How to Develop Critical Thinking in Your Team
Building your brand from scratch?
Managing a mature brand platform?
Or maybe a re-launch and rollout is in your future?
Whatever stage you’re in, you’re always more effective with a high functioning team. That means a team with the critical thinking skills necessary to handle tactics while you focus on strategy.
But often, the critical thinking skills you’ve learned as a leader are innate or hard-won. They’re as natural as breathing to you, but hard to define, coach, and develop in your team. Helping your team develop these critical thinking skills are essential to your success.
Here’s a quick primer on coaching critical thinking in three steps:
1. Understand the core assignment
The core assignment is the “thing” you are thinking about and it can take many different shapes. The core assignment is often a goal or a problem but it can also be things like drawing conclusions from customer data or analyzing possible consequences of a decision. Show your team the value of taking time to define the core assignment.
2. Broaden your understanding.
Research to go broad before you narrow. The Design Council’s Double Diamond framework is a great visual for this process. On any given assignment, there is always something to learn. Guiding your team through this process will show them that even veteran leaders are hungry to learn.
3. Use nine standards to narrow, wisely.
Apply Paul/Elder’s nine standards of critical thinking to your assignment, then narrow to a singleminded idea. As an experienced leader, many of these standards will feel like second nature. But, you may also find there are some avenues of thinking that come less readily. I challenge you to add these to your repertoire to round out your thinking.
Tips for development:
Practice. Encourage your team to practice, but redefine it as “play.” When you encourage critical as an exercise of play, your team will be open to divergent and lateral ideas. Critical thinking is the playground of the leader and practice is recess time.
Write. For larger assignments, ask that your team formulate their thoughts in a written brief. “Writing is thinking in words.” Writing challenges our thinking and leaves no fuzzy corners to hide behind.
Resource. Download this quick-reference deck of cards on the nine standards of critical thinking and share them with your team. Encourage them to reference them until they become second nature. Get them here, no email necessary.
Model your approach to critical thinking aloud and your team will be eager to learn and develop.
