“It’s just common sense.”
I hear that phrase regularly when I’m working with managers. It normally follows a mistake that someone believes should never have happened. A customer wasn’t acknowledged. A team member forgot to complete an important task. A difficult conversation was avoided until the problem became impossible to ignore.
The frustration is understandable. When you’ve done a job for years, many decisions become automatic. You stop thinking about them because they have become part of how you work. The danger comes when you assume everyone else sees the situation through the same lens.
They don’t.
What we often describe as common sense is actually experience. It’s knowledge built over months or years, shaped by previous jobs, good managers, poor managers, training courses, mistakes and lessons learnt the hard way. Once something becomes second nature, it’s easy to forget there was a time when you didn’t know it either.
Think back to your first management role. You were probably expected to motivate people, deal with poor performance, manage conflict and make decisions that affected the whole team. Looking back now, those conversations might seem straightforward. At the time, they probably didn’t. In fact at the time, they probably felt really scary.
Most new managers aren’t promoted because they’re brilliant leaders. They’re promoted because they’re brilliant at their job. Those are two very different things.
I’ve worked with countless managers who could run an operation effortlessly. They knew every process, every product and every system inside out. Ask them to have a difficult conversation with a team member, however, and their confidence disappeared. They worried about upsetting people, saying the wrong thing or making the situation worse. Nobody had ever shown them how to do it well. It was simply assumed they would work it out.
That assumption is more common than many organisations realise.
Organisations are full of unwritten rules. Existing team members absorb them over time without even noticing. New starters don’t have that advantage. They arrive with different experiences, different habits and different expectations of what good looks like.
Take customer service as an example.
- One business expects every customer to be greeted within a few seconds of entering the building.
- Another believes the priority is to give complete attention to the customer already being served.
Neither approach is right or wrong. They’re simply different standards. Yet managers are often surprised when someone new doesn’t instinctively follow the approach their business has always used.
The same applies to communication.
- Some managers expect to hear about every issue as soon as it arises.
- Others want people to solve problems independently before escalating them.
If those expectations are never discussed, people will naturally rely on what worked in their previous workplace.
This isn’t a lack of common sense. It’s people doing what makes sense to them.
Psychologists have long recognised something called the “curse of knowledge”. Once we know something well, we find it surprisingly difficult to imagine what it’s feels like not to know it. We overestimate how obvious information is to other people because it’s obvious to us.
It happens everywhere.
“Common sense is genius dressed in its working clothes.”
Voltaire
An experienced hospitality manager notices empty glasses, long queues and customers looking uncertain before anyone else does. Years of experience have trained their brain to spot those things automatically. Someone in their first week simply sees a busy restaurant.
An experienced retail manager notices gaps on shelves, poor merchandising or missed sales opportunities without consciously looking for them. Someone with less experience is focused on completing the task they’ve been given.
Neither person is more intelligent. One person has simply developed the ability to notice things the other hasn’t learnt to see yet.
The same principle explains why experienced managers often become frustrated with people who don’t show initiative. From their perspective, the solution is obvious. They know what needs doing because they’ve encountered similar situations hundreds of times before. The employee facing that situation for the first time doesn’t have the same mental library to draw upon.
As a young restaurant manager early in my career, I used to get frustrated when waiters could see that a customer was unhappy, but did not approach them. In my mind, it was common sense to approach immediately and find out what the issue was and how I could help. I then realised that it was uncertainty and fear of what the customer may say that stopped them from doing so. This was a training issue. In a team meeting, I discussed how I had learnt that when issues were nipped in the bud quickly, they were much easier to sort out. We followed this up with training and it was a stark realisation that common sense and initiative and borne out of our own experiences.
This isn’t just my experience. Research by Lattice and YouGov found that only 21% of UK employees say they always understand what’s expected of them when their performance is assessed. If people aren’t clear about the standard they’re working towards, it’s hardly surprising that managers end up describing mistakes as “a lack of common sense”.
“Common sense is not so common.”
Voltaire
Expecting initiative without providing clarity is like expecting someone to complete a jigsaw without showing them the picture on the box. This is where leadership makes the difference.
The best managers I’ve worked alongside rarely rely on assumptions.
- They explain what good looks like.
- They demonstrate standards instead of hoping people will somehow discover them.
- They ask questions, check understanding and encourage people to think rather than simply follow instructions.
That doesn’t mean spoon feeding people. It means recognising that confidence grows through learning, feedback and practice, not through guesswork.
Clear expectations also create consistency.
- Customers receive the same experience regardless of who is serving them.
- Team members make decisions with greater confidence because they understand the standards they’re working towards.
- Managers spend less time correcting mistakes because fewer mistakes happen in the first place.
Unfortunately, many organisations invest more time fixing problems than preventing them. A manager becomes frustrated because a task wasn’t completed properly. Another conversation follows about people lacking common sense. Yet nobody stops to ask the most important question.
Did we ever explain exactly what success looked like? If the answer is no, the responsibility doesn’t sit entirely with the individual.
Good leadership isn’t about expecting people to read your mind. It’s about making expectations so clear that people know exactly what great performance looks like. That requires patience. It requires consistency. It also requires managers to remember what it felt like when they were learning themselves.
Some of the strongest leaders I’ve met have one habit in common. They replace assumptions with curiosity. Instead of saying, “You should know this,” they ask, “What information were you working with?” That small change transforms the conversation. It uncovers misunderstandings, highlights gaps in training and creates opportunities to coach rather than criticise.
People don’t come to work intending to get things wrong. They use the knowledge they have and make decisions that seem logical to them at the time. If the outcome isn’t what the business expected, there’s a good chance the expectation wasn’t as clear as everyone believed.
The next time you hear someone say, “It’s just common sense,” stop for a moment and consider what they really mean.
Is it genuinely common sense?
Or is it years of experience that have quietly become invisible?
The answer matters, because organisations that rely on assumptions create inconsistency, frustration and unnecessary mistakes. Businesses that invest time helping people understand expectations build confident managers, stronger teams and better customer experiences.
Common sense has never been the secret to high performing teams.
Clear leadership is.
