BETA This is a new service – your feedback will help us to improve it.

Section 2 of 6
Pathway 3: Maintaining curiosity

Why maintaining curiosity is important for heads of service

Maintaining curiosity is essential for effective leadership at a strategic level, particularly in social care, where biases and assumptions can affect decision-making and service outcomes.  

As a head of service, curiosity encourages you to continuously question your strategic assumptions. It prompts you to explore how your values, motivations, and leadership experiences influence your actions, decisions, and relationships with staff, partners, and stakeholders.  

By remaining curious, you engage in reflective practice that uncovers and addresses conscious and unconscious biases. This ensures more equitable and inclusive leadership across the service. 

Benefits of a curious approach 

Enhance strategic leadership

Driving continuous learning across the service, you identify growth areas in leadership and strategic planning to align with best practices and sector innovations.

Improve service delivery

Engaging in reflective practice, you assess team dynamics and operational processes to ensure service delivery is collaborative, effective, and strategically driven.

Uncover and manage bias

Critically examining assumptions and biases, you foster an inclusive, equitable environment by embedding anti-discriminatory practices across the organisation.

Cultivate better strategic decision-making 

By exploring alternative perspectives, you make informed, child-centred decisions that keep the service adaptive, innovative, and focused on delivering the best outcomes. Without curiosity, heads of service risk relying on assumptions, reinforcing existing biases, and missing opportunities for strategic growth.

This not only affects leadership development but also affects overall service performance and the long-term outcomes for children and families under their care.

Over to you

What recent strategic decisions or actions at the service level could have benefited from greater curiosity? 

  • Are there areas in your leadership where assumptions or established routines have replaced curiosity and strategic reflection? 
  • How can you use curiosity to better understand the needs of your leadership team, your workforce, and the broader service you provide?  

Now, choose one area of your leadership practice such as resource allocation, service partnerships, or staff development, and spend five minutes applying a curiosity-driven approach.  

  • Reflect on how this influences outcomes, and document what you learned in your action plan.  
  • Share these insights with your leadership team or in your next management meeting to encourage a culture of reflective practice.

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

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