The Benefits of Business Bravery

“Curiosity and an attitude of openness to possibilities, ideas, experimentation and a sense of excitement tend to be underlying drivers for innovative organizations,” writes Emile Haddad, the respected Business Coach and Consultant whose perspective on the entrepreneurial spirit of today focuses on how younger companies are bolder, and arguably driven more by openness and a willing to branch out into the unknown than their more seasoned contemporaries.  New ideas and riskier moves have tended to shape much of the business landscape over the past decade.  Take, for instance, Napster.

Image Source: curiosity.discovery.com

Napster was founded and designed by Shawn Fanning and Sean Parker, and co-founded by John Fanning.  The company began in June of 1999 as a simple peer-to-peer file sharing program, mainly MP3 music files.  Although there were many other similar programs at the time, theirs was overwhelmingly faster than anything else online.  Despite copyright infringement allegations from musicians and record labels, the service exploded beyond possibilities anyone could ever imagine, with roughly 80 million registered Napster users at its peak.  Shawn Fanning was 19 and Sean Parker was 20 years old.  Mark Zuckerberg has a somewhat similar story, and Sean Parker would go on to help Zuckerberg launch Facebook just years later.

Image Source: lifenews.com

Albeit Napster eventually closed down its service by court order due to copyright infringement, these entrepreneurs still represented that youthful determination to push something, enhance it, and drive to inspire the overall abilities of the individual and the group with clear and conscious diligence.

Emile Haddad touches upon these sentiments quite often in his writing, stating, “Asking difficult questions of yourself and your peers requires skills that include mutual respect, encouragement of all ideas and the recognition that in every idea, even the least significant, lays a kernel of wisdom worth inquiring about and worth teasing out of the collective wisdom of the group.”

 

Image Source: howto-expert.com

Contemporary times call for contemporary approaches to business development and operations, and having the courage to dive in headfirst and lean more on bravery than caution can instill a core of ideals that hold true and reap the rewards your willingness helped forge and acquire.

The advantages of being a curious leader

Companies are constantly driven to improve and innovate in their search for unique angles of engagement and brand reputation. This, in turn, has the potential to increase their customer bases and, consequently, profits.

Image Source: www.vgroup.in

This, however, is not easy for most companies. The difficulty here lies in their focus: Most companies rely on the logical side of an idea in order to attempt at innovation. This approach has the unfortunate tendency of reducing their team to a bunch of emotionless, entirely logic-driven robots which blindly follow stimuli based on predefined conditions. The truth is that human beings are not like this; they are emotionally-driven beings who make decisions according to their whims.

Image Source: www.vapartners.ca

This emotional aspect is the key to innovation. This is also why a lot of newer companies are more likely to come up with innovative ideas. Young people generally have a more curious and excited view toward life. This curiosity is the perfect mix of logic and emotion, one that can naturally drive people to come up with new, progressive ideas and activations.

However, most corporate environments are not conducive to the curiosity that drives innovation. Older entrepreneurs, in particular, tend to exhibit less curiosity due to the numbing effects that years of workplace experience can give.

Image Source: www.egencia.ca

The key to fighting these numbing effects is to keep one’s emotional intelligence constantly developing. As a company grows, leaders in particular have to find ways to keep abreast of their employees’ and colleagues’ experiences in order to keep the innovative spirit alive, which can benefit the company in the long run.

Emile Haddad is a Seattle-based business coach who is the head of Catalyst Business Consulting, which specializes in keeping leaders on their innovative toes. Visit this LinkedIn page for more about his work.

The transactional leader and his healthy sense of curiosity

One of the most challenging aspects in training business leaders centers on the work of emotional intelligence, which calls for developing a leader’s inner observer. And this requires two fundamental attitudes: curiosity and inquiry. Although not necessarily foreign concepts to most leaders, the challenge lies in practicing them consciously and consistently.

Image source: realestatetwincities.net

A pressure-filled, fast-paced environment may result to some leaders quickly leaping to assumptions and conclusions that they have not carefully examined. However, this pitfall can be circumvented if leaders adopt an attitude of curiosity about their own assumptions and conclusions, and choose to do the same with others. This requires leaders to take a mental and emotional stance that will keep their own position flexible and open to be influenced by others’ input. Such a stance is achieved through a practice of inquiry, wherein a leader is curious about his inner and outer circumstances, driving him to inquire about his and others’ ideas, assumptions, and conclusions.

Image source: travelink.com

And over time, an attitude of inquiry tends to build a larger capacity for curiosity, which allows for a stronger inner observer and a deeper propensity for emotional intelligence. Leaders become more “tuned-in” to their environment, team, employees, and the culture of the organization—the skills that will become the foundation of a transactional leader.

Image source: info.pnatc.com

Read more about transactional leaders here. For additional tips on how to be an effective leader, subscribe to this Facebook page for business coach Emile Haddad of Seattle, Washington.