If everything remains the same in the world, nothing would inspire anyone to do more. This belief also follows your behavior at work. Curiosity is something that helps people explore, adapt, and improve themselves. However, everything comes with a silver lining of limitations. So, how good is curiosity for you at work?

The Challenge Of Change

A curious employee always seeks out new things to do the same thing. That’s how they beat monotony while finding better ways to bring outcomes at work. But, that also comes with the risk of failing or not delivering in time. So, before putting your curiosity to work, it is always better to consult someone who may have some experience in the type of work you opted for or knows how it works.

Ideation & Innovation

Curiosity is not limited only to execution. It extends to brainstorming and bringing new ideas to the table. A curious eye looks at the existent objective with a new angle. Take marketing for example. Multiple brands across the world have been selling their products for years. However, the products remained almost the same. What changed is the way they marketed their product to an evolving audience. If you are only enthusiastic about executing a trend instead of participating in its lifecycle, your curiosity may not really be valuable.

Digging Into Insights

You plan something and go on to execute it, but if you do not calculate its ROI, nobody, literally nobody is going to invest in your curiosity going forth. Curiosity has the power to not let someone stop at the surface of any observation. That is how the research community thrives in our world. Even though your level of curiousness may not require that of a researcher, having the zest to know more helps you dig into the roots of any issue. That’s why the reports of two people on the same project’s analysis differ almost every time. Because one chose to report what they saw on the surface, and the other chose to report their findings obtained at root level. 

Creative Collaboration

A research conducted at Kashdan, T.B. in 2013 suggests that curiosity always comes with a non-aggressive behavior. This results in better conflict resolution skills, higher motivation, ability to experience the same view from other’s shoes, and enhanced interest in communication of ideas. So, curious employees often help in enhancing overall teamwork and collaborative outcomes. This concludes that curious people make good employees only if they are invested in their idea from the very beginning to its closure. Else, what they say or do sums up as suggestions to their peers.

Best Practices Of Being Curious

While it is great to be curious at work, there are certain limitations that you should always keep in mind before displaying such. Below are some of the best practices you can enable at work for yourself while being curious enough. Otherwise, your  excitement can end up offending people at work.

Consent To Listen

You found a new solution for a problem that you and your team have been trying to solve for a long time. It is time to communicate that solution to them. Before that, ask them if they are free to listen and find a good space to communicate your approach. Simply barging in saying “Eureka” may not be the most ideal way.

Accept Criticism

You have presented your new method for solving old problems. But, there are some team members who show concern regarding the new way. The best way to deal with this is to absorb the criticism and work on finding whether it actually makes sense or not. Your curiosity should always match your team’s acceptance.

Time To Adapt

Doing something new out of the blue may not be comfortable for everyone. So, ensure that you give your team both time and space to adapt the new methods. Take for instance a tech team using Github after being used to Trello for project management. We all know Github does have higher perks over Trello in the tech side. But, allowing your team to get accustomed is also important.

Still Curious?

Anything and everything we do that is new, often is an end product of curiosity. This trait is one of the most common one in excelling employees. If you think you are curious at work, let it flow freely in yourself and approach others humbly while communicating about it. Everything else will easily fall into place.