To foster a culture of adaptability, engagement, and high performance on your team, you need to demonstrate consistent curiosity about your employees, yourself, and your organization. Here’s how:

* Curiosity about employees. Organizations are a collection of the mindsets, attitudes, and values of the people that work within them. To shape your team’s culture, you need to understand people’s values and motivations. Talk to employees directly, formally survey them, or engage in focus groups about the team’s culture to tap into your collective wisdom.

* Curiosity about yourself. As your culture evolves, you must too. Reflect with open-mindedness on your own role. Ask yourself: How have I evolved over time within this team and this organization? The better you understand your own position in the culture, the better suited you’ll be to lead and shape it. 

* Curiosity about the organization. Great leaders don’t just shape culture once—they stay curious about the changing nature of their companies and contexts over time. How have your organization’s mission, vision, and values changed? How has the personnel changed? And how have all of these factors affected the culture along the way? The more you understand your cultural context, the better equipped you’ll be to navigate it.
This tip is adapted from “Leaders, Make Curiosity the Core of Your Organizational Culture,” by John Coleman
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