Refactoring Orgs

We have been doing serious work on leadership at sipgate. Not the workshop kind - we brought in an external consultant to help us formalize a framework: what we actually mean when we talk about leadership, what we expect, how we assess it. As part of that process I got interviewed. One of the questions was what leadership quality I most want to see in the people around me.

I spent more time on that question than I expected. There are many defensible answers. But the one I kept coming back to is genuine curiosity.

Every leader claims to be curious. But some are performing curiosity rather than practicing it. The distinction is not subtle if you know what to look for.

Here are five things leaders without genuine curiosity do. I'll start with the more subtle ones and end with a banger:

• When someone pushes back, they explain that the person just didn't understand the reasoning, and is just voicing their "unfounded personal opinion" - a move that ends the conversation without engaging it.
• They get thin-skinned when feedback lands in an inconvenient direction. In the more advanced stages, this tips into something that looks like mild persecution - they start to read criticism as a signal that someone is out to undermine them.
• They pre-filter people or questions before meetings so nothing uncomfortable makes it into the room (i.e. all-hands, product reviews). They shrink the circle. Fewer people in the room when decisions get made. Fewer voices, less friction, more agreement.
• When they feel they need to convince someone, they shift levels constantly, emphasize irrelevant details, and repeat themselves - without noticing they are doing any of it.
• And the most telling one: they speak first in meetings. Not occasionally. Reflexively. They walk in, lay out their view, and genuinely do not notice that they have just made every other opinion in the room significantly more expensive to voice. In the more advanced stages, they don't send out agendas any more. They are the agenda. When they walk in, they set the topic on the spot - which means everyone who prepared did so for nothing. After a few rounds of that, nobody prepares any more.

That last one is the most damaging because it compounds. A leader who speaks first consistently will, over time, stop hearing anything except agreement and elaboration. Everyone else learns to pre-align. Creativity gets sucked out of the room. Criticism disappears. The leader concludes that their thinking is good because nobody dares to contradict them. They think they're the only one having creative ideas because nobody voices theirs. It's a closed feedback loop from organizational hell.

The distinction between performing curiosity and genuine curiosity is not about intent. It is about what happens when curiosity would be inconvenient. Genuine curiosity pulls leaders into problems they were not planning to engage with and produces conversations that might end with the leader changing their mind. Performed curiosity disappears exactly when that possibility arises. When the convincing becomes more important than the understanding, genuine curiosity has left the room.

That's a shame. Because you cannot lead a high-performing team to success around the performance of curiosity.