The goals of a training session on critical thinking skills should include helping trainees:
- Understand what critical thinking is and how it can help on the job.
- Use the critical thinking process effectively to improve job performance.
Understanding what critical thinking is leads directly to discussion of how it can strengthen a supervisor’s work performance. The basic definition is that “critical thinking” is a disciplined way of thinking about issues, decisions, and problems. It is focused, intentional, and goal-oriented.
For these reasons, being able to think critically will help supervisors do their jobs better in several ways. For example, critical thinking will help them:
- Make better decisions.
- Analyze and solve work problems more effectively.
- Manage challenges and overcome obstacles.
- Develop more and better ideas about improving quality, productivity, and other issues related to the success of themselves and the organization.
- Identify the potential for error and make fewer mistakes.
- Learn new information more efficiently and get more out of learning and growth opportunities on the job.
In short, by teaching critical thinking to supervisors, you’ll help them improve their job performance, too.
Yes, you do have the budget and time to train managers and supervisors with BLR’s 10-Minute HR Trainer. Try it at no cost or risk. Get details.
Share with supervisors the many ways they can use critical thinking skills on the job. They can:
- Analyze information and situations accurately and make sense of all the data that impact your work on a daily basis.
- Identify and interpret patterns and determine how they affect your work.
- Make connections so that you can link new information to what you know.
- “Connect the dots” so that you can understand a process or a sequence.
- Make inferences, which are conclusions based on the evidence that allows you to see beyond the known facts and make predictions about possible outcomes.
- Evaluate information so that you can determine its validity and value.
- Develop and organize ideas to make it easier to work with and implement them.
- Discuss issues with others in an organized way and support your ideas and suggestions with sound evidence.
- Develop and weigh alternatives to make the best possible choices.
- Make plans that are likely to lead to successful outcomes.
- Apply abstract or theoretical knowledge to actual job situations to ensure the best results.
So, what skills are required for effective critical thinking? Being able to:
- Observe and qualify incoming information to determine its value.
- Compare different pieces of information and discover connections.
- Probe to discover root issues and causes and clarify information.
- Direct your thoughts to focus on specific pieces of information.
- Understand the meaning of information and relate it to your job.
- Generalize from specifics and apply findings broadly.
Train your line managers with BLR’s 10-Minute HR Trainer. There won’t be time for classroom boredom. Get details.
The material in today’s Advisor is adapted from BLR’s 10-Minute HR Trainer session, “Critical Thinking.”
In tomorrow’s Advisor, we’ll examine the critical thinking process as well as obstacles to critical thinking—plus, we’ll showcase a dynamic resource that helps you train on dozens of key HR topics in 10 minutes flat.