The Excellence Mindset, Pt. 4: Strategic Curiosity
Welcome back to the Excellence Mindset series! If you haven’t had a chance to read the first three parts, I encourage you to go back and check them out!
Before we dive in, here’s a quick refresher on what this series is all about:
The Excellence Mindset is a professional posture rooted in self-leadership, humility, and purpose—where growth is intentional, impact is strategic, and high standards are a daily choice.
The work of an administrative professional has been slowly shifting over the last few years from tactical (task-driven) to strategic (impact-driven). Gone are the days when our roles were limited to scheduling meetings, grabbing coffee for our leaders, or compiling documents. We are now expected to streamline our team’s or executive’s work, understand and manage their projects, participate in the completion of their goals, and, in some cases, even handle some decision-making on their behalf. While it may be challenging to think about ways you can be strategic as an administrative professional who has only ever been tactical, the next step in your excellence mindset journey is to cultivate Strategic Curiosity.
Curiosity is a complicated word. The Merriam-Webster definition is “desire to know” and it is synonymous with inquisitiveness, eagerness, or even meddlesomeness. What do you think of when you hear the word curiosity? Maybe you have a negative view of it, like a child who won’t stop asking irrelevant questions, the old phrase “curiosity killed the cat”, or even an image of a nosy neighbor trying to get into everyone’s business? Or maybe you have a more positive view, such as the thrill of learning something new, or the feeling you get when someone asks you something about yourself and you feel seen and valued because they care.
For the purpose of our conversation, I will defer to the Cambridge definition: “an eager wish to know or learn about something”. As administrative professionals, we must have an eagerness to know or learn about the things that are important and impactful to our leaders and organization. It’s not just about knowing random facts and figures, nor about inserting yourself into everything that is going on. We must be above being the office busybody or office gossip, and maintain professional intentionality about the ways in which we are curious. That is why it is important in our roles to not just maintain a focus on curiosity, but Strategic Curiosity.
Strategic Curiosity is about three things: asking intentional, forward-thinking questions that help you level up the quality of your work, expanding your knowledge in meaningful ways, and elevating your strategic value within your organization. It is a purposeful, goal-oriented, and laser-focused curiosity. We began exploring this idea in the previous post on “proactiveness vs reactiveness”, but now it’s time to take it a step further. This is no longer simply about our tactical tasks, but about the overarching goals we have within our role. It starts with evaluating how you are currently using your time, and being strategically curious about how effective that use of time really is.
When I started working for a former employer, I was assigned a weekly process which involved pulling financial data from the database using a “query” function, manipulating it in Excel, and then providing categorized totals to my supervisor. It was taking me anywhere from 4-5 hours to complete this process each week. I thought there had to be a quicker way to do it, so I connected with the database administrator and outlined the steps that were involved in the process, the amount of time it was taking me, and asked for her advice on ways to streamline it. The answer? She didn’t realize that the process was taking that long and, in looking into the query, a previous employee had written it on top of an old query, so all the information was in all the wrong places. With her help, we were able to rewrite the query, bringing my processing time from 4-5 hours down to less than 30 minutes. Shortly thereafter the database administrator was unable to attend the database company’s annual conference due to a family situation, and she recommended that I, the newest employee in the department, attend in her place. At the conference I had the opportunity to sit down with the programmers and learn about the automated reporting module that was being created. I was able to take that knowledge back, train the database administrator on it, and together we fully automated my report.
Because I maintained a Strategic Curiosity about how to improve the process to ensure the most efficient use of my time, I was able to eliminate 4-5 hours of unnecessary work each week. Not only that, I was also able to serve my team by giving them 24/7 access to the latest numbers instead of them only receiving an update once per week, enabling them to have more streamlined conversations and plans in place for moving forward towards their goals.
That is the power of Strategic Curiosity: it impacts not just you, but your organization…when aimed correctly!
Strategic Curiosity is not random, and it’s not solely focused on your personal goals and desires. It is vital that your Strategic Curiosity is in alignment with your team or executive’s goals. It’s counterproductive if your goal is to go in one direction while the rest of your team is headed another. Without alignment, even well-intended improvements can cause friction, redundancy, or wasted effort. The best place to start this alignment is with a strategy session.
When my former supervisor was promoted from mid-level management to an executive position, my Strategic Curiosity had to remain focused on her goals and priorities. We spent time doing a “sticky note strategy session,” as recommended to me by the incomparable Melissa Peoples. My executive and I started by creating 10 categories of work that “The Office of the Vice President” was responsible for, putting them up on the walls on large sticky notes. Then we each grabbed a different color of regular-sized sticky notes, set a 30-minute timer, and wrote down all our individual responsibilities within each category, one responsibility per sticky note. As we added them to the walls, we could quickly see who was holding more responsibilities in each area based on the color distribution.
But we went a step further. Over the next 90 minutes, we went through each category, one sticky note at a time, evaluating the importance of each responsibility and deciding how to move forward. We had four choices: she does it, I do it, we assign it to someone else, or we stop doing it altogether. This gave us clarity on our roles and responsibilities moving forward, and provided her the space to deeply reflect on her priorities and new goals, ensuring we were fully aligned on how to achieve them.
Following this strategy session, I was able to fully lean into my Strategic Curiosity and determine new ways to streamline and automate, new tools to use, and new structures to set up, all because I had the ability to align with my executive’s goals. She never wanted to walk into a meeting without understanding the purpose, expected outcome, and key discussion items, so I created an agenda template that had to be completed before a meeting could be scheduled. She didn’t want to have to write the first draft of emails or documents, so I implemented a generative AI program to assist with drafting content she could then edit into her own voice. Her time was valuable, and she wanted to avoid the drain of constant context switching between meetings, so I developed a calendaring system that grouped similar types of meetings on the same days.
In all of these things, there was an underlying purpose for my Strategic Curiosity: “Does this support one of our key objectives? Will this make a measurable difference for my executive?” Once you adopt this aspect of the excellence mindset, you might be amazed at how quickly and deeply you are able to positively impact your executive, team, and organization. Strategic Curiosity isn’t just about doing things better: it’s about doing the right things better, with intention.
So my challenge to you is this: What is one process or system that could benefit from a little Strategic Curiosity? Identify an area where you currently feel a lack of understanding or misalignment with your team or executive. Have an open conversation with them to better understand the goals or objectives. Then take time to be strategically curious, to innovate, streamline, automate, and take ownership of your part in the achievement of the goals or objectives.
Let me know in the comments what area you are focusing on so that we can innovate together as a community!
Remember: when you combine curiosity with clarity, and action with alignment, you not only grow, you lead. But curiosity alone isn’t enough. To be excellent, you also need time to reflect. In the next post, we’ll explore the fourth pillar of the Excellence Mindset: Self-Reflection.
