In previous articles on inclusive leadership, I’ve described the challenge and discussed two strategies to overcome it: choosing to lead everyone and personalizing leadership to each individual follower. These two strategies are only effective if the leader understands the followers. The third inclusive leadership strategy helps leaders build that understanding: inclusive leaders must be curious.
I previously described a hypothetical leader that adopted two different leadership styles to engage two different followers. That story showed a relatively easy example. Although she has two very different followers to inspire, she has enough experience in common with each that she is not stretching far to reach them. An inclusive leader faces a greater challenge when engaging someone who is very different. How can leaders inspire someone if they do not share any common experience, knowledge, or demography? The key, and perhaps the single most difficult inclusive leadership mindset to achieve, is curiosity.
In the context of inclusive leadership, curiosity has two meanings. The first is the obvious one: if someone I hope to lead has a background or experience completely different from my own, I try to learn everything I can from that person. The second meaning is even more important, and that is curiosity as the opposite of judgment. Curiosity is a state of prolonged open-mindedness.
Be deliberate about being curious
An inclusive leader can be curious about a follower either by asking direct questions or by engaging in frequent everyday conversations and allowing the follower to paint a picture of who they are over time. One workplace curiosity tactic is to put a coffee break on the calendar and invite everyone to come. Every week. People can learn a great deal about each other by sitting around and talking about anything other than work. Any way the conversations happen, an inclusive leader benefits from them in two ways. First, they’ll get to know their followers, which will help them adjust their leadership approach in future interactions. Second, by getting to know one person with a particular background or experience, they will be better prepared to lead other people with that experience. Get to know your co-worker that plays the accordion, because someday a critical place on your team may be filled by someone else who happens to play the accordion.
Curiosity is like exercise. The more often you practice it, the more capable you become. Every time you learn something about a person or their perspective, you build your ability to lead others. Their perspective influences yours to grow ever so slightly. As exercise makes your body more ready for your next physical challenge, the practice of curiosity makes your leadership mind more ready for the next time you’ll need to inspire someone new.
The best prepared inclusive leaders take a more strategic approach to curiosity. Strategically curious leaders are always seeking to understand different people - not just the different people they interact with, but different people they may never encounter in person. People from around the entire world. They are interested in the values, beliefs, and customs of people from New London to Niamey. There are many leadership benefits to investing in strategic curiosity. First, if adjusting leadership to a follower means leading from one part of yourself, it helps to have many different parts. A strategically curious leader will have a wide range of knowledge about others’ experiences they can call on to lead people. Second, learning about the life experiences of others tends to help a leader put their own experience into context. No matter how great you think you are, or how difficult a part of your past was, there is always someone who has done more with less. Strategic curiosity contributes to the humility that enables inclusive leaders to adjust to their followers.
Curiosity is part of a smart team’s decision-making process
Curiosity means more than just seeking to learn more and understand people. In order to be truly curious, we must overcome a significant mental force that opposes our efforts to learn from different people: judgment. As we work with a person with perspectives much different from our own, there is a tendency to rapidly judge that person or their different ideas negatively. Any perspective that conflicts with our own view of the world is mentally attacked while we charge the shields guarding our own ideas. This tendency to judge destroys our ability to inclusively lead someone with a different perspective.
The absence of curiosity can also short circuit a team’s decision-making process. Our brains are wired to make quick decisions based on initial information. We are also prone to rejecting information that conflicts with our existing world view. The combination of these two traits means that people tend to stop listening to people with different ideas. When a leader needs to make a decision, a lack of curiosity manifests itself as a preference for others with ideas similar to the leader’s initial thoughts. Different ideas are given less consideration or ignored entirely. But the different ideas may be the best ideas.
Curious leaders are aware of this danger and are mentally strong enough to catch themselves when they start to judge another’s perspective. They can maintain their curiosity when others stop paying attention. Curious leaders that can avoid making an initial judgment about a differing perspective may find that it has merit. The reason inclusive work groups can outperform exclusive ones is that they bring out the best ideas of every person, even if those ideas are different. The difference is what can lead to the performance improvement. Not every different idea is better, but an inclusive leader who is curious about what every follower has to say is going to make sure that all the ideas are at least discussed. The exclusive leader, who immediately judges new ideas and rejects them, turns the idea spigot off and will never know about the potentially great things followers can contribute.
A curious leader will never be bored
Curiosity is the icing on an inclusive leader’s cake. The world of leadership is the world of people, and there is no limit to people’s unique abilities, perspectives, creative directions and all-around awesomeness. A curious person with the goal of leading everyone they meet can find great things in every interaction. An inclusive leader is someone who sees all the best of the world and and brings everyone along with them as they explore it.