In this episode of Transform Your Workplace, host Brandon Laws talks with Sean Grace, author of The Art of the Question, about why curiosity is a powerful, often overlooked tool for leaders. Grace explains how great leadership isn’t about having all the answers but about asking questions that inspire others to think and grow. If you’re a leader wanting to deepen positive influence and boost your team’s engagement, don’t miss this insightful episode.
GUEST AT A GLANCE
Sean Grace is a communication consultant, coach, and speaker with over 25 years of experience training sales, marketing, and leadership talent across various industries. With a background in media, advertising, and music performance, he brings a unique, creative approach to fostering team collaboration and success.
A QUICK GLIMPSE INTO OUR PODCAST
🔊 Podcast: Transform Your Workplace, Sponsored by Xenium HR
🎙️ Host: Brandon Laws
📋 In his own words: “The Transform Your Workplace podcast is your go-to source for the latest workplace trends, big ideas, and time-tested methods straight from the mouths of industry experts and respected thought-leaders.”
FROM A SPARK TO A FLAME
Our most recent guest Sean Grace dives into the essence of curiosity as the driving force behind personal growth and exploration. As he puts it, “Curiosity […] is the essence and the seed of all our interest in learning about the world and each other.” Leaders, often conditioned to prioritize expertise over inquiry, may struggle to keep this spark alive. Yet, reigniting curiosity isn’t about expertise but about staying open. Sean advises, “Let go of the idea of knowing […] Letting go of knowing is key to being open to the world around you.”
Grace emphasizes that shedding the need to be “right” can unlock a greater perspective. “The more you think you know, the more you’re potentially closing yourself off,” he says. This openness encourages leaders to embrace “the wonderful world of inquiry,” which he believes leads to “endless explorations of the world and each other, as well as ourselves.” Curiosity, in Grace’s view, isn’t just a spark but a way to expand our understanding and connect on a deeper level.
PODCAST EPISODE HIGHLIGHTS
Staying Curious
“While the average four-year-old might ask [about] 350, the average adult asks around 20 [questions]. That’s if they’re working in a situation where questions are part of their daily lives. A lot of times, it’s less than that, so we go from [being] incredibly curious [about] the world and ourselves, and we start to whittle that down until we become adults. And then, unfortunately, we tend to lose that sense of curiosity. So we diminish our question-asking muscle. It tends to atrophy because what happens is as we get older, asking questions can be quite risky — whether that’s as an adolescent in middle school, where asking questions might expose your own vulnerabilities in understanding things, or perhaps asking questions that might reveal that you might know too much. So the social pressures start to move in. And then as we move into the workforce, we’re often told that answers are valued over questions. So we tend to tuck in, we tend to be quiet, and we tend to not come forth with ideas and questions.”
What Already Exists
“[Socrates] believed in the concept that even if he did know answers, his job as a teacher and the leader was to empower others to reach deep within themselves and find wisdom that may already exist within themselves. So if he approached a situation, especially in teaching, he would act as what he would call a maieutic. And a maieutic, in Greek, is a midwife. He believed that his job was to help bring forth and give birth to wisdom, understanding, and intelligence that probably already existed in others, and the way to do that is not to come in and pretend that you have the answers, but to be skilled in asking the right kinds of questions in order for the person that you’re speaking with to look inward and to think a little more about ‘maybe’ […] -perhaps they can question their own perspectives and reasoning.”
Clearing Up Misconceptions
“I often try to […] live this idea of not approaching a situation as if I have the answers or if I know everything, which is often the case in my experience with my early managers in corporate America, where there was this sense that manager is management, and even leadership was about having the answers. It was about being the smartest person at the table in the room. But I quickly learned as I rose in the ranks of management that, actually, the best leaders were the ones who listened carefully and asked really good questions in order to tap into the wisdom and the knowledge of those […] he or she might be leading.”
“Knowing Thyself”
“I believe that it all starts with being able to ask ourselves better questions in order to understand where our thinking is coming from, where our potential biases might be coming from, where our potential prejudices might be coming from. So being able to ask yourself better questions in order to increase your metacognitive awareness. Metacognition technically is really more about having knowledge about how we learn and how we understand the world, but it does sort of bump into self-awareness and this idea of just being cognitively aware of who we are, how we learn, how we navigate the world, how we react to things.”
“Might” vs. “Can”
“I really use the question, ‘How might we…?’ as the key anchor and pivot for all creative thinking. ‘How might we…?’ is a beautiful type of question that poses what’s possible and not ‘How can we…?’ because there are lots of ways you can do something, but how ‘might you’ do something goes back to that concept of bravery. You have to think of it from a standpoint of action: how might we solve this problem? […] ‘How might we…?’ gives us more of a tendency to figure out how to innovate in a more creative way. […] I often ask this even in a non-creative situation where I might say, ‘Well, how might we solve this particular problem here?’ and what’s nice about ‘How might we…?’ is it invites others to present their ideas. It doesn’t throw down a specific idea. It opens up the floor. It gives people a certain agency to contribute.”
So What? Who Cares?
“I was watching a Howard Stern video many, many years ago. I was never a fan of his radio show, but then when he was on TV, I would stumble upon him, and I really started to appreciate his interviewing skills. And there was one particular situation he had a guest on, and the guest was going on and on, and at the end, he just said, ‘So what? Who cares?’ And it was a really brash, obnoxious tone, but within a second, his guest, just like a laser beam, zoomed in on why what he was saying mattered and who it mattered to. And it was sort of like this, ‘Wow, it’s just like clarity within a few seconds.’ I thought about that after watching that, and I started incorporating it into my own communications, whether it’s writing an email, putting a proposal together, or maybe preparing a speech to a group of people. I would ask, […] ‘Is it going to matter to the people I’m speaking with at this particular moment? So what? Who cares?’”
LEARN MORE
Connect with Sean Grace at peakluma.com to explore his leadership development and training consultancy, and check out his newly released book, The Art of the Question, available on Amazon.