Hello and welcome to another episode of the Working Conversations podcast where we talk all things leadership, business, communication and the future of work. I'm your host, Dr. Janel Anderson.

What if I told you that your next breakthrough idea, your most engaging team member or your biggest client insight, isn't hiding in more data, more dashboards or more meetings, but rather in a question that you haven't asked yet? Today, we're talking about something wildly underestimated. Curiosity. But don't worry, I'm not going to ask you to meditate on a mountaintop or adopt a new morning routine. I am going to, however, ask you to channel your inner marmoset. Stay with me, my friends.

This is going somewhere. Good. Now, let's start with a little creature that's smaller than a squirrel and packs a serious punch when it comes to curiosity. The marmoset. Native to the rainforests. Native to the rainforests of South America, marmosets are tiny primates known for their big energy and their even bigger inquisitiveness. These animals are constantly on alert, peeking under leaves, eavesdropping on the chatter of other marmosets, testing boundaries and investigating everything they don't understand. In fact, if you were to walk past a marmoset carrying a bag.

Now, I don't care if it's a tote bag or a purse or a backpack, the marmoset wants to know what's in the bag. It's that curious. Now here's the kicker. Neuroscientists love studying marmosets. Why? Because they are wired, just like us human beings, to seek out new information. A 2021 study in Nature Neuroscience found that marmosets will go out of their way to explore their environment, not for food, not for rewards, but because they're driven by a deep need to understand. Curiosity, it turns out, is totally baked into their biology. Now, I use the marmoset in one of my keynote speeches to make a simple but powerful point.

When we engage with our world and with each other with that same sense of open, insatiable curiosity, well then, my friends, we unlock innovation, connection, growth, and new relationships. And deeper relationships. So let's channel our inner marmoset, shall we?

Now, curiosity is a superpower that we all have, but most of us don't use it to its full advantage. Curiosity might sound soft, but the research says otherwise. In fact, curiosity is one of the most under leveraged competitive advantages in business today.

Let's start with Francesca Gino's work at Harvard business school. In 2018, she published some research that showed that curious employees have three distinct, distinct characteristics that set them apart from other employees. The first of those characteristics of the curious employees is that they're less prone to confirmation bias. Now, confirmation bias, in case you're either not familiar with the term or it's a little dusty in your brain. Well, confirmation bias is when we have the tendency to interpret new evidence as confirmation of what we already think, even when someone else might interpret it as totally different or outright in opposition to what we're thinking. For example, if you're conducting job interviews and you think you know which one of the candidates is best of the three that you're interviewing based on reading their materials in advance, well, then with confirmation bias, you might assess their shortcomings as assets.

So let's say the person is somewhat disagreeable in the interview. Confirmation bias would have you saying or thinking, yes, this person is exactly what we need. They're going to challenge the status quo, even if that's not what you need. But confirmation bias would have you looking for evidence to support what you already think, even misinterpreting that evidence to align with what you already think. So those who are the most curious employees are, according to Gino's research, less likely to have confirmation bias.

Also, according to her research, they are more likely to collaborate across silos within an organization. Now, this is a huge issue these days. I mean, this has been an issue for a long time. The larger organizations got, the more and more challenging it was to work across verticals within an organization. And of course, work from home certainly doesn't help with us being more siloed than ever. But when you use your curiosity, you're better able to think about the broader implication of your team's choices, your own individual decisions, and the actions that you take. Because you're again having that 10,000 foot view thinking about how might other parts of the organization be impacted by this. So your curiosity goes a long way towards collaborating across silos. Now, Gino's research also showed that those who were incredibly curious were better at receiving and integrating feedback. Now, this is whether it was positive feedback or critical feedback. Let's take an example.

Instead of getting defensive at constructive feedback, the person might say, who's again, curious, might say something like, hmm, I wasn't expecting to hear that. Tell me more or what makes you say that? Or can you share some more specific examples so I can understand it even better? Now, the really curious person might also have the same reaction to positive feedback. What makes you say that? Can you give me some examples of when I did that? Just to really lock in the information and integrate that feedback again, whether it's constructive or positive feedback.

Now, Gino in her research also found that when leaders model curiosity, for example, asking questions, seeking out diverse perspectives, and rewarding exploration, instead of just getting items across the finish line, teams perform better. They're more creative, they're more agile, and they're less likely to in to experience interpersonal conflict. They're taking it all in stride. They're curious when things don't go perfectly and they're exploring those things instead of defending their own behavior or attacking their colleagues. Now, another study published in the Academy of Management Journal found that teams with high curiosity, especially those made up of diverse team members, well, those teams were more likely to engage in organizational learning.

They didn't just tolerate difference. They minded for insight. They looked for how they could capitalize and grow on those differences. Now, in a time in history where in a lot of organizations, diversity, inclusion and so forth, are now words we have to be careful about using. I want you to just channel your inner curiosity. Just swap out, instead of saying inclusive, which might not be okay anymore in your organization, and that's just a whole other episode, but instead you could just say, we're an organization that rewards natural curiosity. We're an organization that leverages curiosity. So you could just swap out curiosity for some of those terms that have suddenly become tab in the current political climate. Again, according to that research from the Academy of Management Journal, the teams that were highly curious didn't just tolerate difference.

As I said, they mined for it, they looked for it. They wanted to capitalize on it. So curiosity might just be a great substitute concept for some of you organizations who are thinking about how do we keep this ethos and change up our language just enough so that we are flying under the radar on some of these issues.

Deloitte's Human Capital Trends report from 2021 spotted learning agility as which is essentially applied curiosity as one of the top predictors of organizational resilience. And again, with all of the change that is whipping through organizational life right now, organizational resilience change is top of the list of one of the skills we really want to cultivate. So we can cultivate that through curiosity. Curious teams adapt faster and they respond more effectively to disruption and to that rapid change in ambiguity that we're all experiencing. So bottom line, curiosity drives organizational outcomes, positive organizational and business outcomes, inclusion, innovation, adaptability, retention, resilience, engagement.

So if you want to future proof your team curiosity isn't optional. So my friends, it is time to channel your inner marmoset. Now let's take a look at this beyond metrics and move into the human side of work so we can look at how we apply this. So one of the quiet tragedies of the modern workplace is that people sit in meetings, work on shared projects, and even celebrate wins together without really knowing each other. We've gotten efficient, we've lost the depth in relationship with one another. And when we lose depth, we lose trust. Or at least we don't have the basis for trust. And curiosity is what brings that back.

Now I do this activity in a keynote where I have people talk in their tables or side to side if they're sitting in an auditorium about something that is a non obvious superpower that they have. And I share an example of mine which is parallel parking. I am a fantastic parallel parker. In fact, other people have known to swap spots with me if I'm not driving when we get to a place where parallel parking is required. Now that's not something that would come up in everyday chatter at work. So I ask people to have this conversation about some non obvious superpower that they have and they get to know each other better. Now I also have some fun with it because I circulate the crowd and I find out different people's non obvious superpowers and some of them are just really unusual and interesting and sometimes we find a match across the room and we are able to pair people up and they can make some connections during the break or at lunchtime, that sort of thing. So it's a really fun activity in a keynote, but it's also just a great activity for you to take on at any time.

So again we, when we lose the depth of relationship, we lose the basis for trust. And curiosity is what's going to bring that back. So when you're curious, curious about your colleagues, you ask better questions, you listen more closely and you move beyond assumptions about them and you move into more understanding and appreciation of them. You build affinity, especially when it is lacking. It's also one of the most inclusive behaviors that you can exhibit. And again, inclusivity might not be a word that you're using regularly in your organization. So curiosity is a nice swap out. Curiosity invites other people in.

It says I see you. It is also humble. It says, I don't have all the answers and I want to learn from you. So curiosity again is a really nice substitute in the particularly unusual climate that we're in right now. And guess what? Because human behavior is reciprocal, that curious energy is contagious. And you know what creature does this naturally? Yep, you guessed it, a marmoset. Marmosets live in complex social groups and they're constantly seeking cues from one another, learning from their environment, and fine tuning how they respond to things. So whether you're onboarding a new team member, navigating a disagreement, or brainstorming a solution for a client, ask yourself, how can I bring more of my marmoset energy into this moment? Okay, so let's get tactical.

I want to give you four ways to spark more curiosity at work starting today. And you might want to jot these down and have them at hand for your next meeting or your next interaction with a colleague. And if you're a manager, by all means be using questions like these in your team meetings, in your one on one meetings, and in just the everyday course of your work life. So let's start with meetings. So in meetings I want you to use curiosity driven questions. So you might be inclined to just say like, does everyone agree? Or does this sound like a good path forward? So instead of asking an assumptive question like that, which quite frankly, if there's any sort of power differential in that exchange, it's really hard if you're the lower powered or lower power status person to disagree with somebody, especially, especially when they start with well, do you agree? And this is the path forward. Right? So instead use a question like what would someone with the opposite viewpoint say? Or what are we missing here? What's one question I haven't asked yet? Or can somebody give me a devil's advocate point of view on this? I mean, I always like to have a contrarian point of view, even if it does nothing but solidify the course that I'm going or the direction that I'm going. Having that contrarian point of view really does give you an opportunity to take a pause and to interrogate your own line of thinking a little bit more deeply.

Okay? So these questions will open up dialogue and surface fresh perspectives. Now here's another practice, and this one, you're going to want to put a little time on your calendar for start a monthly curiosity audit. So you're just going to choose one person, project or client, as your project, your curiosity audit project. So you're just going to carve out. It doesn't have to even be long, it could just be 15 minutes on your calendar. And ask yourself a series of questions. And you don't have to limit yourself to these questions, but here are a few to get you started. Think of these as springboard questions.

What don't I know about this person or this project? What don't I know about their world? And then give yourself some time to brainstorm the answer to that. What don't you know? And again, a really easy place to start. Low hanging fruit. Do you know their pets names? Do you know their kids names or spouse or partners names? If they don't live in the same geographic area that you do, where do they live? Like literally and I mean not exactly, let's not get creepy on them here. You don't have to know their actual street address. But if you know they live in the Detroit metropolitan area, do you know what suburb they live in? Or do they live in Detroit proper? So get curious and find those things out. And you know, find out what's their favorite restaurant in that area, are there good parks around? Where do they walk their dog? You know, so just get curious. So what do you not know about their world? That's your first question.

Your second question, and this one gets a little more challenging. What assumptions might I be making? When we check our assumptions, we start to realize that we piece a lot of things together that may or may not be true. And again, don't beat yourself up about it if you realize you're making a lot of assumptions. This is just how the human brain works. Our brain fills in the gaps when it doesn't necessarily have the hard data to support something. So we're often making assumptions about our co workers, our clients and so on all the time. Our projects, our deadlines, our budgets. So ask yourself, what assumptions might I be making? And then ask yourself this question. What would it look like to learn from them? Not just about them, but to learn from them.

And the follow up question to this is, what did they know that I don't know? And here's where you're going to again, channel that inner marmoset and get really, really curious. So once you've done this audit, what don't I know about their world? What assumptions might I be making? And what would it look like to learn from them? Then set up some time with them. If it's not somebody that you regularly come in contact with, just set up a 15 minute virtual coffee or if you're proximate to one another in the office, or if this is a client that you're going to see sometime soon, you might say, hey, can we have, instead of a 30 minute meeting, can we have 45 minute meeting? I'd just like to get to know you a little bit better, okay? And then in that meeting, you're going to channel your inner marmoset and ask those questions and explore.

Now, I don't want you to make it sound like you're conducting an audit with them. I think you just should say something more like, hey, I was reflecting on how long we've been working together and I realized, like, I don't even know if you have kids or I don't even know about what, what region in the Detroit area you live in. And so I just was curious. And in fact, you can use your curiosity as an excuse because when you just say like, hey, I was just super curious, like, do you have kids? Do you know, whatever it is, what are your hobbies? What do you do outside of work? What, what lights you up? And again, you can just say, hey, I'm just curious. And if they don't want to share, they don't have to.

But when you demonstrate that curiosity from just a genuine place, they're much more likely to, to share the answers to the questions that you ask. And then again, remember that reciprocal nature of curiosity, they're likely to ask you some of those same questions back. That's just how developing relationships work. Okay, the third thing I want you to do, this third very tactical thing, is reward the right behavior. Now, most companies reward having the right answer. And sometimes that curiosity just got drilled out of us in childhood, because in school, well, if you were ever in a class with the person who always had one more question, one more question, one more question, and you maybe saw the teacher just become completely exasperated with that child who had all those questions. Well, the reward system in schools is having the right answer. And we often carry that with us into the workplace.

So again, most companies often reward having the right answer, but try to reward having the right question instead. So publicly praise someone who challenged the status quo or asked something that led to an insight, or asked the question that was on everybody's mind, but everybody was afraid to ask. So celebrate the curiosity, not just the outcomes. When you're reinforcing curiosity like that as a cultural value, then it's not just like a personality quirk. Now again, if you have the person who's always asking, why, why, why, why, why? That's a whole different thing. Here we just want to be asking genuine questions that get a little bit deeper and offer some new insights. And then the fourth tactical thing I want to offer is the idea that you can build bridges with other people through curiosity. So create some opportunities for cross functional connection.

Again, think back to the very siloed organizations where lots of times departments don't really talk that much to each other. So I've seen companies launch internal field trips where marketing sits in on a day of the life of the customer support team and vice versa. You could, and you don't even have to do it that formally, you could just be like joining a sales call and listening in. So there's lots of different ways that you can get some of that cross collaboration happening.

If you've got a new team member on your team, you might invite somebody from a different team to have a 15 minute coffee with them again to really invite that cross collaboration silo collaboration and just getting to know each other. When we get curious about each other's roles, goals and constraints in our work, we find new ways to work together. And this kind of exposure really expands empathy, inspires innovation, it builds collaboration and it creates a much more robust view of the organization when we are getting curious about other parts of the organization. Okay, now, if you've ever been around a young child, you know that curiosity comes naturally.

Again, I was mentioning that before in the school systems, but you know, little kids ask questions like, why is the sky blue? What does a dog dream about? Do dogs dream? Why do our toes wiggle? Now, that instinct doesn't disappear. It gets beaten out of us in schools, quite frankly. And then in the workplace, it gets buried under deadlines and email chains and workplace expectations that we should what to do rather than wonder about what to do or wonder about different ways to do things.

Now, the marmoset doesn't worry about being right. It worries about not knowing enough. It's not trying to prove itself, it's trying to understand. And this reminds me of my youngest child. Now, this is going back a few years. He was, let me think, he was probably five or six and he was asking my mom, his grandma, some questions about, you know, she was retired. And I suppose he just like caught on that she didn't have a job. And so he's like, grandma, how do you pay for your house? Do you have a mortgage? Do you pay rent, where does your money come from? He was asking a bunch of questions like that. And my oldest son, who was of course, you know, at the time, much more steeped in the culture of we don't ask those kind of questions, especially about money, you know, you might be embarrassing your grandma or whatever. And so my oldest son sort of was trying to put the lid on my youngest son and my mom was just graciously answering the questions as they kept coming. But my oldest son said, why do you keep asking questions like that? My youngest son said, well, that's how I learned. I have to ask questions. That's how I learned. So if it's helpful, just anchor that in your heart. The little boy saying, well, that's how I learn. Now that is the mindset of the marmoset.

And we need more of that, especially as our workplaces become more complex, more diverse, more fast paced, and especially when there is all of this ambiguity and uncertainty and things are changing at a breakneck pace. So my friends, let's reclaim curiosity. Let's bring it into our one on ones, our brainstorming sessions, our client meetings, our hallway chats. Channel your inner marmoset. So again, in a time of rapid change, curiosity is your anchor and your compass and it is your superpower. It's what grounds you in your relationships and points you towards possibility. So this week I challenge you. Pick one person that you work with and ask them something you've never asked them before.

Ask them what they're not so visible superpower is could be about or ask them about their background or aspirations or just how they approach a task differently than you do. Listen and learn and be ready to be surprised. Your next great idea might be half your next great idea might be hiding out in a question that you haven't asked yet. So thanks for tuning in this week and I will see you next week where we will keep exploring what it takes to thrive in the future of work. Until then, stay curious my friends. Stay connected and above all, channel your inner marmoset. Now, if you learned something on this episode or you simply enjoy the content, please subscribe to my channel on YouTube, subscribe to the podcast on your platform of choice and follow me on social media.

These are all excellent no cost ways for you to support me and my work and you can find links to my social media over on the show notes page. That's janelanderson.com/214 for episode 214. Until next time, keep thriving and keep working toward the future that we all want. Which includes your curiosity. Be well, my friends.