Picture the last time someone on your team genuinely frustrated you. Maybe they missed a deadline without flagging it. Maybe they pushed back on a decision in a way that felt personal. Maybe they seemed checked out, and you couldn’t figure out why.
Chances are, your brain went straight to a verdict. They’re being difficult. They don’t care enough. They’re not cut out for this.
That’s not a character flaw. That’s just how brains work. We’re wired to assess situations quickly and move on. But in leadership, that reflex costs us more than we realize. Every time we jump to a conclusion about someone, we close a door. And sometimes, as leadership coach Andrea Garfield explains to Simon in a series of lessons on active listening inside Leaderful, we slam it.
The antidote is curiosity. And the good news is that it’s a skill we can build.
The Trap Most Leaders Fall Into
Here’s what most of us do when we listen to someone we disagree with. We listen to answer one question: do I agree with this? We’re evaluating the argument, building our rebuttal, deciding whether this person is right or wrong. We think we’re being discerning. What we’re actually doing is making the conversation about us.
Andrea calls this the judgment trap, and psychology backs her up. Attribution bias research shows we’re wired to explain other people’s behavior through the lens of their character rather than their circumstances. Someone acts out and we conclude they’re difficult, rather than asking what might be driving the behavior.
The shift Andrea recommends is deceptively simple. Instead of asking “do I agree with this,” we ask: “what is going on for them?” That one question moves us out of the courtroom and into genuine contact with another human being. We don’t have to agree with what we hear. We just stay open long enough to understand what’s actually happening, which is almost always more complicated than our first instinct suggests.
Why We Should Start Small
Most of us make the mistake of trying to practice curiosity in our hardest relationships first. We go straight to the colleague who consistently frustrates us, the conversation we’ve been dreading, the dynamic that’s been broken for months. We try to do the advanced work before we’ve built the muscle, and then we wonder why it feels impossible.
Andrea’s advice is to start somewhere the stakes are lower: with coworkers we don’t know as well, with acquaintances, with lower-stakes conversations. Research on emotional regulation shows our capacity for perspective-taking drops significantly when we’re activated. We build the skill in calm water so it’s available in the storm.
“Think of it like training for a marathon,” Andrea says. “You don’t start with 26 miles. You start with one, and then two, and then five. Curiosity works the same way.”
The Exercise That Changes How We See People
For the moments when curiosity feels hardest, Andrea offers one simple exercise. After a difficult interaction, we sit down and write 20 different reasons why someone might have acted the way they acted. Not 20 reasons we agree with. Just 20 possibilities, however creative they need to get.
The first five come easily. The next five take some thought. By 15, something starts to shift.
“Most people find that around number 12 or 13, they write something that stops them cold,” Andrea says. “Something that makes them think: oh. That actually might be it. And suddenly the whole situation looks different.”
Research on perspective-taking confirms it. Generating multiple explanations for someone’s behavior reduces emotional reactivity and increases our willingness to engage constructively. The verdict we arrived at so quickly starts to look like one interpretation among many.
“There’s a lot here that has nothing to do with me,” is how Andrea describes the feeling that follows. “It makes a lot of sense.”
That realization frees us to respond thoughtfully instead of react defensively. Curiosity doesn’t ask us to abandon our judgment. It just asks us to delay it long enough to see the full picture.
That’s not weakness. That’s the whole job.
