Reader situation
You meet a member and quickly sort them by role: an accountant, a sales director, a recent graduate. The label shapes what you ask and what you expect them to know. You may miss the experience that would make the conversation most useful.
Central idea
A role describes only part of someone’s professional experience. Ask about the situations and choices that shaped their perspective, while allowing them to decide what to share.
Practical steps
- Recognize role assumptions. Notice what you assume about someone based on their title, employer or field. An “IT manager” might have spent years in customer service. A “junior analyst” might have run a business before changing careers. Your first assumption is a starting point, not a conclusion. Titles also vary widely between organizations, so the same title can describe very different work.
- Invite context. Ask open questions about how they came to their work and what shapes their approach: “How did you get into this field?” or “What experience has most influenced how you work?” These invite more than a job description.
- Listen for experience. Pay attention to the situations, challenges and decisions they describe. These often reveal knowledge their title doesn’t, such as experience in a different industry, a difficult project or a career change.
- Avoid labels. Resist summarizing the person in a single word, even in your head. Holding a fuller picture helps you see where their experience might connect with yours.
- Reflect. After the conversation, note what surprised you. Over time, these reflections show you how often roles understate what people know.
Worked example
Fictional example
The people and details are invented to illustrate an approach. It reports no outcomes.
At a Circle event, Dylan meets Mariam, whose profile says “Office Manager.” He almost moves on, assuming they have little in common. Instead, he asks what experience most shaped her work. She explains that she ran logistics for a humanitarian organization for six years before moving to her current role. Dylan, who’s working on improving his company’s supply processes, asks about her experience with supply planning under pressure, and they spend twenty minutes comparing approaches. Dylan leaves with two practical ideas and a new contact he would otherwise have walked past.
Companion tool: Professional curiosity prompts
Questions that invite more than a job title:
- “How did you get into this work?”
- “What experience has most shaped how you approach your role?”
- “What did you do before this that still influences you?”
- “What’s a problem you’ve worked on that you found especially interesting?”
- “What do people often not realize about your work?”
After the conversation:
- What I assumed: ________
- What I learned: ________
- Where our experience connects: ________
Boundaries
- Let people decide how much to share. Some prefer to keep their background private.
- Avoid questions that probe personal characteristics or circumstances unrelated to their professional experience.
- Curiosity should be genuine. Don’t use these questions as a script to extract information.
Member action
Ask a member what experience most shaped how they approach their work. Listen to the whole answer before connecting it to your own experience.
Discussion prompt
What’s something about your professional background that your current title doesn’t show?
