Curiosity Before Conclusions
How Great Nurse Leaders Ask Before They Assume
You’re in a meeting and a team member asks the same question three times, each time with a little more heat in their voice. The easy story to tell yourself is that they’re being difficult, or that they don’t respect the process. That story might be completely wrong — and if you act on it before you check it, you’ll have the wrong conversation.
The second step of proactive feedback isn’t about talking. It’s about asking, and then genuinely listening to the answer before you decide what to do next.
The RN Hive Shift
Strong feedback does not begin with a conclusion.
It begins with curiosity.
When nurse leaders ask before they assume, they create room for context, understanding, and accountability.
A proactive culture grows when people feel safe enough to explain what is really happening.
The Cost of Assuming
When leaders skip straight from noticing a behavior to interpreting its motive, they are usually filling in the gap with a story rather than a fact.
That story shapes the tone of the entire conversation that follows — and it is often built on incomplete information.
The person who keeps re-asking a question in a meeting may not feel heard. The employee who seems checked out might be dealing with something entirely outside of work. The nurse who appears resistant may be confused about the expectation or concerned about a risk others have not considered.
You do not know until you ask.
Curiosity does not remove accountability. It makes accountability more accurate. When leaders understand what is contributing to a behavior, they can respond to the real issue instead of correcting the wrong one.
The Research Behind Leading With Curiosity
The Center for Creative Leadership extends its well-known SBI feedback model into what it calls SBI-I — adding a final step of asking about intent.
Inviting someone to explain what was actually happening for them, before you interpret it for them, turns a one-directional correction into a two-way conversation. It often reveals a very different picture from the one the leader first assumed.
This is also where Harvard researcher Amy Edmondson’s work on psychological safety becomes directly relevant to bedside leadership.
Edmondson’s research on clinical teams found something counterintuitive: the highest-performing units were not necessarily the ones reporting the fewest errors. They were the ones where people felt safe enough to talk openly about the errors that occurred.
Safety did not make mistakes disappear. It helped surface them early, while there was still time to learn, respond, and prevent larger problems.
Curiosity is one of the leadership behaviors that helps create that safety — one conversation at a time.
Questions That Open the Door
“Tell me more about that.”
“What’s going on for you right now?”
“I noticed you asked that question a few different times today. It made me wonder if you felt like you weren’t being heard. Can you tell me more?”
These questions are simple, but the leader’s tone matters. Curiosity has to be genuine. A question that sounds like an accusation will still create defensiveness.
Then — and this is the hard part — stop talking.
Let the silence sit.
The answer you receive will help you determine whether you are dealing with a skill gap, a confidence issue, a system barrier, a communication breakdown, or something else entirely.
You cannot close a gap you have not correctly identified, which is exactly where the next step in the SPARK Feedback Framework picks up.
Do not correct the story you created in your own mind.
Ask the question first.
“What am I missing?”
Curiosity gives you information. Assumptions give you a conclusion before the conversation has even started.
Continue Learning With Sisterly Advice™
Building a proactive culture requires more than speaking up. It also requires listening well enough to understand what is happening before deciding how to respond.
In Episode 8 of the Sisterly Advice™ Podcast, we discuss how feedback, curiosity, and clear expectations help nurse leaders create stronger and more proactive teams.
Assumptions close conversations.
Curiosity opens them.
Before deciding what someone’s behavior means, ask what is happening.
Great nurse leaders seek understanding before reaching conclusions.
References
Center for Creative Leadership. (2026). Use SBI (Situation-Behavior-Impact) to inquire about intent. ccl.org.
Edmondson, A. C. (2019). The fearless organization: Creating psychological safety in the workplace for learning, innovation, and growth. Wiley.
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