Curiosity in leadership

Curiosity in leadership has become the capability every organisation claims to want and almost no organisation actually hands out. I have watched the same scene in workshop after workshop. A senior team declares that questions are welcome, then spends the following quarter promoting the manager who never asked one.

The standard explanation says Australian organisations lack curiosity and need programs to build more of it. I think that explanation is wrong, and the Australian evidence points somewhere more uncomfortable. Curiosity already sits in every workplace in this country, in enormous quantity, in the heads of people who are paid not to use it.

What organisations allocate, carefully and by rank, is permission. This article works through that allocation: what curiosity in leadership means, why the declared version and the practised version keep diverging, who holds the licence inside an Australian organisation, and what changes when a leader stops trying to manufacture curiosity and starts redistributing it.

The declared version	What actually happens	The shift that changes it
Curiosity in leadership, definedCuriosity in leadership is the deliberate practice of asking questions, seeking information beyond the immediate task and treating your own conclusions as provisional. Australian organisations describe it as a shared capability open to everyone in the structure.	A licence issued by rankPeer-reviewed research finds that curious team members are read by their managers as insubordinate, while managers who display curiosity raise psychological safety around them. The same behaviour earns a reward at the top of the structure and a penalty at the bottom.	Redistribution rather than stimulationThe scarce resource is permission rather than curiosity itself. Auditing who currently holds the licence, then widening it deliberately, shifts more than any program designed to make people more curious than they already are.

What curiosity in leadership actually means

Curiosity in leadership is the practice of seeking information you were not required to seek, asking questions whose answers you cannot predict, and holding your own conclusions loosely enough to revise them. It is a set of observable behaviours rather than a personality type, which matters because behaviours can be permitted, restricted or measured.

Most articles on this topic stop at the definition and move straight to encouragement. I want to spend a little longer here, because the imprecision is where the trouble starts. Three separate things get bundled together and then treated as one lever.

A working definition of curiosity in leadership

Curiosity in leadership describes what a leader does with uncertainty. A curious leader asks open questions before offering conclusions, goes looking for information outside their own function, and treats a challenge to their view as data rather than as a threat to their standing. The behaviour is visible to the team every single day.

That last point does most of the work. Curiosity is not an internal state your team can read. Your team reads your questions, your interruptions, your reaction when someone disagrees, and the amount of airtime you take in a meeting you called.

A leader who reads widely and asks nothing in the room is invisible to their people. A leader who reads nothing and asks three good questions is experienced as curious. Perception here is not a distortion of the truth, because for the team the observable behaviour is the truth of what they are permitted to do next.

The five dimensions of curiosity, and why work welcomes only some of them

Psychologist Todd Kashdan and colleagues at George Mason University identified five distinct dimensions of curiosity in the Journal of Research in Personality: joyous exploration, deprivation sensitivity, stress tolerance, social curiosity and thrill seeking. The five behave differently, correlate differently with wellbeing, and are treated very differently once a person walks into a workplace.

Joyous exploration, the pleasure of finding the world interesting, is the dimension every employer brand advertises. Deprivation sensitivity, the frustration of knowing there is information you have not been given, is the dimension that gets a person labelled difficult. Both are curiosity. Only one of them is welcome in most rooms.

Stress tolerance is the quiet decider. Kashdan’s team describes it as the willingness to sit with the anxiety that novelty produces. An organisation that punishes the discomfort of not knowing has effectively removed the fuel line, whatever its values poster says.

Want to work with these five dimensions rather than around them? I have set out how each one shows up in a working team in my guide to the five dimensions of curiosity.

Curiosity, creativity and innovation are three different things

Curiosity is the input, creativity is the process, and innovation is the outcome that survives a business case. Treating them as interchangeable is the most common design error I see in corporate programs, because it produces initiatives that stimulate the input while leaving the process and the outcome unchanged.

An idea scheme that collects suggestions is working on the outcome. A creative thinking workshop is working on the process. Neither of them touches whether a technician is allowed to spend twenty minutes wondering why a machine fails on Tuesdays.

The sequencing matters more than the budget. I have seen organisations spend well on the third stage while the first stage sat locked, and the effect is roughly what you would expect from watering a plant that has no roots. If the question of where inspiration actually comes from interests you, I have argued the case elsewhere for choosing between being creative and being productive.

Why the curiosity gap keeps appearing in Australian workplaces

The curiosity gap is the distance between what leaders believe their organisation permits and what their teams experience. It appears in Australian data with unusual clarity, and it appears in the international research on what happens to a person who asks too many questions of someone more senior than them.

Two bodies of evidence explain the gap. One is Australian and measures perception. The other is peer-reviewed and measures consequence.

Managers and their teams describe two different workplaces

The Study of Australian Leadership, run by the University of Melbourne’s Centre for Workplace Leadership with funding from the Commonwealth Department of Employment, surveyed almost 8,000 people across more than 2,700 organisations. It remains the most comprehensive nationally representative picture of Australian management capability available, and its central finding is a perception gap.

The study found that 84 per cent of frontline managers believe they are effective at gaining employee commitment, while only 50 per cent of their team members agree that their manager involves them in decision making. That is a thirty-four point gap on a single behaviour.

Read that gap through the curiosity lens and it stops being a communication problem. The manager remembers asking. The team remembers what happened afterwards. Both are describing the same meeting.

The data is now some years old, and no comparable national study has replaced it. Based on the extended trend and on what I encounter in rooms across the country, I would expect the gap to have narrowed slightly in professional services and to have held steady or widened in operational environments, though that projection is mine rather than a measurement.

What actually happens to the team member who asks

Curious team members are frequently rated by their own leaders as insubordinate, and rated as less likable as a direct result. This finding comes from three independent studies published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, using leader and follower pairs collected at three separate time points plus two experimental designs.

The research team, led by Phillip Thompson with Mark Bolino, Kalan Norris and Shu-Tsen Kuo, found that leaders rate curious followers as more insubordinate and less likable when the curiosity is unconstructive. Unconstructive here means questions with easy answers, or volume without direction. Constructive curiosity, meaning questions that move a decision forward, carries far less risk.

This is the finding I bring into every leadership room, because it dismantles a comfortable assumption. The organisation asked for curiosity and then penalised the person who supplied it, and the penalty was applied by the same manager who requested the behaviour.

The political skill tax on curiosity

The same research found a buffer. Team members with high political skill, meaning those who network well, read a room accurately and influence with sincerity, can be just as curious without being read as insubordinate. Political skill functions as a licence fee: pay it and your questions are welcome, skip it and the identical question lands as a challenge.

Sit with what that means for an Australian workforce. Political skill is not evenly distributed. It correlates with tenure, with confidence in the dominant language of the workplace, with having been socialised into professional norms, and with proximity to the people who make decisions.

So the organisation has not built a curiosity culture. It has built a toll road. The people who can afford the toll drive on it freely, and everyone else takes the long way around and says nothing.

The curiosity licence: how organisations ration what they say they want

A curiosity licence is the informal permission an organisation grants a person to spend time and social capital on questions that are not part of their job description. It is never written down and it is always understood. Every person in a workplace can tell you within a week whether they hold one.

This is the frame I now use in every engagement, and it changes the question a leadership team is trying to answer. The question stops being how do we make our people more curious. It becomes who currently holds the licence here, and on what grounds.

What a curiosity licence is

A curiosity licence has three components: time that is not accounted for against output, access to information beyond your own task, and social permission to be wrong in front of others. Remove any one of the three and the licence is void, no matter how enthusiastically the organisation talks about learning.

Notice that all three are allocated by someone else. A person cannot grant themselves unaccounted time, cannot self-issue access to a dashboard, and cannot decide alone that being wrong is safe. Curiosity is treated as an individual virtue while every one of its preconditions is a management decision.

The people carrying full licences in most organisations are easy to name. They sit in strategy, in research and development, in innovation teams, and in the executive layer. They are wondering on the clock, and nobody questions it.

Rationing by information: you cannot be curious about what you cannot see

Information access is the first ration, and the most measurable. Curiosity needs something to attach itself to, and a person who cannot see how their work is performing has nothing to wonder about. Australian data shows this restriction operating at scale.

The Study of Australian Leadership found that only 34 per cent of workplaces reported that all employees, managerial and non-managerial, had access to the workplace’s performance targets, and that one in three workplaces gave their people no access to key performance indicators at all.

Two thirds of Australian workplaces are therefore asking for engagement, initiative and fresh thinking from people they have not shown the scoreboard to. The curiosity program will not fix that. A login will.

This is why I now start diagnostic work with an access map rather than a survey. Who can see what, at which level, and how quickly. The pattern of restriction tells you exactly where the organisation has decided that wondering is somebody else’s job.

Rationing by function: which industries are permitted to wonder

The licence is also rationed by sector, and the spread across the Australian economy is wide enough to be visible in national statistics. Some industries treat exploration as core work. Others treat it as a distraction from the run rate, and the gap between the two runs to more than thirty percentage points.

The Australian Bureau of Statistics reports that 46 per cent of businesses were innovation-active in 2024-25, ranging from 59 per cent in retail trade down to 28 per cent in transport, postal and warehousing. The same survey found artificial intelligence in use at 38 per cent of information, media and telecommunications businesses and at 1 per cent of transport, postal and warehousing businesses.

A warehouse worker is not less curious than a media producer. The two of them hold radically different licences, issued by industries with radically different views on whether a question is an asset or an interruption.

The same ABS release adds a detail worth pausing on. Among innovation-active businesses, business management was the most commonly reported specialist skill used for innovation, at 46 per cent. Innovation in this country runs through the managerial layer, which makes the managerial layer the gatekeeper whether it wants the role or not.

Rationing by gender: the returns are not paid evenly

Displaying curiosity as a leader raises psychological safety and increases the willingness of a team to speak up. Research also found that this effect is stronger for the followers of male leaders than for the followers of female leaders, which means the same behaviour delivers a different return depending on who performs it.

Phillip Thompson and Anthony Klotz tested this across four samples of leader and follower pairs. They found that leader displays of curiosity increase follower psychological safety and subsequent voice, with effects stronger for followers of male leaders, which they attribute to social role theory and the communality bonus.

Curiosity reads as generous and open when it comes from someone the culture did not expect it from. It reads as unremarkable, or as a lack of authority, when it comes from someone the culture already codes as communal.

I raise this in leadership rooms and it lands hard every time. A woman leading a team in an Australian organisation is doing the same work for a smaller return, and no amount of individual coaching corrects a bias that sits in the observer rather than in the leader.

What rationing curiosity costs an Australian organisation

Rationing curiosity produces two costs, one commercial and one legal. The commercial cost is an innovation ceiling set by the size of the licensed population. The legal cost is less widely understood, because the conditions that ration curiosity are named hazards under Australian work health and safety regulation.

The innovation ceiling nobody budgets for

An organisation cannot generate more ideas than its licensed population can produce. When the licence sits with a small group, the idea pipeline narrows to that group’s field of view, and the organisation ends up recycling the same categories of improvement year after year while calling the result an innovation strategy.

The ABS found that 56 per cent of innovation-active businesses source their innovation ideas from inside the business or another business in the same group, with clients and customers next at 44 per cent. Internal supply dominates. The quality of that supply depends entirely on how many people are permitted to contribute to it.

The same release names insufficient time as the leading barrier to collaboration for innovation, ahead of insufficient funds. Time is the currency of curiosity, and Australian businesses report running short of it before they report running short of money.

The psychosocial duty most leaders have not connected to this

Under the model work health and safety laws, a business must eliminate psychosocial risks or minimise them so far as is reasonably practicable. The hazards named in the model code include low job control, poor support, low recognition and reward, and poor organisational justice. Those four descriptions overlap almost exactly with the conditions that ration curiosity.

Safe Work Australia’s model Code of Practice on managing psychosocial hazards at work describes low job control as including prescriptive processes that stop workers applying their judgement, along with low skills development opportunity or underused skills. SafeWork NSW frames it more plainly still, as being unable to speak up about the work that is done.

I want to be careful about the claim I am making here. I am not saying that a manager who ignores a question has breached a duty, and the model code only carries legal effect in jurisdictions that have approved it. I am saying that the design features which strip curiosity from a role are the same design features a regulator has already listed as risks to psychological health.

That connection reframes the conversation for an Australian executive. Widening the curiosity licence stops being a nice cultural aspiration and starts looking like work design, which is the highest order control the code asks for.

How to choose a curiosity in leadership approach against your own criteria

Four approaches dominate the Australian market: curiosity and creativity workshops, idea schemes with internal champions, leadership development focused on questioning skills, and licence audits with work redesign. They are not interchangeable, they suit different levels of managerial maturity, and picking the wrong one wastes a year rather than a budget.

Use the comparison below as a decision aid rather than a ranking. Each approach works well in the right conditions and fails predictably in the wrong ones.

Four approaches compared

The four approaches differ in what they actually change. Workshops change individual capability, idea schemes change collection mechanics, leadership development changes managerial behaviour, and licence audits change the work itself. Only the last one alters the preconditions, which is why it is also the slowest and the most political to run.

Approach	What it changes	Its blind spot	Managerial maturity it suits
Curiosity and creativity workshops	Individual capability and shared vocabulary across a cohort	Sends people back into a system that has not changed, so gains fade within a quarter	Low to medium, where the organisation needs a common language before it can negotiate anything harder
Idea schemes and innovation champions	The collection and visibility of ideas already forming	Measures submissions rather than responses, and quietly confirms who is worth answering	Medium, and only where response capacity has been resourced first
Leadership development on questioning	The behaviour of the person who holds the licence	Assumes a willing manager can override structural restrictions on time and information access	Medium to high, strongest where managers already control their own team’s workload
Curiosity licence audit and work redesign	Time, information access and the right to be answered	Slow, exposes uncomfortable decisions, and requires executive appetite to change reporting lines	High, where leaders can tolerate finding out that the constraint is their own design

Which signals point to which approach

Diagnose from behaviour rather than from survey scores. Engagement surveys report satisfaction with the current arrangement, and people who have never held a licence rarely report missing it. What you are looking for is the shape of the silence and where in the structure it starts.

• Questions arrive only from the same three people in every all-hands meeting, which points to a licence held by a small group and a workshop that will not change it.
• Ideas are plentiful and nothing ships, which points to a response and decision problem rather than a curiosity problem.
• Managers say they want challenge and their teams describe them as approachable but final, which points to leadership development on questioning behaviour.
• Frontline teams cannot name their own performance targets, which points to an access problem that no program will solve.
• Your best questions consistently come from new starters and stop after six months, which points to a licence that is being revoked by socialisation.

That last signal is the one I trust most. New starters arrive with a temporary licence nobody issued deliberately, and the speed at which they stop using it measures your culture more honestly than any instrument I could sell you.

Questions worth asking any provider

Before commissioning any curiosity or innovation work, put four questions to the provider. Their answers will tell you whether you are buying a change in capability, a change in mechanics or a change in the work itself, and whether the design accounts for what happens after the room empties.

1. What in our operating model has to change for this to hold beyond the next quarter, and who has to agree to it?
2. How does this design handle the team member whose questions are currently read as difficult?
3. What will you measure, and does anything in that measurement track responses rather than submissions?
4. Which layer of the organisation does this reach, and which layer does it leave exactly as it was?

A provider who cannot answer the fourth question is selling you an event. That is sometimes the right purchase, and it should be a deliberate one.

How to run a curiosity licence audit

A curiosity licence audit maps who in your organisation currently holds unaccounted time, information access and social permission to be wrong. It takes a fortnight of evidence gathering rather than a survey cycle, and it produces a picture of the organisation that leadership teams find genuinely uncomfortable to look at.

Run it before you commission anything else. An audit that shows a broad licence tells you a capability program is the right next move. An audit that shows a narrow one tells you a capability program will be money set on fire.

The six checks

Six checks cover the three components of a licence. Two examine time, two examine information access, and two examine social permission. Each check uses evidence that already exists inside the organisation, which means the audit can be completed without asking anyone to fill in another form.

1. Pull the last six months of calendars for three roles at different levels and count the hours not committed to delivery or meetings.
2. Identify which roles can attend an external event, a site visit or a conference without seeking an exception, and which cannot.
3. Map who can see performance data for their own work without asking a person for it.
4. Check how far the information flow reaches during a change, and where the cascade actually stops.
5. Read the last twenty submissions to any suggestion channel and calculate the response rate by function, by level and by site.
6. Ask three recent hires and three ten-year veterans the same question about what happens when someone challenges a decision, then compare the two sets of answers.

The fifth check is the one that changes minds in the room. A response rate broken down by function is very hard to argue with, and it turns an abstract cultural conversation into an operational one within about ten minutes.

What to change first

Change the response obligation before you change anything else. Assign a named owner and a deadline to every question raised through any channel, and publish the response rate rather than the submission count. It is the cheapest intervention available and the only one that redistributes permission immediately.

Information access comes second, because it is usually a permissions setting rather than a strategy. Time comes third, and it is the hardest, since it requires a manager to defend unaccounted hours against a delivery pressure that is entirely real.

Resist the temptation to start with training. Training a team to ask better questions inside a system that will not answer them produces frustration with a certificate attached, and I have watched more than one organisation manufacture exactly that.

How I can help you widen the curiosity licence in your organisation

I work with executive teams, managers and boards on the conditions that make curiosity usable rather than aspirational. The work ranges from a single keynote that reframes the question for a leadership group, through to a full licence audit and a redesign of how questions travel through an organisation.

Keynotes that change the question in the room

A keynote is the right instrument when a leadership group has already accepted that curiosity matters and has not yet accepted that they are the ones rationing it. Forty-five minutes is enough to move a room from encouragement to allocation, which is a different conversation entirely.

I build every keynote around the audience’s own data where they will share it, including their response rates, their access map and their submission patterns. A room recognises its own numbers instantly, and the recognition does more work than any external case study.

Workshops and manager communities

Workshops suit organisations that need a shared vocabulary before they can negotiate anything structural. Manager communities suit organisations that have run the workshops and watched the effect fade, because a community sustains the practice through the months when delivery pressure would otherwise reclaim the time.

In practice I run these together. A cohort workshop establishes the licence frame, then a manager community meets on a regular rhythm to work through the specific cases each person is stuck on. The cases are always more useful than the theory.

Diagnostics and leadership programs

The curiosity licence audit is the diagnostic I recommend before any investment. For organisations wanting to go further, I design leadership programs that connect curiosity to enableship, the leadership of innovation, which is my own frame for the work a leader does to make other people’s contribution possible.

These programs suit organisations navigating what I call the age of fragility, the condition in which systems remain efficient while losing their capacity to absorb a shock. Curiosity is the cheapest early warning system available to an organisation in that state, and it only works if the warning can travel upward.

Conclusion: curiosity in leadership is a permission problem

Your organisation is not short of curiosity. It is full of people who have accurately worked out that wondering is not their job, and they worked it out from evidence you supplied: the meeting where the question went unanswered, the dashboard they cannot open, and the colleague whose questions made them difficult.

Programs that try to make people more curious are solving a shortage that does not exist. The scarce resource is the licence, and a licence is issued by whoever has the authority to issue one. That is you.

Start with the response rate, because it costs nothing and it announces the change faster than any launch event. Then open the information, then defend the time. Do those three things in that order and curiosity in leadership stops being a value on a wall and becomes something your organisation actually distributes.

Frequently asked questions about curiosity in leadership