Five leaders are in a room, working through a restructure. Four align on an approach. One doesn't. The CEO is trying to build consensus, and it isn't going well.

Eventually, the outlier throws up their hands and says, "What do you even need me for?"

"I don't know how to address this," the CEO says to me. "It made us feel like we didn't try."

Most leaders would go straight into correction mode. We did listen. The group decided differently. You shouldn’t have a problem getting in line with us.

I told him not to do that.
Instead, I suggested curiosity.

"Ask them what they meant," I said. "Tell them how it landed for you. Then ask how they expected people to feel when they said it. Ask what they were hoping would happen."

Not to trap them. Not to shame them. To understand them.
And maybe for them to understand you.

That's the moment most leaders rush past. And it's where the real work actually begins.

The fork most leaders don't notice

When someone says or does something that bothers you, there's a fork in the road.

One path is judgment. The other is curiosity.

Judgment is faster. It feels decisive. Especially under pressure. Curiosity takes more time. It requires vulnerability. It risks hearing something you don't like.

So most leaders default to judgment.

The problem is that judgment shuts conversations down. Curiosity opens them up. And leadership doesn't happen when people comply. It happens when people tell you the truth.

Why judgment feels like leadership

Curiosity is my personal theme for 2026. Here's what I've discovered so far.

Judgment feels like leadership.
Right or wrong. Aligned or not. On board or in the way.

Those shortcuts feel productive, especially when you're under pressure.
They also make it easy to miss something important.

Real organizations don't operate in clean binaries. They operate in the space between intent and impact, between disagreement and disengagement, between performance and capacity.

That’s where curiosity shines.

That space is uncomfortable. Which is exactly why it matters.

What fills the gap when leaders don't ask

When leaders don't create space for honest dialogue, people fill the gap themselves.

They talk after meetings instead of during them. They vent in Slack. They tell stories about intent because no one is asking about it directly.

Brené Brown has written extensively about the behaviors that show up when people don't feel safe speaking plainly.

Trust erodes. Information gets distorted. Leaders stop hearing what they actually need to hear.

Eventually, people disengage. Or they leave. Sometimes slowly, sometimes all at once.

Either way, the organization loses the thing it needed most: clarity.

Curiosity is not softness. It's precision.

There's a misconception that curiosity is passive. That it slows things down. That it's what you do when you're avoiding a hard call.

In reality, curiosity is what allows you to make better hard calls.

I worked with a manager once who had an employee regularly showing up late. The obvious move was to pull them aside and issue a warning.

Instead, I encouraged the manager not to get angry or demand compliance, just simply to ask if there was going on.

It turned out the employee's child’s daycare didn't open until 8:30. There was no realistic way to drop them off and make it to work by 9. The manager offered to adjust their start time. The issue disappeared.

No write-up. No resentment. No quiet disengagement.

That's precision. One question revealed the actual constraint. The solution took thirty seconds to implement.

When someone's underperforming, most leaders jump to correction. Curiosity helps you ask what's getting in the way.

When someone disagrees with a decision, most leaders hear resistance. Curiosity helps you ask what they're seeing that you're not.

Curiosity helps you solve causes instead of reacting to symptoms. It doesn't slow leadership down. It makes it cleaner.

Curiosity requires the leader to go first

You can't ask your team to be open if you're not willing to be.

Curiosity signals safety. It tells people their perspective matters, even if you ultimately decide differently. Especially if you decide differently.

There's an idea I've always liked: the Platinum Rule over the Golden Rule.

The Golden Rule says, do unto others as you would want done to you.
The Platinum Rule says, do unto others as they would want done to them.

That second one requires asking. It requires listening. It requires admitting you don't already know.

Many leaders avoid that because being curious feels like giving up authority. In reality, it's how you earn it.

Why curiosity makes decisions clearer

Here's what most leaders miss.

The more comfortable you get with curiosity, the clearer your decisions become. Not because the answers are simpler, but because you understand why people are reacting the way they are.

You stop solving symptoms. You start solving causes.

When you know why someone feels unheard, you can address the real issue instead of just correcting behavior.

When you know what your team actually needs instead of what you assume they need, execution improves.

Curiosity leads to clarity faster than correction does.