Nahdia Khan finds the only answer to be: curiosity!
Ask any senior team to agree on what makes a great leader, and you will likely end up with a list, a disagreement, and someone quietly googling whatever framework their last executive coach used.
The debate is perennial, and genuinely unresolved. Depending on the decade, the sector, and the consultant in the room, the answer has variously been vision, emotional intelligence, resilience, authenticity, psychological safety, or growth mindset. Each has its moment.
Which is why it’s worth paying attention when something cuts across most of those frameworks and does so with growing empirical support.
That something is curiosity. Not as a personality trait or a talent profile quirk, but as a learnable, developable leadership competency. One that may also happen to be exactly what the current moment demands.
This is not a new idea
But it is a newly urgent one. Humans have always known, instinctively, that wanting to understand things is valuable.
Psychologist Daniel Berlyne spent much of his career in the mid-20th century trying to make that instinct legible, his concept of epistemic curiosity, the drive to seek knowledge for its own sake, remains a foundational reference in the field.
But for most of the last century, organisations did their best to suppress it anyway. Taylorist structures rewarded compliance. Questions were inefficiencies. The unspoken message was: “know your job, do it well, leave the thinking to someone else”.
That model has been breaking down for decades.
What is different now is the pace.
What the research shows
A 2020 study published in Personality and Individual Differences, led by researchers at George Mason University and validated across both US and German samples, found that curiosity in the workplace is not a single thing but a multidimensional one: joyful exploration, sensitivity to the discomfort of not-knowing, tolerance for the stress of uncertainty, and openness to other people’s ideas.
Across all dimensions, curious employees showed stronger creative problem-solving, better knowledge-sharing, and greater resilience under pressure.
Crucially, curiosity was not found to be fixed. It responded to environment, which means organisations can actively cultivate it, or quietly kill it.
The longitudinal picture is where it gets particularly interesting. Curiosity compounds. A leader who keeps asking questions accumulates a more diverse knowledge base, spots patterns others miss, and generates options that more narrowly focused colleagues cannot.
The Centre for Creative Leadership has tracked executive derailment for decades, why capable, high-performing leaders eventually fail and the pattern is remarkably consistent: the problem is rarely technical. It is adaptability; whether or not one can update one’s thinking quickly enough when the situation changes.
Morgan McCall and Michael Lombardo’s foundational research on this, first published in 1983 and replicated many times since, found that leaders most at risk were those who had stopped learning.
That is, at its root, a curiosity failure.
Where AI changes the calculation
Generative AI does not make curiosity redundant. It raises the stakes for it.
These tools can retrieve, synthesise and produce at remarkable speed. What they cannot do is notice what is strange about a result, hold productive uncertainty, or decide which question is worth asking in the first place.
That last part, knowing what to wonder about, is irreducibly human. And it is a curiosity function.
The World Economic Forum’s Future of Jobs Report, updated most recently in 2025, has placed analytical thinking, creative thinking, and resilience and flexibility at the top of the core skills employers need now, and names curiosity and lifelong learning among the skills rising fastest in importance through 2030.
These are not separate items on a list. They are outputs of curiosity.
An employee who never asks, “why does this work this way?” or “what are we missing?” will not suddenly become analytically sharp because they have been given access to better tools.
This matters enormously for how organisations think about learning and development. Sending people on courses is not enough.
The deeper investment is in the conditions that make curiosity possible: psychological safety, exposure to ideas outside one’s immediate specialism, leaders who model the habit of not knowing, and performance cultures that reward good questions alongside good results.
The question worth asking
Amy Edmondson’s research on psychological safety, most accessibly laid out in The Fearless Organization (2018), makes a related point: people only speak up, explore, and admit uncertainty when they feel safe enough to do so.
Curiosity without safety goes underground. It does not disappear; it just becomes invisible to the organisation that most needs it.
Every generation of leaders has faced its version of the unknown.
What distinguishes those who navigate it from those who don’t is rarely certainty. It is the willingness to stay, productively, in the question.
That is a leadership competency. It can be built. The organisations that understand this now will have a considerable head start on those that figure it out later.
Sources
Berlyne, D.E., Conflict, Arousal and Curiosity, McGraw-Hill (1960).
Kashdan, T.B., Goodman, F.R., Disabato, D.J., McKnight, P.E. & Naughton, C., “Curiosity has comprehensive benefits in the workplace: Developing and validating the multidimensional work curiosity scale in United States and German employees,” Personality and Individual Differences (2020).
McCall & Lombardo, “Off the Track: Why and How Successful Executives Get Derailed,” Centre for Creative Leadership (1983).
WEF Future of Jobs Report (2025).
Amy Edmondson, The Fearless Organization (2018).
About the author
Nahdia Khan, Director of Tasir Consulting, is a strategic edtech and leadership development professional with 20+ years’ experience building partnerships and shaping digital learning innovation.
This article was first published in Learning Magazine Special Edition 2026. Click here to read the full edition.