Giving your employees enough time to produce their finest job with critical thinking

March 7, 2023
10:46 pm

Joy Olaivar

Like any other skill, critical thinking can be learned, but learning takes practice and practice needs opportunities.

Christian Nevell wrote, “Few minds wear out; more rust out.” Basically, if you let something sit long enough, motionless and in disuse, or barely use it to its full capacity, it just won’t work the way it should and, in some cases, will absolutely decay.

Any industry’s future depends on its employees having the capacity and the time to think through the challenges they face and then come up with creative solutions to get over, under, around, or through them. Yet because there are so many distractions from the outside world and from working in an office or remotely, the time we have to genuinely think is being taken away one email and one browser tab at a time.

Because we are being inundated with information from every conceivable digital angle, much of it being metaphorically purely empty calories, how can we come up with longer-lasting, more comprehensive solutions that are grounded in critical thinking to the issues we face when conducting business?

Intensive work is fruitless.

Busy job and critical thought do not make for effective partners. Working from home or in the office each has its own set of challenges. We are all aware of how challenging it can be to stay on a single productive path where you can actually advance a concept, a procedure, or a service. It is not effective to constantly communicate with coworkers or clients via Slack, email, text messages, etc., back and forth every five minutes, every day.

Executive leadership should promote in-depth talks, emails that are longer and more detailed, and meetings that go longer than a minute so that opinions and data may be gathered and properly considered.

Overly prepared

For those lengthy meetings to be successful and achieve any sense of accomplishment, we must be ready if we are going to set aside time to consider an issue. Consistent and persistent critical thinking is essential.

Teams and their leaders will be able to genuinely confront problems if they are adequately prepared, as opposed to needing to process a lot of data and then develop half-baked solutions on the spot. Businesses should always encourage their staff to develop ideas into a concept that can be presented and defended.

Your brightest thinkers merit financial support.

In addition to encouraging “study and practice,” managers and other delegation experts should provide their teams with the tools they need to do so successfully. The resource in this situation is time. Every decision we make on a product or service should be supported by critical thought. The more prepared we are for a potential issue, the less expensive it gets. Any industry can benefit from developing in-office or remote work schedules that encourage critical thinking and allow for ideas to be turned into something useful and repeatable.

The DDHQ finds those professionals capable of realizing your company’s goals, individuals who can think and work independently and always keep your values in mind. If you’re in need of such valuable team leaders, contact us today!