Hone Your Leadership Curation Skills
Curation is a term often linked to social media content. The concept has gained popularity for leaders who bring together people, ideas, expertise and resources to reach outcomes by collaborating.
We can all benefit from a curator’s mindset, since no single leader can master every domain. I read a great piece in Fast Company that inspired this post.
- Curate Talent. Build diverse teams with complementary skills and perspectives because research shows they outperform homogeneous teams in problem-solving efficiency.
- Curate Ideas. Create spaces where unconventional thinking is not only encouraged but strategically leveraged.
- Curate Innovation. Design environments where experimentation, iteration, and cross-disciplinary collaboration drive meaningful breakthroughs.
Be a Conductor!
Rather than positioning yourself as a singular expert, act as Conductor, ensuring that the right voices are heard at the right moments. Consider the collective ideas you are orchestrating.
Adopt a Curation Mindset
- Honor the Outliers. Conventional wisdom often leads to conventional results. The best leaders actively engage with voices outside their immediate circles—contrarians, industry outsiders, and emerging thinkers who challenge the status quo.
- Design for Collaboration, Not Just Efficiency. Many organizations optimize for productivity at the cost of creative collision. Leaders must create structured serendipity, allowing ideas from different disciplines to intersect in unexpected ways.
- Facilitate, Don’t Dictate. Instead of being the sole decision-maker, adopt a facilitator’s mindset—guiding discussions, posing better questions, and allowing collective intelligence to emerge.
- Champion Psychological Safety. The best ideas come from environments where individuals feel safe to challenge, experiment, and even fail forward to learn valuable lessons.
Embrace curation and consider who you can bring together to collaborate with to achieve extraordinary results!
I’m Caroline Dowd-Higgins, a motivational speaker and executive coach working with leaders to empower them to do their best work and create healthy and productive work cultures. Let’s connect—because we all benefit when people thrive in life and career.
