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Section 2 of 6
Pathway 4: Maintaining curiosity

Why maintaining curiosity is important for practice leaders

Maintaining curiosity is essential for you as a practice leader as it creates continuous learning, innovation, and adaptability.

By staying open-minded, you can challenge assumptions, address biases, and ensure decisions prioritise the best interests of children and families. This approach encourages improvement, responsiveness, and better outcomes. 

Maintaining curiosity can also help you build stronger relationships with your team and stakeholders by promoting open communication and trust. It encourages a culture of collaboration and shared learning, which can improve team performance and morale.  

Curiosity also helps leaders to stay ahead of trends and changes in the field, making you more proactive in both 

  • addressing challenges 
  • taking opportunities for growth and innovation

This mindset supports more effective leadership and governance.

Benefits of a curious approach 

Strategic decision-making  

A curious leader asks critical questions about how high-level decisions affect the organisation's mission and long-term goals. This ensures that strategies are both child-centred and future-proof. 

Building high-performing leadership teams 

By understanding the strengths and development needs of senior and middle managers, you support leadership growth, succession planning, and accountability across the organisation. 

Navigating complex systems 

Identifying and addressing system-wide issues like service inequities, biases, and governance gaps enables practice leaders to drive changes that improve outcomes for children and families. 

Adapting to policy shifts and external challenges 

Staying informed about the social care landscape and policy changes enables practice leaders to guide their teams in adapting effectively to regulations and trends. 

Driving organisational innovation 

Questioning frameworks and exploring research and partnerships allows practice leaders to drive innovation, improving service delivery and creating benefits for the organisation and its stakeholders. 

This approach ensures practice leaders remain agile, forward-thinking, and deeply connected to both their teams and the wider system they influence. 

Failing to maintain curiosity results in outdated practices, poor decisions, and reduced team engagement, weakening leadership effectiveness and service quality for children and families.

Over to you 

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

  • How has my curiosity, or lack of it, influenced recent decisions, and what effect did that have on outcomes for children, families, and the organisation? 
  • In what ways has maintaining curiosity helped me identify opportunities for growth, innovation, or improvement that I may have otherwise overlooked? 
  • What are the potential risks to my team’s engagement, decision-making quality, or service delivery if I stop actively looking for different perspectives and questioning assumptions?

You can use the ‘Why maintaining curiosity is important as a practice leader’ 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