Source: French to English Tester Published on: 2026-05-18
Source: The Conversation – France (in French)– By Benoît Meyronin, Senior Professor at Grenoble Ecole de Management, GEM But why is curiosity never highlighted as a positive value in management? Perhaps because the notion is ambiguous and can be associated with indiscretion, even intrusive behaviors, when curiosity is, first and foremost, interest in others.
Decoding a notion that would benefit from being more actively embraced and experienced in companies. By leadership, managers, and others… A colleague is experiencing difficulties in his personal life, or the mission entrusted to him exceeds his abilities.
Whatever the reasons for these difficulties, two postures are possible: the “dictatorship of judgment,” or curiosity (seeking to understand why this is the case).
Conversely, curiosity is the drive that makes us go beyond appearances, to seek motives, and in doing so, create the conditions for a resolution. It is never a guarantee. But has judging and condemning ever proven its effectiveness?
Take care Curiosity is also a way to embody a form ofto take care, just as much as a condition. It is interesting to note here that there is an ontological link between the notion ofcareand curiosity: “Its primary meaning, according to Littré, is care, concern,” recallsJean-Pierre Martin.
It “proceeds from a caring attention to the world. The curious one is first and foremost the one who worries, and who takes great care. Curious and curate share the same Latin root:care. To be curious, to care about.
We can thus consider that the_curiosity proceedsof a humanistic vision of management_, a vision based on the following assumption:“All men by nature desire to know”.
From personnel to organizational Whether curiosity stems from a personal stance or not, it must also be able to be regarded as one of the practicesculturalpromoted by the company: to be both cultivated within oneself and developed at the organizational level as a managerial practice.
However, while 38% of managers reveal a high level of curiosity, 43% belong to the moderate category, and 18% seem to demonstrate a low level of curiosity. These are the results of a score developed by Todd KASHDAN, a professor at George Mason University:Curiosity Index, for which nearly 2,000 managers, in six countries, were surveyed (excluding France).
It stimulates creativity, promotes cooperation between departments, as well as employee satisfaction and engagement: it also bears witness to aproven climate of trust and psychological safety. Multiple benefits ForFrancesca Gino, professor at Harvard, it is a powerful lever of transformation, as it helps to make organizations more agile.
Moreover, it invites us todo not make assumptionsrelative to others (who are they really?), to dare to explore alternatives: not just to seek information that validates our beliefs, but equally to seek those that contradict them.
In this article, it reports on a study involving ten customer interaction centers which shows that the newest employees who are the most curious are also the highest performers in customer relations. Indeed, they do not hesitate, for example, to ask their more experienced colleagues for help in better mastering their new job by posing questions to them.
Without curiosity, we are facing these silos that organizations deplore: “We live in worlds compartmentalized and indifferent to each other”written by Jean-Pierre Martin, honorary member of the Institut Universitaire de France. The philosopher thus discusses the ravages of incuriosity.
For curiosity is, according to him, “a passion for others. […] It is an antidote to indifference. […] It is the desire to know the world of the other […] the love of otherness. […] It is going towards the other.” An enterprise value?
Encourage your teams to ask questions during seminars and meetings. During these same times, seek their opinions and ideas by showing yourselfsincerelycurious about their feedback and suggestions. On the occasion of a field tour, ask them questions rather than talking.
Promote exploration times, ideally in a formal way (free up time for monitoring, related or ancillary projects to the professional activity, as 3M, the inventor of the post-it, has done). You can also measure the maturity of your organization and build a specific action plan, by integrating curiosity among the values of your organization.
You can acknowledge efforts, even (and especially) if they do not succeed (a form of the right to make mistakes). You can organizeWhy? Daysto encourage teams to ask questions that they might not ordinarily dare to raise.
You can, finally, ritualize “A day in the life” experiences and benchmarks to explore other realities. Encourage methods of knowledge enrichment. Recruit better Make curiosity a recruitment criterion likealready make big brands. Finally, make it an evaluation criterion.
Curiosity must thus become a valued practice within the organization, a lived and observable attitude, ritualized: an element of managerial language. Many organizations practice the ritual of the five whys, in order to invite their teams to re-examine their practices – why do you do this?
What meaning does it have for our clients? Etc. Asking these questions is, by essence, to show curiosity. It is therefore already present, without being named, in management methods and in many organizations.
Understanding field work This is the case at SNCF Réseau, where one of the company’s hallmarks is to ritualize site visits, as Christel PUJOL, the company’s Chief Human Resources Officer, told us in an interview.
It is a great opportunity to show curiosity about the teams, their jobs, by admitting not to know everything, while emphasizing, on the contrary, the desire to learn more. By going themselves into the field, through duly prepared and debriefed tours, leaders therefore have the opportunity to show curiosity about the realities of work and their teams.
The perceived authenticity of the encounter and availability will do the rest – or not. Many obstacles nevertheless exist. The strict application of procedures, rules, and processes can generate a culture of submission to the status quo, blind obedience, and an atrophy of attention.
Then, there is fear: for a leader, this can be perceived as a sign of weakness (“What? He doesn’t know?”). If we recognize in the latter a role of exemplarity, then it becomes difficult to envisage such a culture within an organization if they themselves do not question their own beliefs.
Let’s conclude this article with atrue storyA: “The idea of the Polaroid instant camera was born from a question asked by a three-year-old child. The daughter of the inventor Edwin Land was indeed eager to see a photo that her father had just taken.
When he explained to her that the film had to be developed, she wondered aloud: ‘Why do we have to wait for the photo?'”
Benoît Meyronin does not work for, advise, own shares in, or receive funds from an organization that could benefit from this article, and has declared no other affiliations than his research institution. –ref.
Curiosity, the blind spot of management –https://theconversation.com/the-curiosity-blind-spot-of-management-280068