All bosses want their employees to be good decision makers and problem solvers. But they often come at the goal in different ways:
- Controlling bosses demand compliance — with rules, past practices and “what the boss would do.”
- Coaching bosses encourage critical thinking — about values, reasoning and “what is the best path among the alternatives we’ve considered?”
Great bosses help their staffs become critical thinkers, not sheep-like followers. If you check out the website of the Foundation for Critical Thinking, you’ll see that the seven hallmarks of this kind of reasoning are clarity, accuracy, precision, relevance, depth, breadth and logic.
I fear that some bosses confuse critical thinking with “read my mind and do things just as I would.” Or they confuse thinking critically with criticizing. It takes no skill to shoot down ideas, but plenty of talent to develop them well.
When employees are adept at critical thinking, they:
- Know and respect organizational guidelines and goals, but are comfortable questioning them in the face of new information or circumstances
- Are curious about alternative solutions and eager to research options
- Consider multiple perspectives; think about who else might be interested or affected by the decision
- Identify and challenge their own biases; are as willing to challenge their own hypothesis as embrace it
- Don’t oversimplify, over-generalize or fall prey to logical fallacies
- Anticipate unintended consequences of an action
- Can explain the process by which they came to a conclusion
Critical thinking can lead to better-informed and more creative employees — and ideas. So, how do you, as a boss, encourage critical thinking? Here are six things you can do:
- Model critical thinking yourself. Rely on more than just your gut or past experiences and show genuine respect for research and reasoning.
- Don’t assume that your way is the only way of doing things. Encourage input from others.
- Deconstruct good decisions and how people arrived at them; use it as a teaching opportunity. You can do the same for faulty decisions, especially your own.
- Invest in staff training that goes beyond “what to do and how to do it” and includes an emphasis on “how to think about it.”
- Don’t simply demand compliance with rules. Rules can be important to the welfare of staff, consumers and the organization, but great bosses focus on the values that underpin the rules.
- Support responsible staffers when they, in good faith, take a risk and fail. As people become more independent decision makers, they may stumble. You can help them rebound.
When bosses promote critical thinking, their employees are less likely to say, “But that’s the way we’ve always done it,” “I didn’t know we were allowed to do that,” or “I thought that was odd but didn’t think it was my place to question.”
And they won’t say one other phrase, which I consider to be among the most dangerous things an employee can say to a boss. I’ll share it in today’s podcast: “What Great Bosses Know about Critical Thinking.”
Poynter’s “What Great Bosses Know” podcast is sponsored by The City University of New York Graduate School of Journalism. Poynter’s leadership and management expert Jill Geisler shares practical information that’s valuable for bosses in newsrooms and everywhere.
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