Many professionals hope to pursue careers they’re passionate about so they can find joy and meaning in their work. Caring deeply about your work is vital for engagement and productivity, but balancing emotions with critical thinking is essential in the workplace.
When employees engage in critical thinking, they use an independent, reflective thought process to evaluate issues and solve problems based on knowledge and objective evidence.
Critical thinking skills can guide your organization toward success, but to truly maximize the problem-solving benefits of critical thinking, it’s crucial to teach this skill to your entire team. We’ll explore critical thinking skills and how to teach them in the workplace to help your business improve its decision-making and problem-solving.
Jen Lawrence, co-author of Engage the Fox: A Business Fable About Thinking Critically and Motivating Your Team, defines critical thinking as “the ability to solve problems effectively by systematically gathering information about an issue, generating further ideas involving a variety of perspectives, evaluating the information using logic, and making sure everyone involved is on board.”
This is a complex definition for a challenging concept. Though critical thinking might seem as straightforward as stepping back and using a formal thinking process instead of reacting instinctively to conflicts or problems, it is actually a much more challenging task.
Critical thinking’s ultimate goal is ensuring you have the best answer to a problem with maximum buy-in from all parties involved – an outcome that will ultimately save your business time, money and stress.
A World Economic Forum report revealed that critical thinking is one of the most in-demand career skills employers seek when trying to attract and retain the best employees – and employers believe critical thinking skills will become even more necessary in the coming years.
Critical thinking in the workplace guarantees objective and efficient problem-solving, ultimately reducing costly errors and ensuring that your organization’s resources are used wisely. Team members employing critical thinking can connect ideas, spot errors and inconsistencies, and make the best decisions most often.
Employees with critical thinking are also more likely to accomplish the following:
Critical thinkers are sure about the reasoning behind their decisions, allowing them to communicate with employees clearly. This level of communication enhances employee engagement.
Critical thinking is a soft skill that comprises multiple interpersonal and analytical abilities and attributes. Here are some essential critical thinking skills that can support workforce success.
Many workplaces operate at a frantic tempo that reinforces hasty thinking and rushed business decisions, resulting in costly mistakes and blunders. When employees are trained in critical thinking, they learn to slow the pace and gather crucial information before making decisions.
Along with reducing costly errors, critical thinking in the workplace brings the following benefits:
Critical thinking skills are essential for dealing with difficult customers because they help your team make informed decisions while managing stressful situations.
Experts agree that critical thinking is a teachable skill. Both Lawrence and Welton recommend exploring critical thinking training programs and methods to improve your workplace’s critical thinking proficiency. Here’s a breakdown of how to teach critical thinking in the workplace:
Successful critical thinking happens during a crisis, not after.
Lawrence provided an example involving restaurants and waitstaff: If a customer has a bad experience at a restaurant, a server using critical thinking skills will be more likely to figure out a solution to save the interaction, such as offering a free appetizer or discount. “This can save the hard-earned customer relationship you spent a lot of marketing dollars to create,” Lawrence said. This concept is applicable across many business and organizational structures.
You should also be aware of signs of a lack of critical thinking. Lawrence pointed out that companies that change strategy rapidly, moving from one thing to the next, are likely not engaging in critical thinking. This is also the case at companies that seem to have good ideas but have trouble executing them.
As with many issues in business, company leadership determines how the rest of the organization acts. If leaders have excellent ideas but don’t follow critical thinking processes, their team will not buy into those ideas, and the company will suffer. This is why critical thinking skills often accompany positive communication skills.
“Critical thinking doesn’t just help you arrive at the best answer, but at a solution most people embrace,” Lawrence said. Modeling critical thinking at the top will help the skill trickle down to the rest of the organization, no matter your company’s type or size.
To get your employees thinking critically, conduct employee surveys with well-designed questions to help them identify issues and solutions.
When critical thinking is actively implemented in an organization, mistakes are minimized, and operations run more seamlessly.
With training, time and patience, critical thinking can become a second-nature skill for employees at all levels of experience and seniority. The money, time and conflict you’ll save in the long run are worth the extra effort of implementing critical thinking in your workplace.
Rebecka Green contributed to the writing and reporting in this article. Source interviews were conducted for a previous version of this article.