An Impact podcast with Trevor Johnson created for the Impact leadership playbook.
The curious leader
How curious are you? Do you ask questions more often than you make judgments? What role does curiosity play in your leadership? And why is this important?
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In this mini podcast (25 mins) created exclusively for the Impact leadership playbook, Dan chats to Trevor Johnson about curiosity. Based in Los Angeles, Trevor is a Senior Consultant for Impact US, where he works with some of the world's biggest brands. He's known for his deep listening, productive challenging, and coaching skills; his ability to quickly create psychological safety in any room; and – yes, you guessed it – his curiosity.
Impact’s leadership model, Notice, Decide, Act, tells us that curiosity is the first step towards taking effective leadership action. Before we can act in service of the group, we must first engage our internal and external curiosity in order to notice that something is needed. So how do you get good at this?
What are the benefits to being curious?
"I think I'm in the business of curiosity. The work I do is trying to master the art of curiosity, which to me, is learning something new. But there's so much more to curiosity. For me, curiosity is a fuel for growth, it's a fuel for understanding, it's a fuel for increased empathy. And the benefit to me in bringing curiosity to a relationship or a collaborative endeavour is it expands my point of view – understanding how people see things, understanding their values, understanding where they're coming from. It all helps me expand my point of view. It also increases my empathy, it helps me see how people are experiencing things differently than me, and helps me know how to hold a safe container for those experiences. And it fuels my personal growth, it helps me gain more knowledge. It helps me understand different ways that I can engage in the world to reduce my harm, to people and to the environment.
I think my curiosity benefits others, when I'm in conversation with them, by just centering their experience, helping them feel valued, helping them feel understood. And it reduces the harm that I might cause with my unconscious bias around their experience and how they're experiencing the world. And finally, the benefit to us, and to the relationship that we're forming when I bring curiosity is that it adds more sand to our sandbox, so that we can build something together. And it helps us build rapport and trust.
So, in my mind, curiosity is such a valuable tool; it's at the core of a healthy collaborative relationship."
What role does curiosity play in the leadership toolkit?
"I feel like there's different levels of curiosity that leaders can engage with. To me, the aspirational, highest level is, 'I am curious to understand your point of view'. And the layer below that is, 'I'm curious to understand you from my point of view'. And then the lowest level is, 'I'm curious to understand why my point of view is right.'
And as we move up those levels, we're really engaging with this process of, 'As a leader, the more I know about your perspective, how you got there, why you value what you value, the more I'm going to be able to give you opportunities that speak to your values; the more I'm going to be able to help you or reflect back to you the strength and value that you add to the team."
Listen to the podcast on Spotify
This mini podcast was created for our leadership playbook, an interactive resource capturing 45 years of learning about leadership.