Your team needs people who are as curious as toddlers

Toddlers are a handful, as everyone who has ever parented one will tell you. One trait that makes children from about one to three years old so demanding on their parents is their innate curiosity.  They seem be sticking their fingers into something, putting something into their mouths or staring at something with wide-eyed fascination every waking hour of the day.

If you’re in business – everyone with a job is – this hunger to learn and understand is priceless. Yet for too many people, the yearning for learning they had as a toddler is severely eroded by the time they are 35. 

I will posit that the most important thing you should look for in hiring anyone for any job is curiosity. Truckloads of it, in fact.

Look for lane changers

In my career working on communications and strategy issues for several decades, I’ve seen lots of colleagues fall victim to the “stay in your lane” mentality.  They see themselves as one thing or another – say, as a writer – but not as potentially anything else. So, they stay focused their entire careers on being great at writing but they’re not the slightest bit interested in other aspects of communications, of which writing is just one.

But if I’m hiring someone to work in any communications role, I want them to think more broadly than that. I want them to hunger to learn how to be better and better communicators in the digital age, not solely writers in the pre-digital tradition.

I want them to want to know how to interpret data, which is the heart of modern marketing and communications.  I want them to be curious about how people consume information in 2024, not just how they did so in 1994.  I want them to wonder why so many younger people gravitate to YouTube and Tik Tok and how that seismic shift affects how we need to reach any audience. I want them to read about something they never cared about and ponder how they can apply the new knowledge they just gained.

Willing to be uncomfortable

The list goes on.  It’s a big and amazing world out there full of things most of us don’t know much about.  Every business or organization needs people who will say, “I just listened to an incredible podcast and it gave me an idea on how to approach this problem.” Or, “I admit I am way behind on this subject and I want to go to a conference to learn from the experts even though my lack of knowledge will make me a little uncomfortable.”

If you’re a leader and people on your team tend to go the opposite way, you need to hire some different people – the ones who still have plenty of that toddler-like curiosity, no matter their age.  I’d rather have a 70-year-old naturally curious person on my team than a 40-year-old who can’t imagine changing lanes or learning something new.

-              Eric Whittington