I spent years believing that leadership meant being the smartest person in the room – not in a loud obnoxious way, but in a grinding, prove-it-through-competence way.
I would prepare obsessively, arrive with answers and make sure that no one could ask me a question I had not already thought through.
And for a long time, I thought the approach was working; but it wasn’t.
What I was actually doing was shutting the room down.
When a founder always has the answer, the team stops offering theirs. When the leader speaks first, the conversation narrows.
And when competence becomes the primary currency of your leadership, you end up surrounded by people who defer to you. The ones who would challenge you, contribute, and push the business further stop showing up.
The shift that mattered most was learning a new posture.
I learned to lead with curiosity.
Here is where most technically minded founders (myself included) get it half right.
We are naturally curious about problems; we love to analyse and solve; curiosity about problems is valuable, but incomplete.
The curiosity that changes leadership is curiosity about people.
“Why does this person see the situation differently?”
“What experience are they drawing from that I have not considered?”
“What would they do if they felt completely free to act on their own judgment?”
Questions about people don’t come naturally to every founder, they certainly didn’t come naturally to me.
When a founder leads with curiosity, the room opens up.
People get excited and contribute more freely.
They share the idea they were holding back,
the concern they were afraid to voice,
the perspective they assumed no one wanted to hear.
That openness is a valuable competitive advantage.
The collective intelligence of a team that feels safe to think out loud will always exceed the individual brilliance of a founder who insists on thinking alone.
I’ve watched the shift happen in my own business, and the difference is unbelievable.
The leader who asks genuine questions builds the kind of trust that makes people want to bring their best thinking every day.
I’ve learned that when I direct my curiosity towards the people around me, to genuinely comprehend, the quality of every conversation, every decision, and every relationship improves.
Most people treat curiosity as a character trait, something you either have or you don't, like optimism or introversion.
I see it differently.
Curiosity, in its most powerful form, is a discipline,
a daily practice,
a choice you make in the moments where your instinct is to speak, to solve, to demonstrate what you know, and instead, you ask.
The change begins with language.
Lead with “Help me understand” instead of “Here’s what I think.”
When a challenge comes, respond with a question: “What would you do?”
I send myself e-mails in the middle of the night with questions I cannot yet articulate. I study the people I work with to understand them.
Asking questions and studying people don’t come naturally to someone whose entire identity was built around having answers. I’ve built the habits deliberately and uncomfortably, because I’ve seen what the habits produce.
And what the habits produce is worth every hour of discomfort.
The shifts are small and feel uncomfortable at first, especially if, like me, you’ve spent a career building credibility through competence.
But the impact is large.
The shifts change
how your team experiences you,
what people are willing to say in your presence,
and, over time, the entire culture of your organisation.
I’m still learning to lead this way, still catching myself when the old instinct to prove my competence takes over, still practising the discipline of asking before telling.
What I know for certain: the strongest teams I’ve ever seen were led by the most curious person in the room.
Curiosity is one of the sharpest tools in a leader’s kit.
And the founder who learns to wield curiosity deliberately, and consistently, will build something individual brilliance alone could never reach.
Start asking.
