Why Curiosity May Be The Most Underrated Career Skill
Why Curiosity May Be The Most Underrated Career Skill
Contributor.
Forbes contributors publish independent expert analyses and insights.
Rodger Dean Duncan covers leadership issues important to the workplace
Follow Author
Dec 11, 2025, 03:00am EST
.
Pexels
Curiosity has long been described as a soft skill—nice to have, but not essential. Yet in fast-moving organizations where assumptions expire quickly, curiosity is emerging as a core competency. The willingness to question, explore, and challenge old thinking is no longer optional. It’s a performance differentiator.
Joe Lalley, author of Question to Learn: How Curiosity Can Transform Your Career, Team, and Organization, has spent his career helping leaders and teams unlock better thinking through better questions. In our conversation, he revealed that what most people misunderstand about curiosity isn’t the questioning itself—it’s the intention behind it.
“People think it’s the questions that matter, but it’s really the motives behind the questions,” Lalley says. “People may ask questions all the time in the workplace, but many of those questions will have negative, unproductive motives—to look smart, to make someone else look bad, to make sure they’ve spoken up. Those motives aren’t rooted in curiosity, and they lead to a culture where questions are not really questions at all.”
Joe Lalley
.
According to Lalley, real curiosity is a career accelerant because it prevents professionals and organizations from operating with stale assumptions. “Customers change, markets change, internal teams change. Without questions, we’re working with outdated and insufficient information. We get stuck,” he says. “Simply asking, ‘Why?’ leads to key insights about behaviors and perceptions. That knowledge leads to new thinking and ideas and new career opportunities.”
MORE FOR YOU
One of Lalley’s biggest distinctions is between “asking to know” and “asking to learn.” Knowing is factual. Learning is expansive. “Knowing is important, but it stops at the ‘what.’ Learning pushes beyond that and into the ‘why,’” he explains. “‘What is your favorite food?’ will get an answer. ‘How did that come to be your favorite food?’ will get a story.”
Creating a workplace where people feel free to pursue those stories requires an essential ingredient: psychological safety. “It’s the most important component,” Lalley says. “Many questions live and die in people’s heads for fear of looking bad or uninformed. If people feel the need to analyze the quality of every idea or question, they will play it safe. Psychological safety makes it OK to take risks and risks lead to breakthrough ideas.”
Leaders, he warns, often sabotage curiosity without realizing it. By believing they must always have the answer, they inadvertently shut down exploration. “Leaders who feel they should have all the answers fall into the trap of silencing their own curiosity,” Lalley says. “They’re the boss, so they should know, right? Great leaders avoid this trap and create an environment where it’s OK to not know. It’s not just their questions that matter, it’s the fact that they are asking them. This curious mindset flows through an organization.”
Some workplace structures also work against curiosity. “Strict adherence to hierarchy plays a big role in this,” Lalley notes. “In organizations where every idea or decision must flow up through a chain of command, teams work to create ideas the boss likes instead of what the customers want or need.”
.
.
Shifting culture begins with changing how teams communicate. “The best indicator of a company culture is how people interact with each other in meetings,” he says. “Teams must shift from using generalities and buzzwords to specifics and questions. Leaders play a big role in this. If they are willing to ask about things they don’t know the answers to, with curiosity as the motive, it spreads throughout the organization. Questions cannot be quizzes or traps.”
Curiosity also helps dismantle silos. “Siloed teams lose focus on the customer,” Lalley says. “Rather than prioritizing the needs of the customer, they prioritize their own slice of the customer experience. Curiosity and questions help teams see how all their functions impact the customer experience.”
For individuals considering a reinvention or pivot, Lalley offers a simple framework: ask three questions—Am I good at what I’m doing? Do I enjoy what I’m doing? Is what I’m doing in demand? “If you don’t have three yeses,” Lalley says, “it may be time to pivot into another career path.”
Teams, too, can build habits that sustain curiosity. Lalley recommends starting with solo reflection before discussion. “Rather than jumping right into discussion, have team members write down their interpretation of the challenge or idea,” he says. Reviewing these notes often reveals misalignment and sparks dialogue. He also suggests a weekly meeting dedicated to non-work learning: “If possible, take an improv class together!”
Curiosity, at its core, isn’t an activity—it’s a posture. And as Lalley makes clear, when leaders model it, teams practice it, and organizations normalize it. Then curiosity becomes not just a way to ask questions but a way to unlock progress.
Editorial StandardsReprints & Permissions
LOADING VIDEO PLAYER...FORBES’ FEATURED Video