Chris Voss knows what he is talking about. He stands up straight and speaks with authority. His dark blue suit jacket is unbuttoned, allowing his bright yellow tie to highlight his message. He pauses frequently to allow the audience to absorb each thought. He sprinkles in little jokes and each is met with laughter. His confidence is justified. He is the founder and CEO of his own negotiation consulting firm. He has taught at prestigious colleges and universities. And for 27 years he served in the FBI, rising to become one of the Bureau’s top hostage negotiators. More than once, he convinced terrorists to release hostages.
Chris Voss is an excellent example of our obsession with leaders that know what they’re doing. Our culture has long valued competence above everything else. But today we don’t cherish great scientists who seek new discoveries. We revere leaders who we believe already know more than everyone else. Einstein formed his theories of relativity, ideas that enabled decades of advancements by other scientists, but Elon Musk already knows that someday soon we will drive our electric car to the launch pad for our vacation to Mars. We hang on his every tweet, the stock market reacting instantly to any crumbs of perceived wisdom he shares. In the information age, to know is to breath and to tell others what you know is to eat and drink.
So it seems obvious that someone like Chris Voss, who climbed to the top of his field, is the perfect person to share his knowledge about negotiation. And negotiation is a great topic for us to learn about. The act of conversing with another person to get what you want is a perfect showcase for powerful, knowing leaders, right? Conventional wisdom is that negotiation is a time to compete, to demonstrate superiority, to use what you have to get even more. So someone watching Chris Voss’s TED talk or attending one of his four-figure training events can be forgiven for being caught off guard by what he has to say about the mindset of great negotiators:
Your job is to be curious. You should want to be surprised, because that tells you you’re being curious. There is no way you can know everything, so you should be surprised.
I had previously never heard a leader express a desire to be surprised. But Chris Voss explains that knowing is a barrier to successful interaction with other people. Knowing actually limits our ability to perceive what they value. Curiosity, the mental state of not knowing but wishing to, is the path to better knowledge. The more we accept that we don’t know, the more we can learn. It is a paradox, but not knowing leads to better knowledge.
Curiosity is the bedrock of great leadership. Our cultural belief in all-knowing leaders is misguided. Our need to convince other people how smart we are hinders our ability to lead them. Curiosity is so important to leadership, so valuable to a leader’s relationships with other people, that we should deliberately practice it every day. Curiosity is both an attitude and a skill, and leaders should strive to have both.
How does curiosity fuel leadership?
Curious leaders grow stronger by learning more about themselves and other people every day. Leadership is a relationship between two people, a leader and a follower. Curious leaders think about that relationship as if it were a living, breathing being they hold in their hands. Curious leaders watch how their words and actions strengthen or weaken it. They use that careful perception to do more of what strengthens their relationships, and do less of what weakens them. Through stronger relationships, curious leaders improve their team’s performance.
Leaders who are certain about people instead of curious assume their relationships with followers are constants, or that the relationship is solely the follower’s responsibility. Certain leaders carry on doing what they have always done, their relationships with followers ebbing or flowing with the tide but never really going anywhere. Certain leaders’ indifference means their team’s performance never rises above mediocrity.
Have I been curious today?
Leaders have countless opportunities to be curious every day. Every conversation is chance for a curious leader to learn more about someone else’s personality or preferences. There are many questions to seek answers for. Is my colleague introverted or extroverted? Do they prefer detailed directions, or just a concept of the desired outcome? Are they guided more by thinking, or feeling? A curious leader will recognize and understand these characteristics in another person, and then draw a higher resolution mental picture of them. A higher resolution picture that allows the leader to adjust their approach to build a better relationship.
Any conflict or disagreement is an another great time to practice curiosity. Curious leaders refrain from quickly judging someone with a differing perspective. Instead they seek to learn more about their reasoning. They seek to understand how their past experience led them to their current thinking. Curious leaders are willing to the endure cognitive dissonance they feel by trying on a different perspective, and their courage is rewarded in two ways. First, they learn more about the other person, knowledge that helps them emerge from conflict with their relationship intact or even made stronger. Second, the curious leader may discover that the other person is correct. The curious leader can be convinced to exchange their position for a better one. Rather than considering it a humiliating defeat like a certain leader would, the curious leader sees it as a victory. The curious leader moved themself and their team to a higher place.
Teams led by curious leaders make better decisions than teams led with certainty. Curious leaders know the best outcomes are found not by choosing the best alternative from known possibilities, but by identifying entirely new possibilities. When presented with a fork in the road, leaders with certainty will make their own choice between left or right. Curious leaders presented with the same decision ask what others think. Instead of just left or right, curious leaders and their teams think about perhaps going up or down. Curious leaders inspire other people to engage their own creativity. The benefits are tremendous. People feel valued and engaged with the team’s mission. And the group may collectively find something new, something that takes them to greater success than any of them thought possible.
What can I learn from time in a quiet room?
Curious leaders focus on their relationships with other people, but they also live in productive self reflection. Curious leaders make time and space to think about their work. They ask questions about themselves, and give honest answers. When faced with a decision, curious leaders pause to consider the assumptions that are guiding their thinking. They honestly wonder if the assumptions are valid. They rigorously self critique their own ideas so they can catch themselves before they head down the wrong path.
Curious self reflection also helps leaders after they’ve acted. Even if they are celebrating a victory, curious leaders ask what they could have done better. If things did not go well, rather than blaming others, they think about their own contribution to failure. They will learn from their mistakes and avoid repeating them in the future.
Certain leaders double down on their assumptions or fail to consider them at all, moving out without the benefit of a reflective check. And their certainty makes it more difficult for them to change paths after something goes wrong. While the curious leader grows over time, the certain leader stagnates.
What can we achieve together?
Chris Voss continues his presentation. The longer he speaks, the more he defies the stereotype that negotiation is about confronting another party with superior power. He advises listeners to never split the difference, not because he wants us to take more from the other party, but because the true nature of negotiation is to find an outcome more beneficial to both sides. If both sides are curious, they can find a way to both come away feeling like winners. Curiosity can drive a leader-follower relationship in much the same way. With curiosity we can improve our relationships with others, so we can find the best ideas and achieve our greatest collective potential. We can discover our best future. After all, that is why we’re all here - we want to make the world a better place for everyone. Curiosity as a state of mind, and as a habit to practice, can get us there.
What do you think about that?