A long tenure doesn’t guarantees a correct logic

I bet many of us have been in a situation where a senior colleague or a direct supervisor used his or her number of years of experience to win an argument. The way I see it, there is no cause-and-effect relationship between expertise, results and tenure.

If the notion that a longer stint in business warranted correct logic every time were right, then you would always be wrong to people older than you and right to people younger than you. What if they both made the same argument and you were against it, what would be the right argument? Also, age would be the end-all be-all factor in logic and argument?

I believe that tenure doesn’t matter as much as how hard you work every single day, how much you learn and how effectively you apply gained knowledge to reality. If a person stays in authority and does nothing but “project management” or office politics for years, the person practically doesn’t grow. On the other hand, if you learn by reading, writing and talking to people every single day to grow yourself even by a little bit, you’ll grow significantly eventually by virtue of the compound effect.

Let’s consider this scenario. A manager and a staff start at the same level of skills (take 100 as the starting value). The staff person learns and grows every month by 1%.On the other hand, the manager starts off as a staff, grows by 10% every yearand makes the management level after 10 years. Let’s do some math

You can see that the staff grows faster and reaches in 7 years the same level as the manager does in almost double the time.

Now, some would argue that there are different skills such as technical, communication or management, and that it would not be possible to group all the skills into one variable. It’s over-simplification. Well, it is also over-simplification in the case of the argument that a long tenure warrants expertise and right decisions all the time. The point is that if you are a new graduate with little experience, my recommendation is that if you believe you have a point, don’t lose your faith in it. However you want to react is up to you and depends on the situation. Fame, authority or title doesn’t guarantee that an argument or logic is correct.