Ability Is Not the Issue: What Leaders Are Misreading About Today’s Workforce

Across industries, leaders are noticing a troubling pattern. Employees hired during and after the COVID-19 pandemic often arrive with strong credentials, solid technical skills, and prior work experience, yet struggle to take initiative, synthesize disconnected information, or make confident decisions when expectations are unclear.

This is frequently misread as disengagement, lack of motivation, or a generational issue. In some cases, it is even misattributed to individual deficits. That interpretation is not only inaccurate, it is costly.

What we are seeing is not a decline in ability. We are seeing a disruption in how judgment, initiative, and decision-making are formed.

For many professionals, the pandemic coincided with critical career transitions. People entered new roles, new organizations, or more complex positions during a period of prolonged uncertainty, reduced informal learning, and limited access to mentoring and feedback. The unspoken ways people learn how to reason through ambiguity, observe decision-making, and calibrate judgment largely disappeared.

When uncertainty is high and feedback is inconsistent, acting feels risky. Over time, people learn to wait, escalate, or seek validation rather than exercise initiative. The result looks like passivity, but it is more accurately understood as decision caution shaped by context.

We see similar patterns among teens and young adults entering the workforce. Difficulty focusing, skepticism about traditional pathways, and preference for applied learning are often framed as lack of interest. In reality, they reflect rational responses to instability and disrupted developmental systems.

The implication for leaders is clear. This is not a performance management problem. It is a systems design challenge.

Organizations that want initiative must rebuild the conditions that support judgment. That means making decision logic visible, clarifying expectations, normalizing “show your thinking,” and providing frequent, low-stakes feedback. For workforce programs, it means prioritizing applied decision-making, coaching, and meaning-centered work over credentials alone.

Ability is not the issue. The opportunity is to rebuild how judgment and initiative are formed.

At V.O.I.C.E. Consulting, we help organizations redesign leadership, learning, and workforce systems to restore initiative, decision confidence, and equity in a changing world.