#54: The Power of Curiosity

You're listening to the Proteus Leader Show with Erika Andersen, where you'll get practical tools and insights for leading, managing, and staying ready for the future. Erika is the founding partner of Proteus, a firm that focuses uniquely on leader readiness. A nationally known executive coach and bestselling author, you may already know her as one of the most popular leadership bloggers on Forbes.com. Ready for something you can use today? Here's Erika.

Hello everyone and welcome back to the Proteus Leader Show. My guest today is Dr. Allison Horstmaier, a leading-edge humanistic researcher, talent development consultant, and thought leader. Her work has been widely published, most recently in the upcoming Harvard Business Review Press book, The Burnout Epidemic: The Rise of Chronic Stress, and how we can fix it. Allison works with organizations on agile leadership, healthy team dynamics, and continuous innovation. She also serves as the Director of Client Development and adjunct faculty for USC Marshall School of Business Executive Education, and is the inaugural research fellow appointed to USC Annenberg Center for Third Space Thinking. So welcome to the show, Allison.

Oh, thank you so much. Such a pleasure to be here. I'm looking forward to our conversation. And I know you're a big advocate of curiosity, so it should be a rich conversation.

Yes, I am too. And we connected earlier this year around our mutual interest in curiosity as a core skill for succeeding in today's world. So I thought your perspective would be really useful to our listeners just to go deeper and deeper into how curiosity works and why it's important. So you've called curiosity And I love this, the doorway to collaboration, inclusion, and positive relationships. So can you explain why you believe that's true?

So through my research and my own study and previous research, we really have to start looking and considering curiosity as multifaceted. And the multidimensionality of curiosity consists of not knowing, exploration, openness, and stress tolerance. And the idea is that we know, for example, in the research starting, I would say, in the early 2000s, there was research done over diary keeping, for example. And we saw curiosity had a relationship to social gratification and social support in relationships. And then the research moves forward into more quantitative research where we see that those that are higher in curiosity tend to less aggressive when provoked. And they also tend to be less judgmental, critical, and blaming of others. And as we move more along the tie line, we see a correlation between curiosity and empathy, curiosity and collaboration, curiosity and team connection and trust. And then most recently, there was research done with 1,000 US workers and 1,000 German workers. And the 2 dimensions of curiosity, the openness, so open to other people's ideas, and stress tolerance, were the 2 leading predictors of healthy work outcomes. And I also saw this in my research, was so fascinating. My study participants really described a state of curiosity The true curiosity was when they let go of preconceived notions and biases. They actually, in essence, took their ego out of the problem, the interaction, and they felt in those moments they could connect to their most authentic self. And then they could bring forward who they knew they could be and wanted to be, whether that was in their role as a president of a hospital or a senior executive at a real estate firm, you know, I did multiple industries. But in the research, we know too that if we can take our ego out of it, become less narcissistic, we have a higher chance of embodying stress tolerance. So stress tolerance is managing the anxiety, doubt, and confusion along the way. So if I'm really leaning in to connect with somebody and I don't really understand where they're coming from, right, or how they're operating. But I'm willing to put those assumptions aside or put my story aside and put my agenda aside. They were able to say, wow, I didn't really take into consideration what's going on with this other person. And I was able to connect more deeply and actually meet people where they are more effectively and co-create together and reimagine and reinterpret shared horizons of the issue and the problem together. We also know in the research that when we do that, we almost reinterpret ourselves. We acknowledge that we're not perfect.

Yeah.

Right. And we are willing to say, oh, wait a minute, you know, thank you, Adam Grant. We're ready to think again and rethink it. And so, you know, this idea of— it's not, you know, I don't want to make it sound like, okay, it's the antidote to everything, but there is an intentionality to curiosity. It is self-determined. You know, you choose to be curious and it takes effort. This is not not— you have to think of it as a verb, and not just like this observation of, you know, being interested, because you can be interested and do nothing.

Right.

You can, you can observe and do nothing. This, you know, all of my study participants were very clear. It takes, it takes energy and effort. And you have to be willing to go and explore. But as soon as they were able to let go of any preconceived Predetermined boundaries, really. Like, the more open they made the exploration, they actually felt more liberated and less anxious.

Boy, everything you're saying just resonates so deeply for me. And I really agree that it's a habit that takes effort to create. And then it has kind of its own momentum because it does feel liberating. It's so fun. It's so rewarding to like, I never knew that. And now I understand, or I see it more clearly, or that's— yes. I completely understand that. And I love what you said about the anxiety, that for people who are first starting to be curious, it is anxiety-producing because it's no longer like, I got it all sorted out. I know everything. I have it completely figured out. And it's like, I don't know. I mean, that's all.

Well, that's the not knowing. We have to, right? I mean, we talk about this all the time in terms Or we're seeing more momentum around, can we all stop being experts? And actually, the model that I use with executives is the expert explorer model. So, right. And it's not— I'm not saying you can't be an expert in your domain. What I'm saying is you can't— the expert is listening to fix, listening to win, my way, proving I'm right.

Got it.

Really influenced by cognitive biases, doesn't take the time to reflect. is really holding on to the status quo. The status quo is an illusion of certainty. You got to let that go. I was still so amazed when I did a survey of executives last year. This is probably— we were 6 months into COVID. And I had listed the biases like confirmation bias, status quo bias, champion bias, sunflower bias. I said, still, what's the bias that's most prevalent in your organization? Status quo bias still.

Yeah. It's great. 'Cause you're already starting to answer what was going to be my second question. So let's just keep going down this path, which is, I was going to say, you know, what do you see as the main organizational individual impediments to curiosity? What keeps us from being curious? And it's a lot of what you're talking about now, right?

What surfaced in my research and what surfaced in other research is that it's a fine line between enjoying it and having, you know, anxiety or distress or discomfort come up. And there's a couple of reasons for that. One is that we have actually an immediate appraisal process right before we get started. One is like, oh my gosh, this looks new, different, unfamiliar, right? We have some kind of incongruency that now we have to reconcile. And those type of situations are actually great because they give us the highest potential to find new information and to have new experiences. So if we don't have unfamiliarity and ambiguity, then we're not going to continue to expand our thought-action repertoire. So we need those experiences. The second appraisal is, do I have what it takes to cope along the way? And also, we have to think of curiosity as a process because the anxiety can show up again. So you can dive right into the exploration. You can have experiences of flow state because you're deeply absorbed. But what we don't talk about in flow states is the feedback loop that happens. And I saw this with my study participants. They would get— they would move into the unfamiliar, get away from markers that were familiar to them, whether it was a new behavior, challenging a subjective belief they had about themselves, or an issue at work, and really trying to just— go for, looking at something differently, trying a new behavior. You know, those things can be scary because you're exposing that you're not perfect. And then they would come out of it and they're looking for feedback. So the cognitive would kick in. So they would like— the self-censorship would be like, oh my God, how am I doing? And then depending on what they're receiving, right, in terms of feedback, Hmm. Would either help them continue or they would just be like, I'm out.

Right.

So this is why— yeah, or just like, yeah, I mean, think about it. If we're not— especially in the creative process, we want to give open-ended and metaphorical feedback, you know, try to keep it open-ended because if you keep it very closed-ended, then that shuts down the creative process and iteration.

Okay.

But think about, this is why it's so great that we're all talking about psychological safety so much these days because we do need environments where you can feel safe contributing, challenging, learning, right? We have, I love Timothy Clark's 4 zones that he's identified in psych safety, 'cause I think those really resonate and so tied to what I saw in my research. So you have to really think about what kind of environment you're putting your employees in, in that it's not like, yeah, go be curious. Right. Right.

Right.

It's like, what are you doing? Are you— what are you modeling? Are you saying, like, go experiment, and then you're, like, you know, using weaponizing questions in terms of, like, why'd you do it that way?

You're starting to answer what I was going to ask as my last question, which is, I always try and give some practical takeaways. So, and you're already starting to do this, what practical advice would you give leaders about how to activate their employees' curiosity and also their own in order to navigate this changing world that we're in?

What's new in the research, I've only seen one other study connects these 2 things, and I saw it in my study, is values and curiosity. I know you do a lot of mission strategy envisioning work in your work too. So we're seeing more empirical support that we have to get really clear on our values. Our values will inform how we are curious. Our team values will inform how our team is curious. And when I work with teams, even if the organization culturally— I know we really do need to solve it at a cultural level. We have great examples of that, right? Microsoft, Intuit, Novartis are really going for it at a cultural level. But You know, I worked with a team and they were like, you know, it's not really in the culture. They say we should experiment, but we really worked on their values, getting clear about the dimensions of curiosity, how that shows up, because they really wanted to challenge the status quo, learn how to really challenge senior management on certain things, and bring a level of exploration and creativity to what they were doing. And So the values really helped. The other thing that really helped was having a common language and frameworks to use. So for example, the expert-explorer framework, so you can have a sense of humor about it, right? Oh, you know, you look like the expert today, right?

Yeah.

You know, or if you know you have certain saboteurs that come out, you know, hey, hey, Erika, your, your Sassy Sally's showing up right now. You know what's going on? But we also had the team teach their— the whole organization, their whole department of 22 people learned what cognitive biases were, what they— all the different types. They started using them in discussion and being like, hey, well, that sounds a lot like confirmation bias. And they just decided together what they were going to practice in terms of certain behaviors they wanted to model themselves to kind of bring that out in others. So I always say, you know, one great thing is how are you listening, right? Are you listening to fix and to win, or are you listening with the intention that what I hear changes what I do? The intention doesn't mean that you're going to do it, but imagine if we all listened. That way, because I love people say, oh, curious, curious. If you're curious, you ask questions. And my response is, that's great. How open are you to what you're receiving though?

Yeah.

Yeah.

I love that, that intention. What are you listening? What intention are you listening in? So Alison, I feel like we're just scratching the surface. I always promise listeners we'll keep this short and insight so much knowledge, but even this little bit has been very helpful. If you're interested in finding out more about Alison and her work, you can go to linkedin/in/alisonhorstmeier.com. To find out more about how we at Proteus see curiosity as being key to learning, you can go to proteusleader.com/topics and choose Be Bad First. And stay tuned for more information about our new book coming in October, Change from the Inside Out: A Guide for Becoming More Change-Capable in This Ever-Evolving World of Ours. Thank you for listening, and until next time, here's to creating the life you truly want.

We hope you're feeling better equipped to create the career, the business, and the life you want. For more insights and tools for leadership and management, join us at theprodigiousleader.com. Have an excellent day, and thanks for listening.