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There’s that moment every leader knows: something feels off, but you don’t have enough information to confidently call it feedback yet.
A plan sounds fine on the surface, but your gut says there’s a missing assumption. Someone outlines next steps, but you can’t quite connect the dots. A project is moving forward, but you have that quiet, familiar spidey-sense that the team is solving the wrong problem.
You feel the urge to say something, but you also don’t want to overstep, derail momentum, or give feedback based on a half-formed suspicion.
This is where curiosity becomes one of the most useful tools you have.
To be clear: this is not a substitute for feedback. Feedback absolutely has its place, and avoiding it doesn’t serve anyone. Where curiosity holds value is as a bridge. A low-pressure way to surface the information you need before you decide whether feedback is actually warranted.
A thank you from our sponsor:
Get your own “year in meetings” recap.
Granola just launched Granola Crunched—a fun, end-of-year look at your meeting patterns. It highlights everything from how often you meet to the behaviors that appear most frequently in your collaboration style.
It surfaced a few insights for me this year (including the fact that I spent 22,442 minutes in meetings… so next year is definitely going to be a “fewer meetings” year).
If you missed using Granola in 2025, you can still generate insights from your first meeting onward. Get your first month for free by clicking here.
Granola is an AI Notepad that helps you stay present in meetings while capturing what matters—and Granola Crunched is a great way to wrap the year with a little clarity and a few surprises.
Check out four of my highlights below.
Curiosity lets you slow things down just enough to ask questions like:
“Can you walk me through how you landed on this approach?”
“What tradeoffs were you thinking about here?”
“What assumptions are we leaning on?”
“What does success look like from your perspective?”
These questions don’t correct. They illuminate. And once things are illuminated, the real conversation becomes obvious, whether that’s “This looks great,” “We’re missing something critical,” or “Here’s the feedback I didn’t know how to give five minutes ago.”
Curiosity works here because it keeps the door open. It signals that you’re trying to understand, not criticize. It prevents you from giving premature direction based on incomplete data. And it protects the relationship while you gather context.
I was thinking about this a lot after seeing my “Crunched” summary from Granola this week, where one of the insights joked that I “weaponize the I’m new card.” It made me laugh, but it’s true: being new gives you permission to ask blunt, clarifying questions under the cover of context-seeking—and honestly, those questions often reveal more than any piece of polished feedback would.
It reminded me how often leaders jump too quickly into advice-giving when what the moment really needs is a deeper understanding.
Curiosity doesn’t replace feedback. It makes feedback accurate. And sometimes, it makes the feedback unnecessary because the team sees the gap themselves.
When something feels off, but you don’t yet know why, curiosity lets you move toward clarity without doing damage along the way. That’s the sweet spot.