Curiosity is a Corporate Performance

Sia Papageorgiou:

Curiosity has become one of leadership’s favourite competencies. It’s in leadership frameworks, job advertisements, executive development programs and performance reviews. Leaders open town halls with, “I’m curious to hear your thoughts” moments before announcing a decision that was made weeks ago. We’ve turned curiosity into something leaders are expected to demonstrate rather than genuinely practise. In doing so, we’ve confused the appearance of curiosity with the practice of it.

What performative curiosity looks like

Most of us recognise it immediately. It’s the leader who asks, “what do you all think?” in a meeting where the answer has already been decided, and who moves on the moment someone gives a real answer that doesn’t fit. It’s the “ask me anything” session where every question submitted gets a warm, general response and nothing anyone said changes what happens next. It’s the survey that asks employees for honest feedback, framed with genuine-sounding enthusiasm, followed by months of silence about what was done with it.

None of these things are curiosity. They create the appearance of curiosity because organisations increasingly reward leaders who look curious without demanding the vulnerability that real curiosity requires. And we, as communication professionals, build most of these mechanisms. We write the town hall script. We design the survey. We draft the “ask me anything” invitation and coach the leader on how to manage the room. If curiosity has become a performance, we are very often the ones who wrote the stage directions.

Real curiosity comes at a cost. It means a leader might hear something that complicates the plan. It means hearing something that forces them to rethink a decision, instead of redirecting the conversation back to where they intended it to go.

Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety has consistently shown that people are more willing to speak up when they believe it’s safe to do so. One of the clearest ways leaders reinforce that safety is by visibly listening and responding to what people hear.

Performative curiosity strips out that risk while keeping the warmth. That’s exactly why it has spread so quickly through organisations that value the appearance of openness far more than the disruption that real openness invites.

Why this matters more than it looks like it does

This isn’t just a culture problem. It’s a communication problem. When people ask questions they don’t want honest answers to, the workforce eventually stops giving honest answers. Employees notice when their input changes nothing and they adapt accordingly. There is less candour in surveys, less pushback in the meeting, less energy spent raising the awkward thing before it becomes a crisis. That erosion rarely happens in one visible moment. It builds through a hundred small exchanges where curiosity was performed rather than practised, and the workforce concluded that honesty wasn’t worth the effort.

There’s also a leadership cost that gets less attention, and it should worry us as much as the trust problem does. Leaders who only perform curiosity end up making worse decisions, not just less trusted ones. Every decision is only as good as the information that reaches the decision-maker. Performative curiosity filters out inconvenient information long before a decision is made.

If a leader never risks hearing something that changes their mind, they are, by definition, only ever confirming what they already believed. Several leadership failures I’ve watched unfold up close had months of warning signs that were raised and gently deflected in exactly this way. The information was there. It just met a leader, and often a communication team, trained to look curious rather than be curious, and the two are not the same skill.

What genuine curiosity costs a leader, and costs us

This is the part most advice conveniently skips over, and the part our profession needs to own. Real curiosity requires a leader to tolerate being wrong, in public, sometimes at short notice. It means the town hall question that changes the plan announced twenty minutes later. It means the engagement survey result that leads to a leader standing up and saying, “we got this wrong, here’s what we’re doing differently,” rather than a slide that explains why the results weren’t quite as bad as they first appeared. Most leaders say they want that kind of feedback culture. Far fewer are willing to absorb the short-term discomfort of visibly changing course in front of the people they lead. Performative curiosity fills the gap between what leaders say they value and what they’re actually prepared to do.

That’s the uncomfortable mirror for communication professionals. How many “ask me anything” sessions have we designed knowing the outcome was fixed before anyone asked the first question? How many surveys have we run because leadership expected one, not because anyone intended to act on the results? We often describe our role as building trust between leaders and their people. Sometimes we’re just engineering the appearance of dialogue.\

What I’d tell a leader, and a communication team, to do differently

Stop asking “what do you think?” in situations where nothing will change, and start being explicit about which decisions are genuinely still open. People are remarkably good at spotting the difference between a genuine question and a symbolic one. Naming that difference honestly builds more trust than pretending every decision is up for debate. If you ask for feedback, build in a visible, dated commitment to respond to what you heard, even if the response is “we’re not changing this and here’s why.” Asking for honesty and responding with silence is one of the fastest ways to teach people that honesty isn’t actually welcome.

For communication teams, that means telling a leader their “ask me anything” shouldn’t go ahead, because nothing said in that room is actually going to change anything. It means pushing back on the survey nobody plans to act on, before it goes out, not apologising for the silence after it closes. Those conversations are uncomfortable. They’re also where strategic communication earns its place. It’s also, I’d argue, our actual job.

Let people see you change your mind occasionally. Leaders who never visibly change their minds unintentionally teach everyone around them that challenging them isn’t worth the effort. And separate social curiosity from strategic curiosity. Asking someone about their weekend is polite conversation. Asking them what’s wrong with a plan you’re invested in, and genuinely listening to the answer, is strategic curiosity. Organisations have become very good at the first and increasingly reluctant to embrace the second.

Organisations don’t become more curious because leaders ask more questions. They become more curious when people can point to moments where someone’s insight genuinely changed what happened next.

That’s the standard communication professionals should hold ourselves and our leaders to.

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Sia Papageorgiou is the Co-Founder of the Centre for Strategic Communication Excellence and is an IABC Fellow.