Most of us learned leadership backwards.

Have the answer. Project confidence. Fill the silence before it gets uncomfortable. 

When someone says something charged that raises the temperature in the room, the knee-jerk reaction under that old leadership model is immediate: redirect, defend, answer, fix.

What if true leadership is more about asking the right questions than having all the answers?

There’s a question that opens up a room. One that creates space instead of filling it. And it works better than that “pretend you know everything even when you don’t” approach we’ve been spoon-fed since birth. 

Do you want to say more about that?

Four words. Infinite space. 

Leadership coach Kurt Bush learned this lesson during what he calls the hardest stretch of his career: leading a volunteer team through 2020 to 2024 and everything that era brought. Anxiety was running high in every room and the old playbook kept failing. He used those four words not just to hear people more deeply, but to buy himself time to get ahead of his own reaction before it ran the room.

He found that most of the time, people find their way to a more grounded place when you simply give them space. 

The rest double down. And that’s useful information too.

Most of us have been there. Performing certainty. It’s exhausting. It’s exhausting precisely because it’s a performance. And the people we’re leading feel the difference between someone who’s with them and someone who’s controlling them.

Leadership emerges in the meeting place between curiosity and presence. 

It’s nearly impossible to be genuinely curious without also being present to whatever it is we’re being curious about. And when we’re present and curious, that old model that demands certainty, control, and having all the answers, loses its grip. 

When we lead from that curious, present state, it changes the vibe in the room.

Decades ago a boss at Longs Drugs told me that “each store has the personality of the manager.”

He didn’t mean management style or policy. He meant energy. Presence. The unspoken broadcast that a leader sends into every space they inhabit, and that every person in the space absorbs, reflects, adjusts to.

We’ve all felt this. The room that hums. The room that constricts. The team that moves like one organism and the team that’s braced.

That’s not chance. That’s the leader impacting the environment. 

Curious first isn’t just a tactic. It’s a different orientation to the room, which is a requirement for changing it. 

🎧 Curious First: A New Model for True Leaders with Kurt Bush is the Season 3 finale of the Untamed Leader Podcast. Listen here.