Great Leaders’ Qualities – Curiosity and Active Listening

What makes a great leader? So many qualities and traits! It can be overwhelming to think of them all. Integrity, Consistency, Trustworthiness, Humility, Curiosity… just to name a few.

I thought I’d create a series of posts that explain these qualities and help a budding leader get their head around them.

Let’s start with some qualities that any leader – a budding or an experienced one – can work on and practice. Namely Curiosity; and what comes swiftly with it – Active Listening.

Curiosity. As in asking lots of questions?

Ok, let’s start with explaining what we mean by curiosity in a team leader’s world.

I’ll give you a real life example: a member of a project I was in had been acting odd. They were making unreasonable choices. Their actions got us scratching our heads. What the rest of the project team were seeing was at odds with what we had come to expect from the person in question.

We could have gone with being annoyed, put it down to laziness, or being difficult on purpose. Some of us did go down that lane – it’s the easy pathway after all – and started gossiping about the person.

However, I and another person decided to approach the problem in a different way. Here’s what we did.

“We are curious about a certain situation from last week”

We asked for a chat with the team member. In this chat, held without any intruding eyes or ears, we referred to a very specific situation and outlined why it had caught our attention. We also were very clear that we simply wanted to find out what drove the particular decision that led to the situation in question.

And we stopped speaking. The team member looked at us, took a deep breath, and initially acting a bit defensive started explaining. We let them speak for as long as they needed.

When they finished, we asked a couple more questions that reflected on what we had just heard. The team member was a bit more relaxed at this point, seeing that we were not attacking, nor judging them. We got even more detail.

And we finally heard that the team member had been acting in an unusual way because they had their divorce on their mind. No one knew about it.

Our chat finished with two things:

• we explained the consequences of the situation (not great but fixable). We also offered help to fix the consequences, and the team member accepted the offer. The next 10mins were dedicated to working out next steps.
• we also reassured the team member that no one would find out about the divorce situation, as it was their piece of information to share as and when they wanted to. However, we made it clear that the personal situation was affecting the team member’s decisions. Therefore, we suggested another chat to figure out how to work with these circumstances long term.

Photo by Christina @ wocintechchat.com on Unsplash

Be curious – not nosy; listen actively – pay attention

So what does it mean to be curious as a leader of a team or person?

• Be open-minded – it’s easy to jump to conclusions and assume you know why something has happened. Sometimes you will be right. The skill that you need to work on is to come into each situation without preconceptions. Make it your aim to want to find out if you are right or wrong. And don’t be afraid to be corrected.
• No judging – judging is in human nature. It takes a good deal of energy to pause your judging and not form an opinion about something or someone. No judging means working with facts and details that help with finding a solution to a situation. It means you give a person the space to explain without you reacting to what they are saying. You acknowledge what you’ve heard, and follow up with e.g. this open-ended question “Ok, so what do we do about it?”.
• Ask open-ended questions – when you ask open-ended questions, you allow the other person to explain and provide as much information as they wish to. It also means that you can follow up their answer with further questions. What are open-ended questions? Here are some examples e.g. “I’d like to find out with you some information – could you help me?”, “Tell me more please?”, “How can we make it different next time?”, “Please tell me your side of the story?”. You can read more about open-ended questions in this article.
• Listen actively – this means making a conscious decision to be fully present with the other person(s), and pay your full attention to them. Here’s what I do: I put away my phone – I make it an explicit action; I put away my notebook (I always have a notebook with me FYI); and I keep quiet until the other person has stopped speaking. Once the person has finished speaking, I ask one or two follow up questions, reflecting on what they have said. Thus also showing I have paid attention. (MindTools wrote a great article about active listening – take a look)

Curious mindset equals continuous learning and building trust

Exhibiting a curiosity and active listening could be summarised in one sentence:

“What can I learn from this conversation?”

By showing a curiour mindset and that you are an active listener, you build trust between you and your team. And being trustworthy is another super important trait of a great leader!

You can read more about other traits and qualities of a great leader in the Learning Leader’s Guide – you can find it here.

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What would your advice be about being curious and an active listener? Looking forward to your comments and suggestions!

Feature image by Towfiqu barbhuiya on Unsplash