3 tips to grow your business through promoting curiosity

Grow your business with a curious mindset

One thing is quite common amongst recruiters: the focus on hiring new employees open to progressing as the company evolves. No doubt, this is a key item in this global and ever-changing world. Making progress implies for the individual to be curious. In other words, to develop an ability to explore and a strong interest in taking risks.

How do you encourage curiosity at work?

1. Reward the willingness to innovate

Through curiosity comes innovation

It is a major element to keep your team motivated. Especially if you are the kind of entrepreneur who wants to benefit from colleagues willing to:

• Provide their opinion on the tasks at hand
• Give their suggestions in the working methods as much as on how to approach the market
• Encourage their colleagues to take initiatives and in doing so act as partners instead of employees.

Those 3 items are crucial to have a company built up to last and even stay ahead of its market. Treating your employees like partners will also leave you time to ponder on the big challenges instead of spending most of your time monitoring your staff.

2. Ask for the opinion of your colleagues

Get everybody involved through questions

Not getting your team involved in the decision-making process is hindering your success. Indeed, the goal of an organization is to answer the needs and wishes of a public not only of one person. Moreover, it can easily lead to frustration and demotivate your employees, especially when:

• The business decision ends up being a bad one
• A new recruit is eventually unwilling and/or incapable of working with the current employees
• You have been working for a while in the company and feels like your experience is not valued.

It is hard for any of us to be always right. Asking for a feedback does not mean leaving aside your leadership role. Rather, in doing so, you feed from the people who will implement your decision. Thanks to that, they might end up feeling like your project is also theirs.

3. Share success and failure with your team

Come together through sharing

On one hand, sharing success is a great way to encourage your team in:

• Aiming for high goals
• Keeping up with the best practices 
• Developing a culture of success.

On the other hand, going through failure as a team builds a strong bond. If we take an example from our personal lives, quite often, our nearest and dearest friends are those who have been with us through thick and thin. Any entrepreneur and manager should definitely think twice before indulging into blaming every other person. Like the saying goes: "Leaders don't create followers, they create more leaders." (Tom Peters) As somebody who dedicates his work on what I call "Return on Time Invested (RTI)", I can testify that in the long run aiming to create leaders will save you a lot of time and money. It will also enable you to have several minds focused on the single goal of developing your business.

Learn more on Tom Peter's publications and increase your skills starting with this best-seller:

Written by David IBRAHIM.
Mayotte