I’ve spent this past November making presentations to groups ranging from city leaders to small businesses to the US Army and Air Force. In every program, the issue of “common sense” has become a topic. I’ve not prompted this. It just comes up during the discussions.
As always, I ask what these questioners mean by common sense. The responses I get revolve around a hesitancy to make decisions, ignoring context in the rush to make a decision, an expectation that options for making decisions will be offered in every situation, and an over-reliance on supervisors for solving problems.
Most commonly, the subjects of these discussions are college-degreed professionals, one to five years into their careers. Let me be clear. No one is accusing these individuals of being dumb, lazy, or entitled. But after having considered this for quite a while, I have concluded that we’re dealing with a difference between “book-smarts” and “work-smarts.” A sizable percentage of today’s college graduates come out of school having never held a full-time position where their performance is based on their decision making, situational awareness, and ability to deal with ambiguity.
There are two reasons for this: 1) The focus in their formative years has been on sports, clubs, travel, and other extra-curricular activities rather than on front-line employment where basic work skills have been mastered in the past. 2) Most of the positions that offered this initial skill development have either been eliminated or assumed by those seeking to turn them into full-time jobs that will support a family. These include fast-food, retail, newspaper delivery, landscaping, and janitorial service. Anyone who holds these “dirty-hands” jobs develops basic decision skills just to survive.
There is certainly nothing wrong with avid participation in sports, clubs, student government and so on. It’s just that basic work skills are delayed in their development until age twenty-two or twenty-three. At that point, these newly-minted graduates are forced to develop both basic works skills and the professional skills they’ve just learned at the same time. Is it any wonder that some of them flounder? Add to this their reliance on digital technology and you have the recipe for hesitancy and discomfort when they are faced with daily decisions on the job. Then we wonder why many can “think for themselves.”
I can’t offer a quick fix to this. No one can. But we can stop making the assumption that because someone is a college graduate that he or she will have mastered the basic decision skills and developed a confidence in dealing with the adversity and ambiguity we all face in our daily work. We can’t not hire people who lack “common sense.” But we do need to make time in their initial training and development to coach them on daily decision making. If we don’t, they will learn the hard way. But that takes a lot longer and gives us heartburn.