People are naturally curious. We explore space because we want to know more about the universe than what we can see from Earth. We travel because there is a great joy in seeing new places and experiencing different cultures. We buy cargo pants because we’re curious to see if they’ll look as good on us as they do on other people.
While people are naturally curious, our inclination to wonder and ask “why” can be stifled in the workplace. This is because leaders sometimes make the mistake of telling teams to be curious without providing the support needed to act on their ideas for new products and processes. In order to encourage curiosity, leaders need to show that good things happen when their teams ask questions, express a desire to learn a new skill or challenge the status quo.
For instance, at healthtech company ESO, team members are encouraged to run with their ideas and given support to develop them, whether it’s an internal tool to monitor employee morale or a new line of business. At cybersecurity company Rapid7, leaders provide opportunities for employees to learn new skills and explore different areas of the business.
As ESO and Rapid7 show, inspiring curiosity in a team can be as simple as providing support for team members to dive into their curiosities.
Curiosity is the catalyst of creativity, which is why cultivating a culture of curiosity is so important at cybersecurity companies like Rapid7. Hackers are not known for their lack of creativity, and a curious team is one that continually comes up with new solutions to keep critical information and systems safe. In addition to staying ahead of bad actors, Sales Director Alex Pratt said a culture of curiosity helps Rapid7’s sales team better understand their clients’ needs and close more deals.
How have you created a culture of curiosity on your team? And how do you model this mindset as a leader?
As a leader, I focus on ensuring all of our account executives are aligned to our goals and values. Two core values that help create a culture of curiosity are “never done” and “challenge convention.” In the fast-growing and highly competitive cybersecurity space, it is critical we focus on solving the challenges customers face every day in their unique threat landscapes. We need to challenge convention and ask the right questions to ensure we get to the best outcome. Curiosity is a key component of this as we work to keep customers ahead of whatever’s next.
When it comes to embracing “never done,” leadership practices what we preach on the sales floor. Keeping a growth mindset alive is critical in order to continue to find ways to work more efficiently as a team and create impact for customers. We check our egos at the door and seek opportunities for us all to grow as sales professionals and become better partners to our customers. Being curious gives us permission to ask hard questions that help us identify alternative or more efficient ways to accomplish our goals.
We’ve created a safe space for curiosity by building a culture that prioritizes open communication and constructive feedback.”
What are some things you do to inspire curiosity in your team?
In order to maintain innovation and thought leadership in cybersecurity, we need to continue finding new ways to push ourselves forward. We’ve created a safe space for curiosity by building a culture that prioritizes open communication and constructive feedback, which requires us all to let go of our egos to focus on the needs of our customers. We have deep levels of inspection of our deals, processes and strategic plans and are consistently looking to brainstorm, critique and suggest new ways forward no matter how large the obstacles. We always talk about how we can be better and encourage new ideas in both team and one-on-one settings.
Tell us about a time when a team member’s curiosity manifested in a new idea, solution or feature.
Curiosity and innovation manifests new ideas, processes and features regularly at Rapid7. Our team talks to hundreds of customers and prospective customers per week, doing elaborate discovery and putting ourselves in their shoes. We gather feedback and consolidate and share our findings. We then share these with our engineering team so they can be considered, prioritized and eventually built into our offering.
As leaders, we are hyper focused on identifying what inspires our reps and putting them in positions where they can make a true impact on the greater organization. Our team members are empowered to lean into areas they are curious about and learn new skills, which can include developing a new internal program or greatly improving a legacy process. Enabling people to pursue their passions and be curious about other areas of the business leads to improved collaboration across teams and has produced some great new ideas and results over the years.
To James Jenkins, transformation director at healthtech company ESO, there are three keys to building a culture that inspires creativity: trust, diversity and “we.” Jenkins explained the importance of, and the links between, each and shared how curiosity has led to a new line of business and a solution for fighting employee burnout.
How have you created a culture of curiosity on your team? And how do you model this mindset as a leader?
In my experience, curiosity thrives in environments of trust, diversity and “we.” Trust nurtures, diversity fuels and “we” sustains curiosity. An environment of trust means feeling safe within the team. People who understand expectations, believe their teammates care and are treated fairly feel safe sharing wild or underdeveloped thoughts. In this context, trust builds a firm foundation for curiosity.
Having a diverse team helps spread, encourage and propagate an enquiring mindset. Dissimilar experiences and skill sets naturally shape people to view things differently. When these differing approaches are shared within high-functioning teams, questions arise and curiosity abounds. Couple trust and diversity with a group that values team success and you’ll have a “we” mentality. This type of conviction doesn’t necessarily promote team triumphs over individual wins. Rather, “we” celebrates both individual and team successes, iterates additional ideas and innovates.
As a leader, I ask a lot of questions and share my curiosity and ideas. Some worked quite well, most failed but a few were picked up by other inquisitive minds and developed into something wonderful.
People who understand expectations, believe their teammates care and are treated fairly feel safe sharing wild or underdeveloped thoughts.”
What are some things you do to inspire curiosity in your team?
Our teams tend to be senior-level employees and we typically lead projects or embed ourselves in other teams. To help build trust and teamwork, I organize events for us to work together. We classify most of these events as “team goals,” and they tend to arise from discussion topics in our weekly tacticals. Generally, someone says something like, “Wouldn’t it be great if…, ” and then someone will add, “Even better if…” With this line of thought, we ask people to own the idea and run with it. I’ll work with that group to document a goal and give them a timeline.
An example of this was “monthly markers,” or monthly milestones. This idea made its way into our enterprise project management office when someone inquired, “What if we could monitor progress on projects we weren’t managing?” The team took this idea and ran with it. The result was EPMO consulting, which uses specifically developed artifacts to track milestones remotely.
Tell us about a time when a team member’s curiosity manifested in a new idea, solution or feature.
While talking through how we could measure whether our group of project managers was winning or losing, our teammate Alex had a thought: “What if we had a metric that measured our team’s health?” We surveyed the team weekly and asked them to provide a ranking on work-life balance, engagement on current projects, satisfaction with our career path and their understanding of how our work ties to the company’s strategy. The results were anonymous and the team averages were plotted on a graph.
We took notice and stopped to discuss the team’s health when scores dropped. I also could see concerns over career paths or current work. I used that as an opportunity to address these topics in weekly one on ones. I’ve seen performance management software track similar things, but the results aren’t rolled up to the team level nor are the team averages plotted.
