some practical advice, right?
On how we make this happen. So I have this little element of the show called sticky notes, which is where I'm looking for you to give me your three best pieces of advice. And in this case, advice for helping leaders strengthen that curiosity muscle.
If you could give me three little bits of advice, I could fit on three sticky notes. What would those pieces of advice be today, Debra?
[Debra Clary] (42:49 - 43:36)
Well, knowing that leadership and culture is synonymous, so goes the leader, so goes the culture. So you have a huge responsibility as a leader. And the one would be is set the intention of, I want to create a culture of curiosity.
And by telling your team that that's your intention, that begins you on this journey of being a curious organization. And the next is reward people that ask questions. And the third would be reward those that try to poke holes at what's happening.
You know, those that challenged the status quo, you need to lift them up and celebrate them and let them know that we are the kind of organization that listens to people and we want to know what's important to you.
[Andy Goram] (43:36 - 44:00)
There's such critical leadership behaviours there. Thank you for sharing those. Before I let you go, well, I don't want to let you go, Debra, but I have to let you go.
Where can people find out a bit more about you, get hold of the book, The Curiosity Curve? And I'm definitely going to try and put the link to that assessment in the show notes too, which I think would be cool. Fabulous.
Yes. So where can people find you?
[Debra Clary] (44:01 - 44:20)
So you can find me on my website, which is debraclary.com. I'm also on LinkedIn under that same name. And if you go to my website, you'll be able to take the curiosity assessment and you'll get your own score, if you will.
You can also buy my book on amazon.com. It's available worldwide.
[Andy Goram] (44:21 - 44:35)
Fantastic. Well, I will make sure all of that information goes in the show notes. Debra, it's been an absolute joy meeting you.
Thank you for sharing your passion on this topic of curiosity. I am so grateful for coming on the show. Thank you very much.
[Debra Clary] (44:36 - 44:36)
Thank you, Andy.
[Andy Goram] (44:37 - 45:18)
Okay, everyone. Well, that was Debra Clary. And if you'd like to find out a bit more about her or any of the topics that we've talked about today, including the book, please check out the show notes.
So that concludes today's episode. I hope you've enjoyed it, found it interesting, and heard something maybe that will help you become a stickier, more successful business from the inside going forward. If you have, please like, comment and subscribe.
It really helps. I'm Andy Goram, and you've been listening to the Sticky from the Inside podcast. Until next time, thanks for listening.
Andy Goram is the owner of Bizjuicer, an employee engagement and workplace culture consultancy that's on a mission to help people have more fulfilling work lives. He's also the host of the Sticky From The Inside Podcast, which talks to experts on these topics from around the world.
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