Expressing genuine interest in others—there’s no better way to make people interested in you.
—Dale Carnegie
A second essential people skill is assertive curiosity. People are naturally curious. We’re born with it! Isaac Singer, Nobel Prize–winning author, once described life as a novel that has good parts and bad parts. Like a novel, no matter what you might say about it, everybody wants to see what’s on the following page. Everybody wants to learn what’s going to happen next. Everybody is inherently curious about the world, and we should do everything we can to nurture that inborn human characteristic and keep it alive.
This has special relevance in a corporate setting. Curiosity can be of tremendous benefit to any manager who knows how to ignite the inborn curiosity of his or her team. In the next few pages, we’ll explore strategies and tactics for making the best possible use of other people’s curiosity. Most important, we’ll see why the key to doing that lies in keeping your own curiosity alive and well.
Let’s look at an example of how this works. Michelle is an investor relations executive with a large multinational corporation. Her job is a very interesting one, and it depends heavily on her having a healthy sense of curiosity. Basically, she keeps in touch with people who are large investors in her company and she tries to learn if they have any particular needs or concerns.
Many, though not all, of the large investors are elderly people for whom loneliness is a real concern. At this point in their lives, they have a lot of money and not much else going on. When Michelle contacts them, they want to talk about their investment, but they also want to feel that she’s taking a real interest in their lives. The conversations that result from this may not seem like conventional business discussions, but Michelle quickly learned that talking about someone’s grandchildren for half an hour can make a very positive difference in building trust and loyalty. So she’s learned to be genuinely curious about the people she talks with and about what they have to say. Often this has meant delving into topics that might not have seemed all that interesting or relevant at first glance. But it’s amazing how taking the time to get to know someone can build customer relations and help you achieve success.
When Michelle was tasked with training a new employee to help her with her work, she had a chance to reflect on what curiosity really means as a people skill in a business environment. Like Michelle, you may be a manager who wants to motivate your team to learn as much as possible as quickly as possible. Or you yourself may be a new hire who’s curious about your company. You want to put your curiosity into action in ways that will benefit you and your employer. Whether you’re a seasoned manager or a new employee, what you’re really looking for is assertive curiosity. That’s a very unique and somewhat complex frame of mind. It includes no less than ten separate but closely related elements. By putting them into action, you can instantly maximize the role of curiosity in your people skills repertoire. Let’s look at these points one by one.
First, you need to realize that assertive curiosity is an emotional as well as an intellectual experience. When you’re dealing with another person, this is the difference between really creating a sense of shared discovery and just politely inquiring about one thing or another. If there’s one word that describes this special kind of energy, the word is passion. Assertive curiosity is more about passion than about simply gathering facts. It’s not only motivating yourself to learn but also teaching yourself to do it in ways that are meaningful, memorable, and effective. It’s about caring for what you want to learn, feeling real excitement for it, and conveying that excitement to the people around you.
How did Thomas Edison manage to get over one thousand patents from the U.S. Patent Office? The engine that powered all those discoveries was infinite, unlimited curiosity. Edison wasn’t a theorist. He was what’s called an empirical thinker. He liked to see how things worked in the real world. It didn’t really matter whether the real world worked the way he thought it would. Even if one of his experiments came out differently than he expected, he never regarded this as a failure. He never spoke of “failed experiments” in the conventional scientific jargon. Every experiment was a success, because he always found out something new. If it was something other than what he anticipated, so much the better. What’s more, Edison was able to transfer this curiosity to all the people who worked with him. That’s what made him an assertively curious person.
Of course, assertive curiosity is about substance as well as emotion. So the second point involves seeing yourself both as a student and as a purveyor of real knowledge. It’s about doing your best to keep on top of your field, by gathering information both inside and outside your areas of expertise, and being at the leading edge as often as possible. This doesn’t mean spending hours every day on the internet, in the library, or poring over professional journals. Assertive curiosity is something much more dynamic than that. It’s about bridging the gap between theory and practice. It’s about leaving the ivory tower and immersing yourself in a particular field. It’s talking to the experts and authorities inviting people to talk with you as you become an authority.
Nobel Prize–winning physicist Richard Feynman was like a modern-day Edison in some respects. Feynman’s work, however, was in the hidden world of quantum mechanics and cosmology. There was also a very practical side to Feynman. He once said that there is a sure way to tell whether someone is a real expert or just posing as one. It all depends on how often they say three very important words, “I don’t know.” If a person has the answer to every question, if there’s seemingly nothing on a particular topic that they don’t thoroughly understand, then you know you’ve got a phony on your hands. When somebody obviously knows a lot but is still able to admit that they don’t know everything, that’s the mark of true confidence and authority. Of course, Feynman added an extremely vital corollary to that principle that definitely applies to assertively curious individuals. While they’re more than willing to admit they don’t know, they also have a very strong intention to find out. Assertively curious people are eager to be challenged, and they’ll challenge others in return. They want to get the facts, and they know they haven’t got all of them yet. What’s more, they know they’ll never get all the facts, and they’re very happy about that.
Drawing upon this, our third point concerns the operational, interactive component of assertive curiosity. It’s listening, questioning, being responsive, and remembering that every human being is different from every other. It’s about eliciting responses and drawing out people who are naturally quiet. It’s about finding what’s best in people while also respecting their limits and being professional at all times.
When people are speaking to you, do you listen with full attention or are you distracted by their appearance, their phrasing, or other details? Is listening a matter of waiting for the other person to stop so that you can start talking, or is it a skill that you genuinely want to develop? It’s amazing how rare good listeners really are—and by becoming one of those rare people, you can take a big step toward making yourself a truly skilled communicator.
How do you react when someone says something that you disagree with? Are there certain topics or certain people that you immediately find irritating? The truth is, we all have our hot buttons—but here again, an important aspect of people skills is to be in control and to accept responsibility. When someone says something that seems totally off the wall, he or she may indeed be an uninformed person. But it’s not your responsibility to inform the world of that fact. Your responsibility is to respond with coolness, calm, and control—in a word, with skill.
The title of Dale Carnegie’s most famous book is How to Win Friends and Influence People. It’s a title that’s known around the world and its simplicity is one of its strengths—but to really understand that title, we need to look very closely at one word. Surprisingly, that word is and. In ordinary conversation, and is just a linking word—a conjunction. But here those three letters have a more important function. And in the title of Dale Carnegie’s book really means “in order to.” The two parts of the title don’t just coexist—one part grows from the other. It’s not just a matter of making friends and influencing people. Making friends gives you the power to influence people. In the fewest possible words, gaining affection confers respect. It’s not rocket science! It’s simple. Not necessarily easy, but definitely uncomplicated.
Part of your commitment as a truly interactive listener involves letting go of some of the negative set pieces that so many of us mistake for real conversation. Very simply put, don’t criticize, condemn, or complain. Period. Why not? Well, do you enjoy listening to other people’s complaints? Does hearing someone condemn someone else endear you to that person? Does hearing a list of criticisms from someone incline you to be positively influenced by them? I think the answers to these questions are very self-explanatory.
Instead of criticizing or complaining, create in yourself feelings of appreciation, gratitude, and genuine interest in other people. Don’t do this because you want to be a Pollyanna. Do it out of positive self-interest. Once again, how do you feel around people who are positive and appreciative? Chances are, those are the kinds of people you’ll want for your friends. And as Dale Carnegie showed, friends are the people who influence us. We generally want to forget about people who are habitually negative, but genuinely positive people are not just memorable—they’re literally unforgettable.
What’s the best way to show appreciation, gratitude, optimism, and other positive feelings? Once again, what you say and how you listen can be canceled out by how you look—so smile! What could be simpler? There’s really no need to go very deeply into the benefits of smiling, but as discussed earlier, research shows that smiling—that is, flexing the muscles of the face—stimulates the production of certain neurochemicals in the brain that are associated with feelings of pleasure and well-being. At the most basic biological level, smiling is good for you.
And laughing may be even better than smiling. More than twenty years ago, Norman Cousins wrote a best-selling book describing how he watched movie comedies to deal with a serious illness. Since then, there have been many studies of the physical and emotional effects of laughter. One very interesting study tracked the frequency with which people laugh at various_stages of life. At the age of three, we laugh a lot—hundreds of times a day, in fact. From then on, however, there’s a gradual lessening of laughter over the course of many years. But then something very interesting happens. Some people start laughing more, and others stop laughing altogether.
Part of this may be a matter of genetics—but remember, an essential aspect of character is taking 100 percent responsibility. It may be that it’s simply “natural” to become unhappier as we grow older. But that doesn’t mean you have to let it happen. It may also be natural to become physically weaker and to gain weight, but millions of people have made it a priority to resist those processes. In the same way, you can make a commitment to keep your emotions positive just as you can to keeping your body healthy. But commitment is a key word. It doesn’t happen by itself. It doesn’t happen easily. You just have to make it look like it does!
Once again, there’s nothing especially complicated about this. Usually it’s just a matter of asking the right questions and really wanting to hear the answers. It can be as easy as saying “That sounds interesting. How can I help?” or “I’ve been thinking about something new. I’d like your opinion.” Nothing is more inspiring to employees than having a manager ask for their feedback. How often, though, does that actually happen in the corporate world? Assertive curiosity doesn’t mean just finding answers to problems. It’s really about finding out what people think. When you do that, you’ll be surprised at how many problems you can quickly eliminate. You’ll be even more surprised by the number of problems that never come up in the first place.
Assertive curiosity is about being interactive with people without having a fixed agenda. It’s about being flexible in adjusting to other people’s interests and having the confidence to admit that another point of view might be just as valid as your own. Sometimes it means accomplishing only half of what you wanted from a meeting or a phone call but still feeling good about what you’ve learned. It means striking a creative balance between being an eager questioner and a patient teacher. It’s about balancing your own curiosity with another person’s need to learn.
In many areas Dale Carnegie was hugely ahead of his time, and one of the clearest examples of this is the way he stressed paying attention to other people’s wants and needs and being aware of both verbal and nonverbal clues. That means being curious about what other people want and using those desires as a way to make a connection. The fact is, most people won’t tell you what they really want unless you ask them, but how many of us ever bother to ask? The way around this is quite paradoxical. If you’re really interested in what another person cares about, the best way to access that information is by sharing something about yourself. As you do so, though, you need to remember that you’re only doing it as a way of inspiring the other party to talk. Don’t get so caught up in your own story that there’s no room for anyone else to say anything.
In order to share a personal story of your own as a way of building trust and eliciting information from another party, there are just a few points you need to keep in mind. First, always begin the conversation in a friendly and unthreatening manner. This is especially important if you’re in a supervisory role, when people are naturally hesitant to open up to you. Generally it’s best to be very explicit about this. Make it clear that the conversation will be off the record, or ask permission to share a piece of personal information. This is all part of really seeing the situation from the other person’s point of view. Then make sure that the information you share is conveyed in a dramatic and interesting way, so that they’ll feel inspired to do the same. For example, it’s not very exciting to hear someone say, “Someday I’d like to have my own business.” Compare that with “I’ve always dreamed of owning an elegant little boutique where I could sell really elegant clothes.” The second alternative is more than just a business plan. It’s sharing a dream. And when you share one of your dreams, the person you’re speaking with may find the courage to share one of theirs. This is what you really want to have happen when you’re an assertively curious manager.
There are an infinite number of questions you can ask people in order to get them talking and sharing information about themselves. As we’ve seen, sometimes the best start is to reveal something about yourself, but the deeper purpose should be to ignite the other party’s curiosity about things they may have simply taken for granted and accepted. Here are some sample questions that can serve that purpose. The chances are, a manager or supervisor in your workplace has never asked questions like this. Even if someone wanted to ask about these things, perhaps they seemed too personal or not businesslike. But they can be very important for creating an atmosphere of assertive curiosity. As you read these questions, you will begin to see how valuable they can be for helping people to find out about themselves and adopt an attitude of curiosity toward their lives. In fact, they’ll probably help you to do much the same thing.
• What is the history of your family name?
• What part of the world is your family from?
• What is the linguistic derivation of your name?
• Where do you live? How do you like living there?
• What are some of the things that you enjoy doing with your family?
• What do you like and dislike about the kind of work you’re doing in the company?
• How did you get your start with this organization?
• Tell me about some places you like to travel.
• Where is the last place you went for a vacation? What were your impressions?
• What sports do you enjoy?
• What are your hobbies?
• What do you like to do in your free time?
• What are your ideas on how our company could be changed for the better?
• If you could wave a magic wand and change one thing today, what would it be?
• What would you like to learn about in the next year? In the next week? Today?
• What are some obstacles you’ve had to overcome?
• What advice would you give a teenager who wanted to enter this line of work?
When you ask open-ended questions like these, you’re exercising your curiosity. Couple this with active listening skills and you are demonstrating assertive curiosity and inspiring others. The choice is always yours.
The fifth point about assertive curiosity concerns the importance of personal style. We’ve seen how this works in terms of sharing your hopes and dreams. You’ve got to put some drama into them. You’ve got to make them exciting and heartfelt, as if you’re sharing an important secret. The importance of this should be very obvious. How can you ignite curiosity in another person if you yourself don’t seem very interesting? So often in meetings or presentations, speakers try to portray themselves as if they have all the answers. Even when they ask for questions from the audience, there’s usually no sense of spontaneity or drama.
Let’s be very clear about this—there’s nothing less interesting than a know-it-all (even if the person actually does happen to know a great deal). On the other hand, when managers make it clear that they are also seeking to learn and that their sense of curiosity is still alive and well, they are much more inspiring leaders. An assertively curious person is like the leader of an orchestra. There have to be some theatrics involved. If you watch the conductor of a major orchestra, you’ll see exactly what this means. It’s not just about telling the instrumentalists which notes they ought to be playing at a particular moment. It’s helping them to play in that moment as if they are discovering and expressing those notes for the very first time. When you know how to use curiosity in this way, you’ll bring out the best in everyone, including yourself.
Humor is the sixth component of assertive curiosity, and it goes along with the sense of style that we’ve just been discussing. We’ve said that assertively curious people are very frank about how much they don’t know. As a result, they often have a finely developed sense of self-deprecating humor. Humor and curiosity go together, because both depend on the pleasure of surprise and the unexpected. Humor isn’t just a tactic of an assertively curious person; it’s a natural characteristic. But in a practical sense, humor does create the kind of relaxed atmosphere that makes everyone want to listen and learn.
Before we leave the topic of humor, we should mention that it’s one of the most elusive of all people skills. It’s one of the most difficult skills to learn and master, and there’s a very simple reason for that. Most people don’t really think they have anything to learn about humor. Most people think they already know how to be funny, or at least how to appreciate a funny person or situation. Very few people will admit that they don’t have a highly developed sense of humor. Yet how many people do you know who really have the ability to make you laugh? Conversely, do you have the ability to bring laughter to other people? Answering that question honestly can take some courage. But if it causes you to realize that your humorous quality isn’t what you thought, there’s still hope. Again, the solution lies in just being very honest. There was a gentleman who participated in some Dale Carnegie training, and when he heard this discussion of humor, he really took it to heart. He realized that despite what he might have thought, he actually didn’t have a very good sense of humor. He wished he did, of course, but he wanted to face the truth. So at the next meeting of his class, he stood up and somewhat sadly announced the truth. He just said, “I’m not a funny person. I’m just not funny.” And of course everybody laughed!
Assertive curiosity means recognizing not only what other people want to learn but what they need to learn as well. Then it means sparking their curiosity to go ahead and learn it. Accomplishing this can take many forms. It can mean forwarding someone an article from the internet or leaving a book or a magazine on someone’s desk. But it has to be done without an agenda on your part. This is especially true if you’re in a supervisory role. Remember how difficult it was to read the books that were assigned to you in school? There’s something about genuine learning that seems to be contradicted by being ordered to learn.
This is an area where a bit of reverse psychology can be very effective. When you give someone a book or article to read, you should be very explicit about the fact that you have no expectations or agenda that they’ll actually do so. Really emphasize that point. You might say something like this: “If you ever have a moment, I think you might find this article useful. I know I did.” And that’s all you say. Leave it at that. You have to relinquish your own agenda completely if you want to create curiosity in the other individual. You have to be very assertive about that, and the assertiveness needs to be directed at yourself. Otherwise you’re just engaging in a not-too-subtle form of manipulation, which has nothing in common with effective people skills.
Assertive curiosity has to be supported by the company culture as a whole. This means strong and visionary leadership, of course, but also tangible institutional support, including resources, personnel, and funds. Curiosity needs to be reinforced throughout the organization, from the CEO to the mailroom. It needs to be reflected in what is said and written, but more important, by what is done. You may be an assertively curious manager. You may really care about engendering authentic curiosity in your team, but if you’re a lone voice in the midst of an essentially conformist environment, your impact is going to be limited.
So take a hard look at how your company responds to people who ask unexpected questions and who come up with surprising answers. What systems are in place to support that kind of assertive curiosity and to reward it when it takes place? We tend to think of people skills in terms of what happens between two individuals or within a small group. But sometimes there are things that need to be done on the macro level that will make individual interactions much more effective.
The ninth point is really a specific application of the previous point. Senior management should mentor curiosity for team members. Through a mentoring relationship, managers can see very clearly how well team members are seeking to expand their vision. With this insight, managers can make curiosity a factor in employee evaluation, recognition, and promotion. At the same time, lack of curiosity needs to be addressed through training and development books. This does not mean that there should be an official “department of curiosity” within the corporate structure. However, there should be a way of giving employees time and motivation to explore new ideas and points of view.
A classic example of how powerful this can be is the legendary Skunk Works division of the Lockheed Martin aircraft corporation. This was an unofficial department of the company, the sole purpose of which was to explore new ideas and eccentric or innovative approaches to problem solving. For more than fifty years, this division produced some of the most innovative concepts in the history of aviation. The success of this entire enterprise, however, was based on nothing more than the importance of curiosity and the power of junior and senior employees working together in an unstructured, no-pressure environment. For example, the whole technology of stealth design for military aircraft emerged from the Skunk Works. Engineers found the mathematical key to the stealth design buried within an obscure physics journal originally published in Russian. Oddly, the bureaucratic Russian military had never made use of the principle, despite urgings from the article’s Russian author. Even more amazing is the way the first stealth plane was tested. The plane was housed in a secret, unlighted hangar full of bats. When the bats couldn’t detect the plane’s presence and crashed into it in the darkness, the engineers knew they had a successful design. It’s very hard to imagine that a testing system using bats could have been thought of in a conventional research and development book. It required an institutional commitment to curiosity, in a setting that was outside the official company profile. In fact, for many years the existence of the Skunk Works was not even acknowledged by Lockheed Martin, nor did the U.S. government acknowledge the planes that came out of it.
Finally, the tenth principle of assertive curiosity, and perhaps the most important: Assertive curiosity should be fun. The rewards should be spontaneous and intrinsic. You should feel the excitement of wanting to explore a new topic, or see that you’ve kindled that excitement in one of your colleagues or coworkers. Assertively curious managers aren’t doing it for the money. Curiosity is simply a part of who they are, and really curious people can’t imagine doing anything else. Take the atmosphere at Google. Employees are encouraged and empowered to be curious, to explore, and to have fun. The results are an incredibly successful organization with happy and loyal employees.
A good way to glimpse the power of curiosity is to consider its opposite, which is boredom. Boredom is a feeling rarely experienced by small children. It’s the sense that your creative, or even subversive, energies are being completely stifled. It’s the way you feel when you have to sit up straight through a long class on something that holds no interest for you. That’s not the right way to experience education, and it’s certainly not the best way to live your life. We began this chapter with the idea that life is like a book and you don’t want to reach the end. That may be true, but are you a person who’s really interested in what you’re reading, or are you just afraid of what might happen if you get to the last page? Answering that question is itself an example of assertive curiosity. It’s the kind of question that deserves some thought on your part, and it’s also something that you can inspire others to think about.
The ten points we’ve covered in this chapter can most certainly help you do that. But we’ve far from exhausted the subject of assertive curiosity. We’ll continue our discussion in chapter 6.
ACTION STEPS
1. On a scale from 1 to 10, how much assertive curiosity do you have for the work that you do and for the individuals with whom you engage at work?
1 2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10
Very little Some Quite a bit A great deal
2. Being assertively curious involves having flexibility and interest in the needs of others. Sometimes cultivating the desire to focus on the needs of others takes conscious commitment and practice. During the next week, choose at least one person a day whose needs you commit to focusing on. Write about any insights that you have gained by practicing this exercise.
3. It is important to be proactive by encouraging and enforcing learning among your staff. Write out a One-Year Learning Track for your team. Be sure to get their input and include their desires and interests. Then take the necessary action as required.
4. Creating fun and having a good sense of humor are two important traits to cultivate when developing your assertive curiosity. They are also choices that will uplift your spirit and enhance your daily exchanges. Are you having fun at work? Do you laugh a lot? Make a point of adding more fun and humor to your day. Keep a record of what you do and of any changes that you notice in response to making this commitment.