Keep Leading!® Podcast Episode 004 | Cracking the Curiosity Code | Diane Hamilton

Hello, everyone. This is Eddie Turner, your host for the Keep Leading Podcast, a podcast dedicated to leadership development and leadership insights.As a leader, are you curious? Have you stopped being curious? Well, if so, how can you and I crack the curiosity code and thereby unlock our full potential as leaders. The person who has cracked the code for us will explain. We’re going to learn from Dr. Diane Hamilton why curiosity matters to you and I as leaders right after this message.

Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Keep Leading Podcast, a podcast dedicated to leadership development and insights. I’m your host Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator. I work with leaders to accelerate performance and drive impact.My guest today has interviewed hundreds of the world’s top leaders. It is truly a list of the who’s who. And today I get to interview her. Dr. Diane Hamilton is a nationally syndicated radio host, speaker, moderator, consultant, and author. She’s the former MBA program chair at the Forbes School of Business. Dr Hamilton is the author of multiple books including Cracking the Curiosity Code: The Key To Unlocking Human Potential. She is the creator of Curiosity Code Index Assessment. Her groundbreaking work in the area of curiosity has been heralded by some of the biggest names in leadership. Her books continue to be required reading in universities around the globe.

Dr. Diane Hamilton, welcome to the show.

It’s so nice to be here, Eddie. This is so much fun to join you on your show. I hear it’s doing amazingly well and I’m looking forward to this.

Well, thank you. I am so excited because I got a chance to be a guest on your show and then you came and you spent a little time in Houston. Even though we weren’t able to connect, I still felt your presence.

I loved it there. I’ve never been to Houston until that trip and it was so pretty. I had a quick little tour of Rice University and it was just beautiful. So, yeah, next time we’ll have to get together. I met you back in Dallas years ago. So we have met at least once. So that was good.

Thank you. My memory is escaping me. You’re absolutely right, at the C Suite event. Yes.

Right. I have a picture with you. Yes, we had a big event there and it was really fun to get a chance to meet everybody in the C-Suite Network. And Jeff Hayzlett did a great job with that and it was fun.

Wow! You can’t see me blushing and feeling really, really silly right now but, yes, thank you for the reminder.

I don’t think we had a chance to really meet each other until then. We got thrown into a picture before even being introduced. So it was more fun when you were on the show because I really had a chance to chat with you. And your work and my work, we’re both interested so much in the same stuff. So this is fun.

Yeah, we have a lot in common, including being curious.

Yes, we do.

In fact, your book is doing really well. It’s an Amazon bestseller and it’s available in Kindle hardcover paperback and as an audio book so people can actually hear you live. So tell me what motivated you to write this book.

Well, as you you’re talking about the motivation behind, I want to get but you’d mentioned this in the audio book and as you were introducing me, I was thinking it would be just so great to have audio book narrated. I mean, you have the beautiful voice. I picked Dion Graham to do my audio book narration. He’s one of the best audio book narrators. He’s won like every award out there. And there was a point when you were introducing me and I’m thinking “Well, you sound a lot like Dion. You have that same beautiful toned to your voice.” So I think you have an extra business to go into, Eddie, if you don’t spend much time at million other things that you’re doing.My motivation was … Well, you mentioned I have a radio show with who’s who and definitely have interviewed some of the most amazing individuals on the planet from billionaires to hall of fame speakers to Time Magazine’s most influentials. I mean, every day I am just stunned by who I meet. I had Oliver Bendorf on the other day. I mean, he’s like the most cited psychologist of all time, right?

Wow!

So everybody I talk to, Daniel Goldman, or just the tops of the tops and listening to them and thinking “Oh, the last person, they just really have it.Everything that they’ve done is just amazing.” Every time I started to find out what led to their success, it always kept coming back to that they were really curious. They read a lot. They just had the self-motivation and drive that led them down these paths and they didn’t give up. And there were just certain qualities I started to notice. And I’ve also taught more than the thousand business courses and probably interviewed close to a thousand people now. And so in those business courses you’ve got … I don’t even know how many students overall were there in all those courses I’ve taught and a lot of them are really driven and have a lot of great things in what that they’re trying to do but you could just tell there’s a lot of students who just kind of want you to tell them how to do it. They don’t want to figure it out themselves. And I started to think “Why aren’t they more curious? Why is this group so unbelievable and this group they’re happy to have somebody give them the fish instead of teach them to fish?” And I started to write a book on curiosity because I thought it all boiled down to that. And when I started to research this, everything boiled down to the sparking curiosity. From motivation and drive to critical thinking, conflict, creativity, teamwork, engagement, innovation, productivity, everything kept coming back to curiosity. And I’ve had motivation and drive experts on my show who would say “Yes, curiosity is the spark.” So, as I am writing the book, I’m thinking “Well, I don’t really just want to write a book. This book is about drive and motivation and curiosity.” There wasn’t book or an assessment even out there that really determined what kept people remain curious. That’s what I wanted to fix. I’m not thinking “How can you become more curious if you can’t put your finger on what’s keeping people for being curious, right?” So as I sit down to write the book, I started write an assessment because I had written my doctoral dissertation on emotional intelligence and studied a lot of personality assessments at that time and that led to my interest in just how to assess things. And I hired a bunch of people, psychometric statisticians and people who went to Harvard or Pepperdine and all these people I talked to. And then it started to learn how to do factor analysis on my own because I really wanted to make sure my questions could really pick out the things that help determine what’s impacting curiosity. So as I’m starting to write the book, I start to write the assessment and it all ended up, together they complement each other, and it all ended up a lot bigger project than I had planned. So is the answer to your question, a lot longer than I thought it would be.

No, no, it’s fascinating. And you really help us to understand the full depth and breadth of what went into it. And there’s a couple of things you mentioned that I’d love to unpack. One is how you said everything kept coming back to curiosity and you lay that out very nicely even in the table of contents – Curiosity as it relates to decision making, curiosity in leadership, engagement. You lay it out very nicely just the way you said that everything does come back to that. And I don’t think I made that connection before going through your book.

Well, I didn’t either until I started writing. The things I started to write, well, what are the things that really are problems for companies right now. I mean, everybody’s having conflict resolution with multiple generations or teamwork issues because of that or engagement issues that are huge. As I started to think about all the things that I hear as a consultant that leaders want to fix, I started to write “Well, how can curiosity help with that?” And everything kept coming back to it. And that’s why I included chapters on all those things because I really think those are the pain points that everybody’s feeling right now. And it just resonated with so many people. You saw that I had Keith Krach write the forward and he’s the billionaire genius behind DocuSign and a lot of other ventures. And he was one of the most curious people I knew. And so I had a lot of people like that who took a look at my work and Verne Harnish and Jeff Hayzlett and Conan Fischer and Steve Forbes. I mean, you name it, they all wrote really wonderful things because they agreed that curiosity was a huge thing. And I can’t remember exactly how Verne put it but he was saying this could be the next big movement similar to what we’re seeing with emotional intelligence, what we saw how important it is to leadership. And I think everybody knows that motivation and drive is important but they didn’t go back far enough, I don’t think. I think we needed to keep it to the spark which, I think, is very awesome.

And, by the way, congratulations on getting a billionaire to endorse your book but you’ve got three. I mean, that’s just incredible. So you definitely know some pretty influential people and it says a lot that they put their stamp on your work because it really is well done.

I was really grateful to even … I mean, I’ve interviewed so many billionaires. Jeff Hoffman was going to write to me. He never got to get through with that one but I’ve interviewed Craig Newmark of Craigslist. All those guys, they’re just so … I mean, think of all the great people that have reached billionaire status. And every one of them, I include stories about a lot of them in my book and, I mean he is just the most voracious reader than anybody I’ve met my whole life. And he just goes into different industries and tries to figure out what it is that needs fixing. And he goes in with fresh eyes. He doesn’t let it limit him that he’d never had been trained in that, whatever that is, in college or whatever. He starts from the ground and he builds it into … and he never stops reading. I’ve never met anybody quite so driven in terms of wanting to learn like he does.

Yeah, you do cite a lot of people and you did to a lot of research on this. Literally when I said that you’ve interviewed hundreds of the world’s top leader, sometimes that’s the use of hyperbole when someone may say something like that but in your case, clearly it was no hyperbole. I mean, people look at your guest list or people you’ve had on either your radio show, nationally syndicated, or your podcast, it really is some impressive list of people, some of literally the best authors in the world, the most influential business people, C-Suite leaders. I mean, you’ve covered the gamut. So, very impressive.

You’re one of them. And I think that I try to seek out the best of the best and I think it’s getting close to a thousand, I hate to say. It’s been not quite that many but there’s been quite a few. And every year I keep thinking “Well, how many more people can I interview?” because it seems like there’s always somebody new and exciting. I never would have realized, I would have met some of the people I’ve met. Yesterday I had Rich Paulgaard on. He’s huge at Forbes and really has great new book out and it was so fun to talk to him. He’s a friend. And I’ve gotten to know so many people from my work as MBA Programs here at Forbes it really was helpful to get to know people like Rich and Conan Fischer and Steve Forbes and those guys but once you start to know people and you get into this business, you realize everybody’s just like everybody else. These billionaires, you’d think they would be just so different but they’re just like everybody else. They’re working their rear ends off every day and they love it. And a lot of them become really great at philanthropy and they really give back. I’ve been to events where Keith Krach’s given away a million dollars right in front of me for children and amazing education opportunities. And so, I’m really fortunate to have been around the people I’ve been around, I have to say that.

Wonderful, wonderful. Thank you, Dr. Diane. So let’s pause for a quick word from our sponsor.

It’s time for this week’s shout-outs. This is where I acknowledge individuals who have engaged with the Keep Leading Podcast on social media or on iTunes. This week Angela Dickson, thank you for sharing on LinkedIn and Facebook. David Wolfe, who happens to be the audio engineer behind the Keep Leading Podcast. Lou Diamond, MCAG. Daniel Dobesch, Jesse Mejia, and Melanie Bragg who just released a book called Defining Moments: Insights To The Lawyer’s Soul. I want to thank all those individuals for their reviews of the Keep Leading Podcast on iTunes. That is very helpful to me and the podcast as well as those who may be contemplating if this is the right podcast for them. So thank you all. I really appreciate.I invite you to subscribe to the Keep Leading Podcast and share it with your friends. Please leave a review for me on iTunes so I know you’re out there and I know what you’re thinking. If you leave a review for me on iTunes or share this podcast on social media, please tag me and then send me a message so I’ll know. I’ll send you a digital copy of my bestselling book 140 Simple Messages To Guide Emerging Leaders and I’ll also give you a shout-out on social media and on the Keep Leading Podcast.

Okay. My guest today is Dr. Diane Hamilton. She’s just a fascinating person who I am so privileged to have on the show. And Dr. Diane has discussed with us her book Cracking The Curiosity Code: The Key To Unlock Human Potential.

Dr. Diane, you were telling us about the Curiosity Code Index that you create it because there wasn’t anything out there that met your needs. Can you talk a little bit more about that and why the reader will benefit by using it?

Well, it was an interesting to develop because I didn’t want to have an assessment that just told you if you are curious or not because there’s been assessments like that. If you look at some of the research out there in the past, openness with experience, as part of the big five, which includes curiosity but it’s also creativity and self actualization and different aspects. And I wanted something that was only curiosity in only what impacts it so that we can fix it, right? So after so many thousands of questionnaires and respondents out there filling in their responses, we finally narrowed down the questions. We got it down to 36 questions. So it’s a really quick questionnaire, similar to taking a simple like emotional intelligence or MBTI type of assessment but what we’re finding are there are four things that impact curiosity, which are fear, assumptions, technology, and environment. And what we found on the fear is fear is real common. Actually, I thought it was going to be just … I was wondering how much because everybody has that, right? I mean, nobody wants to be embarrassed or lose control or fail at anything. So we looked at some of the factors. I mean, a lot of it is past experience, some of it is pressure to succeed, some of it is just don’t want to look incompetent or be rejected. And there were just so many sub-factors involved in fear that when someone takes the test, they get their results in nine different subcategories of fear. And that’s really helpful because I think a lot of people don’t realize “Oh, that’s why I don’t do this” or “I’m afraid to say something” or “I avoid proposing a solution.” And we really want people to get over that sense of fear because in the past, I mean, sometimes it was looked at as insubordination almost if you don’t help anything or ask questions but now they realize that if you really want to be innovative, you got to get some options from everybody. And if you’re telling people “Don’t come to me with your problems if you don’t have solutions,” well, then people are going to fear coming to you. They may notice a problem but not actually know a solution, they might be qualified to give you a solution. So that’s not really … I mean, I understand where some of this is coming from when they say that. They want to make sure people don’t just complain all the time but sometimes you have to be aware some of the problems. So we got to realize what we’re telling people that might be causing them fear.And then assumptions. I like to think of assumptions as the voice in your head. You’re just assuming you’re not going to be interested, that that’s not necessary, “I don’t like this,” “It sounds boring,” all things that we say to ourselves out of maybe doing something, you’re reading something and we don’t see why should we bother. And we’ll have that negative kind of tone sometimes. And some of it is based on past experience, we’ve done things in the past and some of it is just we make assumptions that aren’t true. So I think, again, there’s nine sub-categories underneath the main heading of ‘assumptions’ that I think you can really get some good ideas about what you’re telling yourself that might be holding you back.

And then the third area is technology. And a lot of people are held back by technology either because it does it for them and then they have to think about it or they don’t get the foundational reasoning behind things or they feel pressured to the change, it’s not from their timeframe, maybe they’re older and they didn’t grow up with it or it keeps changing so much, they finally learn it and then they got to learn it again, all that type of thing or it’s just too much, it’s information overload. Some people really rely on technology instead of using their critical thinking skills, which can be problematic as well. So as we talk about some of the things that leaders are trying to fix, we really want critically thinking employees. And if you’re over reliant on technology, that can be a problem and if you’re afraid of it, then that’s a problem.

And then the last one is environment. Environment is everything from your childhood to your current situations, every relationship you’ve ever had from your parents to your siblings to work relationships, peers, friends, you name it, your current boss, your past boss, anybody you’ve ever met basically, even social media. So there’s so much that when you’re a child, you’re very curious, you’re going to school, and then the teachers have teach, so they test, they have limited time to answer questions. And then even in work situations, you might have had a past boss that shut you down or gave you a bunch of work and no reward for that work. There’s so much that holds people back. And a lot of people just want to be liked, they just go along with the flow and they kind of miss their passion in life because of that.

Wonderful. So what I hear you saying is it’s about fate. FATE – Fear, Assumptions, Technology, and Environment. Thank you for your explanation on those.Now, one of the things you mentioned here was very similar to something I was going to ask about that you mentioned that your chapter about curiosity and leadership. And you said when you were discussing how “Don’t bring me questions. Bring me solutions” was just a very common adage. So not only from an employee level but from a leader level, so within the chapter where you discussed that, you mentioned that even leaders may lack curiosity because they fear that being curious would expose them as not being smart as people believe that they are. Talk a little bit more about that if you would.

Well, nobody ever wants to look stupid, right? . Nobody wants to look like they’re aren’t in control of everything. And I think some leaders are so afraid to discover that they don’t know as much as they should know or as much as they think they should know. And I think we’re seeing a lot of people who just think “How did I get here? If I let anybody know that I don’t know everything, I’m going to look bad” and that’s a problem. And I had mentioned Keith Krach writing the forward and he’s somebody who I really admire because he just is so humble and the fact that he just says “I put really great around me” because you can’t know everything. I mean, no one knows everything but if you surround yourself with the best people and you don’t worry that if you ask questions or provide input that you’re going to look bad … He has this humble way of acting. He doesn’t pretend that he knows it all. And I love that quality in a leader because you know he’s smart guy, he went to Purdue and he’s a billionaire, created all these companies and there’s no way he’s not bright. You know he is and you’re going to be a CEO of a company without being bright. So you have to let go a little bit of that need to be thought of as so perfect because there’s no way you can know everything. That’s why you surround yourself with great people. I mean, Steve Jobs didn’t know probably a tenth and what Wozniak new in programming and different things but he was great at what he knew. And it’s impossible for everybody to know everything. And you have to really think about who you surround yourself with and make sure that you have that humble quality and ask people questions and if you’re showing that you have the ability to ask questions and be vulnerable, other people will be that way as well, which is important for people to learn.

Very we’ll said. Well, if a leader is listening to this podcast right now and they’re wondering about themselves or organizations, how can they keep leading, and the secret is curiosity, what do they need to do if they determine that they need to develop curiosity. Other than read your book and take the assessment, what would you say to them?

Well, they made the first step is they recognized there’s a problem that they want solve, right? And I think that we all know all of us, like you and I both, deal with culture and change in organizations and if the CEO doesn’t buy in, that’s a big problem. If they know that there’s a change needed, the CEO has to be behind it. And if they recognize that these are issues, engagement is an issue or conflict is an issue, whatever their problems are, and a lot of them are working on innovation and productivity issues, if they realized that curiosity could be the main key to what helps them overcome some of the problems that they’re experiencing, its’ really simple to work on that. And the training programs are really great. We certify the leadership consultants and HR professionals out there who are going through the training right now to be CCI certified. In that we give them some assessment assignments that you give when the boys are taking these assessments. So, say a leader decides they want everybody to take the CCI in the organization. Well, either somebody like I would come in or Eddie would come in or whoever is certified to give the CCI or their HR people may have already become certified, it would give the assessment to all the employees and the employees can keep their own personal results as private but there’s a couple of activities where they go over there issues that they have and create action plans to improve in these areas, which is really helpful for all four areas of F-A-T-E, as we mentioned, but then there’s also other assignments that they can do and one of them is a really important one for leadership because the result is that everybody who takes the assessment, they all get together in their training course and come up with ideas to give to leaders about how to improve in some of these areas like engagement and innovation based on what can help develop their curiosity skills. So from the horse’s mouth, so to speak, the leaders are getting these ideas of “This is what we need to succeed. And this is because we know about curiosity now, this is what I think would help me be more curious.” And then the consultant or HR person would go back to leadership with a report saying “Overall, these are the suggestions we have. This is how we can make your organization better. This is what will for engagement. This is what will work innovation.” And it’s a compiled report. And consultants love this because it’s basically giving them something a huge value to give to leaders.

Thank you.Now there’s another area that you focus on related to curiosity in your book and I briefly ran through some of those that really were interesting to me. There is emotional intelligence. I’m a certified emotional intelligence practitioner. And you’re not only certified but you also interviewed the man himself, Daniel Goldberg. I don’t know many people that can say this. I’m just in awe of you for that reason but there’s something you said that I just thought was really important to share with the audience and that is something I’ve never heard put quite this way and I love this – “Emotional intelligence is not about being nice. It’s about being impactful.” I love that. Talk about that a little bit.

Well, a lot of people think that you hear things like emotional intelligence, just the word ‘emotion’ brings up soft skills, soft, and everybody likes to make everything seem kind of squishy. And I love the Daniel Goldman gave it a real solid like this is something very important and this isn’t just about being liked and being something that could sound as fluff. You know what I mean? And so he was the key, in my mind, who made emotional intelligence mainstream even though there were other researchers that had done unbelievable research that he drew on. I love his book because it really made the statement that “EQ can matter more than IQ.” And we’ve seen how many years that we hear people saying they’re hiring people for their abilities and their skills but they’re ending up firing them for their behaviors. So their soft skills and their emotion intelligence is a huge problem for organizations. That’s why I think EI is something that so many companies still need to develop. And I am working with a lot of research in the area of not just curiosity but perception and other things that impact performance. And EI keeps coming up. No matter what area you deal with, emotional intelligence comes up, because our motions are so influenced by our surroundings, our culture. The best part about emotional intelligence is that it can be developed though because it can be changed, it can be improved. And that’s I think why Daniel made just a slash and now Travis Bradberry and others have capitalized on how great this is to know because it’s the front part of your brain where you’ve got processes where you can just develop what we’re doing in our knowledge and our brain and our ability to handle growth in our areas of emotional awareness. And it’s interesting to look at emotional intelligence because when I wrote my dissertation on emotional intelligence and its impact on performance, I was fascinated by it because I didn’t really know much about it long time ago. And I kept thinking “Well, this is kind of a neat subject. I wonder how long this will stick around.” And it became so huge. I mean it kept growing and growing and snowballing and people really see the importance of it. That’s why I thought it was such a compliment when burn Verne Harnish was saying that he thought curiosity could be the next big movement in human performance because I really think that that’s what we’re looking at is trying to improve human performance and emotional intelligence is key to that.

Well, I think Verne maybe on to something and I couldn’t agree more. And if it does turn out to be the next big movement, I’ll be fortunate to say that I had a chance to interview you before it took off to the level that I think it’s going to reach.Well, if our listeners are listening and we were to boil this down to one succinct statement, I think it would be that curiosity impacts everything from engagement to innovation and productivity. And it’s the spark that ignites motivation and drive. Would you say so?

I would agree and I would add that our goal, my goal is to just help the world develop their curiosity just for them to learn just a little bit about something that they’d never looked into before, just to make fear be a little bit less, to have that voice in our head be a little more positive, to embrace technology just a little bit more, and recognize that our environment might have dissuaded us from something that could have been something we really would love.And if we’re going to be truly engaged, we need to be aligned properly. And I think we can do that through developing our curiosity.

I love it. I love it. Well, Dr. Diane, my listeners are listening to this podcast so that they learn ways to keep leading. Do you have a leadership quote that you could share?

Well, I don’t know if I would consider it leadership quote or just a people quote but I would say one of my favorite quotes, I had a whole bunch of them in my book, but Albert Einstein had some of the best votes and his most famous one that I like to use is “I have no special talent. I’m only passionately curious.” And I love the humble quality of that because nobody’s more curious but Albert Einstein was it for me and I was so impressed by what he was able to accomplish and I would like more people to try and emulate that.

Well, based on our discussion today, I certainly believe that is a leadership quote because I’m going to certainly be telling people that if we want to be more effective as leaders, if we want to continue to develop and keep leading, we have to become curious and stay curious.

I love that.

All right. Well, thank you so much for being a guest in my show. And tell everybody where they can find you, please.

Well, it’s so nice of you to have me on the show, Eddie. There’s a couple of places. If they want to know more about curiosity and developing their curiosity levels, they can go to CuriosityCode.com and on that site you can get the book. Of course, on Amazon as well you can get the book but you get the book, you can take the assessment, and you can contact me if you’re interested in becoming CCI certified, which would give you five hours of recertification credit and a lot of discounts on future assessments and things that you give to organizations. There’s really been a lot of interest in that. And if you’re interested in any of my other work, it’s at DrDianeHamilton.com. You can also get to the curiosity information from there as well as my radio show and my consulting and speaking.

Fantastic. Well, we’re going to make sure that this is in the show notes so that folks who are driving or doing other things while listening can be able to go back and retrieve those and get in touch with you and stay connected with you. Thanks again.

Thank you so much, Eddie.

Well, that concludes this episode everyone. This is Eddie Turner, the Leadership Excelerator, reminding you that leadership is not about our title or our position. Leadership is an activity. Leadership is action. No, it’s not the case of once a leader, always a leader. It’s not a garment we put on and take off. We must be a leader at our core and allow it to emanate in all we do. So whatever you’re doing, always keep leading.