Ego vs Curiosity

Don't let your ego betray your curiosity

A common conversation in work settings is on that can be characterized as the "junior/senior" or "student/teacher" conversation. Perhaps occuring at a team lunch, an offsite, or even during a coffee break. Were you a junior or a senior? If you're a senior, and you've been one for a while, do you remember what it was like to a junior? What did that look like?

Recently, I've had a surge of these type of interactions from the junior perspective. Something tragic happens when roles become obscure and the conversation wanders into an area where the roles are balanced or even reversed.

Typically, the senior has more experience in the field, so naturally they take the role of the teacher. Taking the form of the student asking a lot of questions and the teacher answering the questions to the best of their ability. In my own experiences, the conversation is 70/30 where as a student you are listening 70% of the time and talking 30% of the time.

As an example, I was having a conversation with a person who was clearly my senior. The conversation was going as expected with us generally following the traditional rules of engagement. Then I started delving into an area that I know quite a lot about, while the other person did not. We were in an environment were there was 1 other person of lower seniority than them and they seemed to also be interested in this topic I had brought up. At first both seemed interested, and after a certain point of back and forth questions I noticed the senior sort of catch himself from asking a follow up question. It was almost as if, at that moment we had crossed the treshold of 70/30 and I had assumed the role of teacher. The other person still seemed intruiged but also sort of expected the senior to ask the question, almost as if to ask permission to continue the conversation down this path.

In that moment I was astonished, I felt awkward, it didn't feel like a natural stopping point and I also felt like he didn't want to be kind of person who just abrubtly changes topics. So I decided to just divert the conversation and bring up something else which I knew would be in his wheelhouse.

Observations:

1. People seem to be less willing to allow themselves to be in a reverse student/teacher interaction when they're in the presence of other subordinates that also look up to them.
2. It follows that people are also willing to let this 70/30 ratio skew higher when it's a 1:1 setting, more so than in a group setting.
3. As a result people will kill their curiosity, and perhaps more tragically, the opportunity at a good dialectic conversation to "save face" and protect their ego.

When I do ever become a senior, remind me to never let my ego betray my curiosity