Let's talk Transformation : The business leaders podcast #146 Curiosity based transformation with Julie Pham
"Think about how stretchy you are and what you accept. Where are your breaking points?"
One particularly striking data point: 70% of people face obstacles asking questions at work.
This statistic underscores a core issue. Curiosity is often cited as a value, yet many environments make it unsafe to ask for clarification or challenge ideas. Fear of looking incompetent, challenging authority, or slowing down progress often silences valuable input.
Julie and I discuss how curiosity, respect, and self-awareness can transform organisational life. We explore practical strategies for leaders to foster psychological safety and inclusive collaboration, using Julie's own unique journey and the powerful “Seven Forms of Respect” framework for guidance.
We often talk about “soft skills” in organisations, but as teams become more global and complexity increases, these skills are anything but soft. They’re foundational. We discover a refreshing perspective to curiosity, respect, and self-awareness, showing us how to make these invisible dynamics tangible and actionable. This in turn allows leaders to shift from just “knowing” to truly “learning” — a real leadership superpower in our changing world.
Recognising your “rubber band” stretchiness - Understand personal boundaries and breaking points, and communicate them to others is also key as it prevents snapping and strengthens relationships. This episode offers key insights into navigating complex team dynamics and maintaining a learning mindset in high-pressure environments.
The main insights you'll get from this episode are :
- Being a self-taught organisational development consultant taught the critical value of sharing resources and building communities in times of crisis; there is tension and friction in any community but making the invisible relational dynamics tangible helps to understand them.
- When it comes to learning from other people, curiosity and self-assessment are required for the shift from knowing to learning, and to decode the different dynamics; curiosity requires questions, but do people feel safe enough to ask questions?
- Internal narrative and cultural formatting influence communication - we are all members of multiple cultures, communities and identities simultaneously, and inward curiosity is a prerequisite: What matters to me?
- Our multiple identities mean that we must slow down and reflect to enable good decisions to be made from a place of curiosity; leadership rituals (e.g. meeting facilitator rotation) can help teams maintain curiosity when under pressure, create empathy and force listening.
- Using the seven forms of respect as a framework for collaboration helps understand how respect is relative, dynamic, subjective and contradictory: Procedure, Punctuality, Information, Candor, Consideration, Acknowledgement, Attention.
- A useful analogy here is with language: the organisational level represents the national language; departments represent dialects; and the individual is represented by their own language – we all need to be multilingual.
- Intercultural working results in unclear messages, which lead to perpetuated actions and unmet expectations that were never made explicit - a team must understand what respect means to them, not by guessing, but by asking others.
- Inward curiosity is about self-reflection and admitting what challenges us and what our expectations are – this can be difficult to acknowledge given that it can be perceived as a challenge to our identity.
- Curiosity in practice means approaching conversations curiously and asking ourselves two questions first: Do I want the other person to learn from me? Am I willing to learn from them? This applies in the workplace and in our private lives.
- Context, such as corporate, personal communities, etc., can make a difference to the outcome given that some relationships are more transactional (e.g. tech company) than based on investment in people (e.g. governments) - it is easier to practice curiosity when there is less emotional attachment.
- The golden rule of respect is to treat people the way you want to be treated. The ‘rubber band rule’ holds that we can all stretch, if we want to, for other people; if we overstretch, we snap and break but often blame others for this.
- The stretchiness of the band varies depending on contexts, which require different boundaries; it is about adapting, reframing what you can do rather than what you can’t, and feeling safe enough to make a counteroffer.
Find out more about Julie and her work here :
https://www.linkedin.com/in/juliepham2/
https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/curiosity-at-work/id1761849370
TedEx : https://youtu.be/Jb0aQ2gE4tU?si=izPd0kf_1OfzW7Bz
YouTube : https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCMatwOESTROb6qJF5qYf1Kg