The Answer Trap: Why the Skill That Got You Promoted Will Fail You as a Leader
The “Hidden Playbook” For New Leaders
I named my business The Curious Leadership because curiosity is the first thing I've watched people lose when they move into a leadership role. When people move from being individual contributors to managers, they fall into the “expert trap” - they believe leadership means being the smartest person in the room. But the technical skills and decisiveness that got you promoted are often the exact behaviours that close you down - and can lead to failure - as a leader.
Many leaders might say that in stepping into leadership, they've become more decisive, more sure, better at making the call - which is the problem. The behaviour that gets a new leader praised is often the same behaviour that's closing them down.
Because let’s be honest - the reason you get promoted into leadership in the first place is because of the technical skills you’ve exhibited - technical skills, project management, etc - we start to pin a lot of worth to this and this becomes our safety net.
Underneath all of this (in fact, everything we do) - sits a deep set belief of how we picture leadership: that a leader is the smartest person in the room, the one with the answer. It's a flattering idea, but it’s also a limiting one. Because once you accept it, you quickly start to realise that once you’ve stepped up into leadership - being the smartest person in the room won’t get you far.
I call this the hidden playbook of leadership. No one hands us this hidden playbook that tells us how to adjust our behaviour AND how we see ourselves, which hits the deepest parts of our self worth. If you find yourself feeling imposter syndrome or feeling like you don't belong in your leadership role, this could be the thing to look at and work on shifting.
Systemic Curiosity: Seeing Beyond Your Direct Context
As an individual contributor, you can see your work clearly. You know what you produced and you can see how it lands - up the chain to the people above you and across to the people beside you. The line of sight is short and the impact is visible.
Leadership doesn't work like that. The complexity around you multiplies, the layers between you and the actual work grow and your decisions carry a ripple effect you can't fully trace. The context you need to make a good call is no longer in front of you. It's spread across people, history and established ways of working you might not have been a part of before.
But without curiosity, you make decisions on a fraction of the context that matters - and you may have no idea how much you've missed.
This is where the pressure on new leaders works against them. Because let’s be honest - most new leaders want to make an impact and do things differently - in fact, many organisations put pressure on their leaders to do something bold and be noticed to show your value. Organisations reward decisiveness and we tell people to come in and make their mark inside 90 days. For someone hired from outside, who has never operated in the business before, that's an instruction to guess, assume and override ways of working they haven't understood yet, on the strength of one or two opinions they happened to hear first. We call that decisiveness; more often it's confidence bias and bias can be expensive. The most destructive ways I’ve seen this play out is in start-ups and scale-ups - a c.50M revenue decide they want to hire a ‘heavy hitter’ from Amazon, Netflix, Google, etc - and then quickly realise that the leader they have brought in and asked to shake things up has operated and led in a wildly different environment where ways of working are incredibly different due to scale, complexity and growth stage.
Relational Curiosity: Unlocking Psychological Safety and Best Thinking
Pointed outward, curiosity does more than gather information - it changes what your team is willing to give you.
I like to say, “consensus tends to produce the most tolerable decision for the largest number of people”. The decisions that actually move something usually come from disagreement that's been argued properly, all the way to the point. A curious leader is the one who can draw that out: who turns up at a meeting without the answer, and speaks last in order to let everyone else have space to speak without feeling like they’re disagreeing with the boss from the outset. They ask for the idea that hasn't been said yet and makes the room safe enough to say it. They don’t accept the first answer - they encourage bold thinking, scenario planning.
Think about it - people don't hand you their best thinking because they’re in the presence of your incredible intelligence; they offer it when they can see that you're genuinely interested in theirs.
It also answers one of the hardest practical problems of stepping up. You become responsible for supporting more people than you could ever spend real time with. Curiosity is how you make the time you do have, count. In a one-on-one, asking someone what they've been working on, what's gone well for them lately, what they'd want more of - and actually listening - is what tells them they're seen. For someone working a few layers below you, a real question from their leader, properly heard, goes a long way.
3 Questions Curious Leaders Ask to Unlock Team Potential
What’s the perspective or idea in this room that we haven’t heard yet?
What assumptions are we making that might be completely wrong?
What’s an even bolder way we can do this, or think about this?
How do we 10x this idea instead of taking the safe route?
Self Awareness: Bridging the Leadership Blind Spot
The hardest place to stay curious is about yourself and it matters more, the more senior you get.
Almost no one who steps into leadership believes they have a self-awareness gap. In fact, the research strongly supports this - Dr. Tasha Eurich is an organisational psychologist and researcher points to 95% of us believing we are self aware when in fact, only 10% to 15% actually meet the criteria for true self-awareness.
But you cannot see yourself the way other people see you.
People around you hear your words differently from how you mean them, they will read your tone and your body language and draw their own conclusions. You will explain something that's completely clear in your own head and one person could walk away with the opposite of what you intended. Without any curiosity about how you actually land, you'll keep assuming your version is the only one in the room.
And if you’re reading this and saying, “no, that’s not me, I have self awareness” - think about that. We cannot be fully self aware. And self aware people are always seeking more information about how they are experienced - so, I would argue that anyone that believes they are 100% self aware - is not.
Micro Habits: Practicing Curiosity Under Pressure
Curiosity in leadership isn't a grand stance or a one-off exercise. It's small and continual - a genuine question in a meeting, a pause before you reach for the answer, an interest in how a decision is sitting with the people who have to live with it. Aimed at the system, at the people around you and at yourself.
Authentic vs, Performative Curiosity
The one thing curiosity can't be is performed. A leader can learn the technique - ask the open question, hold back the answer, run the better meeting - and people will still know, almost immediately, whether there's real interest behind it. We’ve all seen it before in a leader.
In fact, a question you don't actually care about the answer to is worse than no question at all, because it tells people you've learned the shape of listening without the substance of it and that erodes trust faster than bluntness ever would. Real curiosity is just being honestly interested in what someone else sees, including the parts that don't flatter you or fit the plan you’ve already built.
Which is why I've never thought of it as a personality trait - the way it's sometimes described - something you're either born with or you're not. It's a belief towards not knowing everything: one you lose under pressure and one you can choose to keep alive, which makes it both harder and more useful than a trait. It's the first thing to go when no one is protecting it, and the hardest to hold onto. I love the saying a leader early in my career used to use on repeat “you don’t know what you don’t know” - which can have a few interpretations but the sharp one I always sit with is this - I have great experience and intelligence but I also know that I will never know everything, I am always open to being proven wrong, being enlightened, having my mind changed by others - because I simply don’t know everything. Being consciously aware of this frames my mindset and how I approach others.
The leaders who leans into their curiosity tend to be the ones still genuinely interested in everything that other people are learning around them, they are curious about what they haven't worked out yet. They don’t believe they are armed with the answers - and in my experience, those are the leaders worth following - and they are the leaders that will continue to grow and show up better, every day.
