Five Leadership Qualities You Want To Avoid As You Move To High Quality Remote Collaboration
There are five leadership qualities that you want to avoid as you begin to foster increased curiosity in your organization and make the move to high quality collaboration in this remote word:
1. Question shaming – Eye roll’s, exasperated sighs, or disdainful remarks to simple questions asked by your team have a immensely diminishing effect on curiosity. Instead of doing this, begin with a “yes, and” approach where you find a bit a wisdom in the statement or question that you can build off of instead of tearing it down.
2. Punishing failure – curiosity entails risk-taking innovation and occasionally failure, the two are inseparable. A leader must establish a culture in which the reasonable risk of failure is understood to be the cost of great curiosity—absorbing the occasional setback is worth the offsetting breakthroughs that result.
3. Elevating process over results–some organizations, especially large ones, need processes but an obsessive focus on how people do things rather than getting the job done suffocates creativity. Leaders should start at the end result and encourage their team to uncover the strategies that work best to attain those results themselves.
4. Failing to demonstrate curiosity themselves – the leaders within an organization need to ask questions, to be willing to say, “I don’t know let’s find out” when they are in meetings. Great leaders should demonstrate curiosity by surrounding themselves with a diversity of thought. This can include a person who is older than them and is where they want to be in the future, a person who possesses strengths and accomplishments that they do not, and a person younger than them and further advanced towards their goals than they were at that age. Leader’s should invest time into exploring their industry and educating those around them – offer learning opportunities for your team like thought-provoking links, podcast playlists, webinars, online courses, or even start a company library filled with books you think your team should read.
5. Leaders must be careful of focusing on individuals over teams. There has long been this notion in leadership that there exists one authoritarian individual who executes every decision and alone is responsible for coming up with an invention or product. The real creativity behind that product, however, is curiosity, and curiosity is enabled through questioning and through teams. So, in any decision, its important that a leader takes an expansive approach to the subject and sources opinions and questions from their team so that the product they create or experience they deliver is as optimized and efficient as possible.
Curiosity lives naturally within all of us, all we have to do is to get out of its way. As a leader, it’s your responsibility to enable your team to be curious by providing a the space for them to be curious and fail if they need to fail, while at the same time role modelling curiosity in your everyday actions.