Curiosity x Leadership

Quick - what are the top 3 qualities you think of when it comes to leadership?

Whether you are (or aspire to be) a creative director, agency founder, managing director, or C-Suite, I imagine the immediate answers include some combination of: expertise, communication, empathy, visionary, resilience, etc. All of which are super great, super important, super necessary qualities and skills to be an effective leader.

But there's one quality I think is overlooked and underrated: curiosity.

Curiosity may have killed the cat (also why is this a saying?!), but I think it's also what sets innovative, impactful leaders apart from the rest.

Because curiosity implies a proactive mindset. It signals open-mindedness, a willingness to learn and change. It suggests an acknowledgment that the status quo isn't always right/best, an acceptance that the status quo will inevitably need to evolve (and probably sooner than later), and that we should never rest on our laurels for too long.

To put a finer point on this though, curiosity alone isn't enough. Too much unsupervised curiosity and we fall victim to Shiny Object Syndrome. Curiosity needs the right scaffolding and infrastructure - whether that means people, programs, or processes - in order to graduate from curiosity to meaningful change.

There is no question that the pace at which the cultural and creative landscape (ok, ALL the landscapes) is changing is overwhelming, brain-breaking, and terrifying, whether we're talking about broken creative business models, AI, inflation, retention, business development, the list goes on. But I think it's less about "getting ahead of" change, and more about simply meeting it head-on, step-by-step: as creative leaders, if we are even just 5% more curious about everything, it might make things even 5% less daunting.