Curiosity Expert: What We Completely GET WRONG about Curiosity!

About this episode

Dr. Debra Clary discusses the importance of curiosity in leadership and its impact on team performance.

Dr. Debra Clary started her career at 4 AM, driving a Frito-Lay route truck in Detroit as a Teamster. Three decades later, she had held senior leadership roles across four Fortune 50 brands (Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel's, and Humana), spent nearly 17 years building Humana's Leadership Institute, performed a one-woman off-Broadway show, and written The Curiosity Curve, a research-backed leadership book published by Fast Company Press in October 2025. In this episode of Inspiring Women, she sits down with Laurie McGraw to unpack what tied all of it together: curiosity. It started with a single question. During a Humana board meeting, then-CEO Bruce Broussard leaned over and quietly asked her, "Do you think curiosity can be learned, or is it innate?" Debra promised she'd find out. What followed was a trip to Italy where she noticed Europeans had fundamentally different conversations than Americans, a Gallup engagement report showing the lowest numbers in the firm's history, and ultimately a multi-year research project (commissioned with researchers out of MIT) that produced something no one had measured before: a direct correlation between a leader's level of curiosity and the…

People in this episode

Host: Laurie McGraw

Guest: Dr. Debra Clary

Topics covered

• curiosity
• leadership
• team performance
• research
• creativity

Keywords

• curiosity
• leadership
• team performance
• The Curiosity Curve
• research

Mentioned in this episode

Organizations: Frito-Lay, Coca-Cola, Jack Daniel's, Humana, Fast Company Press, MIT

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