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Section 2 of 6
Pathway 2: Maintaining curiosity

Why maintaining curiosity is important for middle managers 

Maintaining curiosity as a middle manager helps you better understand your team’s strengths and challenges, enabling stronger collaboration and trust.  

It ensures you stay attuned to the evolving needs of children and families, driving more effective support.  

By remaining curious, you adapt to changes, make informed decisions, and model reflective leadership for your team. Maintaining curiosity as a middle manager in children's social care can offer several benefits: 

Enhanced problem-solving 

Curiosity drives managers to question practices, explore solutions, and find better ways to address challenges, improving outcomes for children and families. 

Continuous professional growth 

Staying curious encourages lifelong learning, keeping managers current and enabling them to lead with fresh perspectives, innovative approaches, and a commitment to personal growth. 

Stronger relationships 

Curiosity about team dynamics and strengths improves communication, strengthens relationships, and creates a motivated, cohesive team that feels understood and valued. 

A culture of innovation 

A curious leader builds a learning culture, inspiring teams in children’s social care to innovate, adapt, and improve outcomes for children and families. 

Failing to maintain curiosity limits adaptability, affects innovation, and increases biases, leading to outdated practices, missed improvements, and negative effects on service delivery and outcomes. 

Over to you

Spend 10 minutes reflecting on the following questions as part of your practice: 

  • What assumptions do I hold about my team or the challenges we face, and how might these influence my decisions? 
  • What specific action can I take this week to encourage curiosity in my leadership practice? 
  • Now, choose one area of your team leadership, for example, motivation and engagement, communication and wellbeing and apply a curiosity-driven approach. Reflect on how this influences the outcome and document what you learned in your action plan.  
  • Share your insights with a peer or in your next supervision session. 

You can use the ‘Why maintaining curiosity is important as a middle manager’ section in your 4C leadership capability framework action plan for this activity. 

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The resources have been developed by Frontline in collaboration with DfE.
Published: 30 January 2025
Last updated: 30 January 2025