Our message to leaders: Grow Down!
CVL Senior Consultant, Megan Sullivan, shares her thoughts on our need to grow down.
Bedtime with my daughter Wynne takes a long time. Like, a REALLY long time. It seems that her brain comes alive with all of the most important questions in her universe at 8pm.
“What would happen if you tried to feed scrambled eggs to chickens?” “What does space feel like?” “What is the color of the insides of your eyelids?”
Questions are powerful, but often undervalued
The questions from small kids, if I’m honest, can feel endless – and according to research I am not wrong. Some studies show 4-year-olds ask as many as 200 to 300 questions a day. Warren Berger, author of A More Beautiful Question, says kids ask an average of 40,000 questions between the ages of 2 and 5. This makes sense when you consider that asking questions is essential to learning and kids are quite natural learners.
Our propensity towards curious inquiry starts to drastically decrease around the same time we start school and by the time we are in our forties we typically ask a handful of questions a day and they are NOT as interesting as egg-eating chickens.
The cited reasons for this are numerous. Much of our schooling places greater value on knowing the answer rather than asking a good question, curiosity continues to be devalued in the workplace as a waste of time and unnecessary, and the lies of our scarcity culture seep into our psyche, convincing us that asking questions is akin to weakness.
This is a problem. In fact, it is such a big problem that the Millennium Project, a global think tank with the purpose to “improve humanity’s prospects for building a better future” has included our inadequate cognitive agility and poor decision-making in complexity among the 15 global challenges facing humanity.
In order to thrive, curiosity and questions are key for leaders
Globalisation, the information economy, the rate of change and innovation, have all created a reality where we are not always able to have clear line of site to answers. Instead, our new normal is operating in the grey where valuable information can come from anywhere at any time. This reality places a premium on relational skills and empathy-based leadership.
“Leaders must be able to initiate quality conversations with anyone and develop connections quickly.”
Leaders have to be approachable and invite ideas and problem-exploration across diverse groups to make the most strategic next step. Curiosity and great, authentic questioning are foundational to these critical behaviours.
At CVL we invite leaders into the critical behaviours to seek out and be present to the important conversations that are happening all around them and step into an authentic leadership that places relationships and human connection first.
It’s time to unlearn and grow down
So leaders, it is time to unlearn a few things, grow down, re-learn curiosity and re-value questions – for the benefit of your colleagues at work yes, but perhaps more importantly as a role-model to the future little leaders in your life.
I will kick us off… what are you curious about?
