I have a young client with an old soul.  We were discussing whether early career employees are adapting well to the world of work and he said: “A lot of my generation is often loudly wrong.” He meant his peers express strong opinions about decisions made at their jobs (privately and publicly) even when they have relatively little experience about the topic.

We agreed that everyone begins their career with incomplete workplace knowledge. The question is what to do when someone at work with different information, greater experience, or another point of view suggests that your first answer may be incomplete.

It is understandable why folks starting out today may take fixed positions. The environment around them indicates this is the right approach School rewards the right answer and social media rewards confidence.

For most of our education, success is individual. We study a problem, develop an answer, submit it, and receive a grade. Even when the work is collaborative, each student demonstrates to the professor what they individually know. Social media also rewards certainty. Ideas are stated publicly, and with considerable conviction. Bravado works well in that medium.

On the other hand, work rewards critical thinking. At work, sound judgment, aggregated from many sources and collectively accepted is what matters. This requires the ability to hold your original ideas up against other’s knowledge and information and shape your answer against the collective data. Currently it seems entry level hires are struggling a bit with this.

The National Association of Colleges and Employers (NACE) reports a gap between how entry level employees rate their ability to critically think and what managers have witnessed.  In its surveys of students and employers, 94% of students and 96.1% of employers identified critical thinking as very important. But there is a nearly a 25 percentage-point gap between how highly graduates think of their skills and how much less favorably managers judge them.

I suspect new hires equate critical thinking with having an intelligent point of view. Workplace critical thinking however, requires another step. It requires testing that point of view against information held by other stakeholders.

Sadly, individuals at all levels are surprisingly reluctant to give other people’s opinions enough weight. Research on “advice taking” has repeatedly found that we tend to discount other people’s judgments when making decisions. We have a built-in preference for our own reasoning because we know how we arrived at it. Someone else’s reasoning appears without that same internal history.

That preference for your own ideas becomes particularly consequential early in a career. A new employee may be perfectly capable of identifying a problem or proposing a solution. What they may lack is context and history.  They do not yet possess years of experience with the customers, systems and tradeoffs surrounding that problem. Experience deserves consideration. It carries information.

This does not mean there should be automatic deference to seniority. Experienced people can be spectacularly (and loudly) wrong too and healthy organizations need new employees who will ask why and question assumptions.

The discipline needed for early career employees to build this skill is to be curious when a coworker or manager sees the issue differently. To remember to ask: What are they considering that I am not? What happened before I arrived? Which consequence am I missing? In other words, to evaluate evidence that might lead you to revise your position.

Researchers studying “actively open-minded thinking” tell us that open-minded thinkers consider alternative opinions, pay attention to evidence that contradicts an existing belief, delay closure, and engage in reflective thought. Studies associate that style of thinking with better performance on reasoning tasks and greater resistance to common biases.

So, here is a suggestion for honing critical thinking at work. Arrive at a point of view. Before you offer it to the final stakeholder, expose it to other people’s knowledge. Sometimes you will discover that your original thinking was better. Sometimes the other person will change your mind. Often the best answer will emerge from pieces that neither of you had individually.

Being wrong is unavoidable. Becoming too attached to an opinion to benefit from someone else’s knowledge is being loudly wrong.

Perhaps one of the most important things to learn early in a career is how to have confidence without that confidence ossifying into certainty. It behooves us all to hold our opinions strongly enough to contribute and lightly enough to change.

References

Gino, F. (2008). Do we listen to advice just because we paid for it? The impact of advice cost on its use. Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes, 107(2), 234–245. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.obhdp.2008.03.001

Gray, K. (2025). The gap in perceptions of new grads’ competency proficiency and resources to shrink it. National Association of Colleges and Employers.

Mesmer-Magnus, J. R., & DeChurch, L. A. (2009). Information sharing and team performance: A meta-analysis. Journal of Applied Psychology, 94(2), 535–546. https://doi.org/10.1037/a0013773

Stanovich, K. E., & Toplak, M. E. (2019). The need for intellectual diversity in psychological science: Our own studies of actively open-minded thinking as a case study. Cognition, 187, 156–166. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.cognition.2019.03.006