Today I want to focus on an attribute that appears to have been lost amongst the fancy management speak and that's common sense.



The odd thing about common sense is that it's really not that common at all. Consider the following fine examples:

* On Thursday a company retrenched 10% of their employees. On Friday the CEO sent out an email that said, "Just a reminder that today is our staff strategy meeting. So bring your great ideas and positive attitude."

* I received a letter from the Chairman of my bank that started off, "I'm pleased to announce that the shareholders took the Board's suggestion to merge with Greedy (excuse my creative licence) Bank. There will be many excellent benefits as a result of the merger." I discovered ONE lousy benefit; I would have access to more cash machines - whoop-ti-do!

In the first instance you would hope that the CEO had the common sense to acknowledge the previous day's retrenchments. Instead, she acted like nothing happened and all was well in the world (well at least it was in her world, she was still safe in her corner office). Employees read the email in disgust, they were already feeling unmotivated, uncertain and scared for their own jobs and now were expected to put on a big happy, pretend smile for a strategy meeting.

The second example is one of assumption. The Chairman assumed I would be happy about the big merger, but in fact I wasn't. I had fired Greedy Bank years ago for their poor customer service so the last thing I wanted to hear was that they were now merging (read 'taking over') the bank I have been a customer of for over 15 years. The other aspect was that they had wasted time, money and paper on a letter that had one lousy benefit in it.

In both cases it comes down to one thing, the CEO and Chairman are paid big bucks to be competent at their job. In both cases they lacked common sense and also failed on other key management skills such as successful communication, maintaining and heightening customer satisfaction to create loyalty and team building.

Consider your day-to-day work and ask yourself if you practice common sense at work. It's a basic skill, that can have an incredible impact.