The Curious Way to Connect at Work

Most of us have colleagues we work alongside every day whose work we have not yet taken the time to explore. Not because they are not interested, but because initiating that kind of conversation can feel awkward, especially earlier in a career when professional relationships are still being figured out.

In this episode of The Career Edge, Leslie Ferry makes the case that genuine curiosity about the people around you is one of the most powerful and most underused professional capabilities there is. Not because it feels good, although it does. Because it sharpens judgment, deepens problem-solving, and builds the kind of business acumen that used to take years of experience to develop.

One conversation, with one person, and one genuine question about their work and how it connects to yours is where it begins.

Start your own discovery at Zandra.app/wiringgap

Transcript

Welcome to The Career Edge, where we unpack how work actually works. I'm Leslie Ferry. Most of us have colleagues we work alongside every day whose work we've not yet taken the time to explore. Not because we're not interested, but because initiating that kind of conversation can feel awkward, especially when we're earlier in our career and still figuring out how professional relationships work.

And here's what makes that awkward feeling worth pushing through. The professionals who understand the people around them, who know their teammates' responsibilities and how those shape how they think, what they're trying to solve, and what they need to do their best work, show up differently in every room they enter. Their judgment is sharper, their ideas land more effectively, their business acumen deepens faster than experience alone produces.

Not because they were more talented, but because they are more curious. Today I want to talk about that curiosity and what it looks like and how to start building it one conversation at a time. Most of us have more unexplored relationships than we can initially realize. People whose work touches ours in ways that we don't fully understand. People who are solving problems we've never thought to ask about.

People who see our organization and our shared challenges from a completely different angle than we do. What we have not yet discovered about those people, how they think, what drives them, what they're trying to figure out, maybe their role stressors and what they need from the people around them to do their best work is a human knowledge gap. And the way to close it is to get genuinely curious about the teammates already around you.

Getting curious starts with reaching out, and the way you frame that outreach changes everything. When you reach out to a teammate and say something like I've been curious about your work and how it connects to mine, or I would love to learn more about what you do and how our work supports each other,

any awkwardness disappears.

There's a clear purpose that

that benefits both of you. And that makes connecting genuinely easy to initiate. Start with one person, someone whose work you wondered about, but haven't had the chance to explore.

if you're in person, suggest having coffee or lunch. If you're remote, a video coffee works as well. The medium matters less than the intent.

Remember, when you reach out, you're not asking them to be your friend. You are expressing genuine interest in their work, which is one of the most flattering things one professional can offer another. If initiating this kind of conversation feels uncomfortable, try including a specific question in your invitation. Something that you are genuinely curious about. What drew them to this role? What is the hardest part of their work that most people don't see from the outside?

A specific question gives the conversation a clear starting point and takes any pressure off of the social dynamic entirely. It works whether you're earlier in your career and still building your social confidence, or whether you simply haven't had a lot of opportunities to build that muscle yet. And once you're in the conversation, notice what you learn beyond what you went in to find out. That's almost always where the most valuable discovery happens.

You went in curious about their role. What you came away with is the beginning of something more. A sense of how they think, what they care about most, what they're trying to solve, what they need from the people around them. This kind of understanding, it doesn't happen in a single conversation. It builds over time through genuine attention and continued curiosity. But even the first conversation changes something.

Their emails that you read will will land differently for you.

meetings will make more sense. Their hesitation becomes readable rather than mysterious. You stop guessing about them and start knowing them. And that knowing compounds over time into something that looks a lot less like a professional acquaintance and a lot more like a genuin working relationship.

And here's where the curiosity starts paying off in ways that go beyond any single relationship. Knowing how different functions think, what they're solving for, and how decisions get made across teams expands how you see your entire organization.

That's what sharpens judgment, deepens problem solving,

And builds the kind of business acumen that used to take years of experience to develop. Once you've built that curiosity muscle inside your organization, the same practice travels naturally to a wider circle. Industry events, conferences, professional gatherings, or communities, these they don't need to feel like rooms full of strangers you're supposed to impress. The same questions that open doors inside your organization

Open them here too. What you're working on right now? What has surprised you about your work this year?

What is the hardest thing about what you do that most people don't see from the outside? Those same curiosity questions apply here. A wider circle of people to be curious about. And the same human knowledge discovery waiting on the other side of every conversation.

As work becomes more human, get to know the humans. Not because it's good for your career, although it is, not because it will expand your network, although it will, but because the professionals who understand the people around them, who have taken the time to get curious about how others think and what they're trying to solve, show up differently in every room they enter. They read situations more accurately.

They collaborate more effectively. They communicate in ways that reach people. And they build the kind of relationships where trust grows naturally rather than being strategically constructed. That is human knowledge discovery. And it starts one conversation with one person about something that you are genuinely curious about. The thinking in these episodes is designed to provoke a question.

Zandra is built to help you answer it personally in the context of your own work. Zandra.app forward slash wiring app. Thanks for listening to the Career Edge. I'll see you next time.