6 Ways To Improve Your Critical Thinking Skills As A Leader

Critical thinking is vital for quality decision-making in leadership.

Over the past few years, we’ve been emphasizing the need for qualitative, emotionally intelligent leadership approaches.

While this is all good and well, we can’t let the left-brained, critical thinking approach to leadership fall to the wayside.

As the world increases in complexity — due to the abundance of information, advances in technology, and shifting perspectives — we need leaders who are critical thinkers while remaining fluid.

Critical thinking leaders make sense of the world by:

• Adopting various perspectives.
• Questioning norms.
• Managing ambiguity.
• Identifying potential in emerging leaders.

For leaders to be critical thinkers, they need to be able to systematically and deliberately process information so that they can make intelligent decisions regularly.

When you, as a leader, can marry the intuition of emotional intelligence with the power of critical thinking, there’s nothing you can’t accomplish.

Here are six ways you can improve your critical thinking skills as a leader.

Shed Light On Your Biases

Empathy and compassion should be the number one priority when it comes to the communication of ideas.

All of us have our biases.

It’s our responsibility to find out what those biases are because they influence how we lead.

The last thing you want to be as a leader is influenced by your unconscious biases and prejudice.

Prevent unconscious biases from undermining your leadership by:

• Asking your team for feedback.
• Forming a board of advisors.
• Verifying facts.
• Thinking outside the box.

For example, as a union leader, I always encouraged differences in opinion when I held meetings. I specifically sought out differing opinions because I wanted to avoid groupthink influenced by my own biases.

To keep bias in check, you can also ask yourself the following questions:

• What is my perspective?
• What other points of view did I not consider?
• What is my current life circumstances?
• Does my privilege reflect my current circumstances?

Empathy and compassion should be the number one priority when it comes to the communication of ideas.

Make Time For Deep Work

Shallow thinking has no place in a leader’s mind.

Recently, I’ve unplugged from social media.

I’ve been reading “Deep Work” by Cal Newport, and adopting the concepts within this book has taken my creativity to a new level while also deepening my critical thinking skills.

The book’s central premise is based on the concept that extended periods of concentration leads to better quality thinking, which lead to better quality work.

Cal Newport briefly describes attention residue as a culprit for compromising quality thinking. Attention residue is when you switch from one task to another while residue of your attention is left over from the previous task.

It’s a concept that was originally introduce by Sophie Leroy.

According to Sophie Leroy,

If you have attention residue, you are basically operating with part of your cognitive resources being busy, and that can have a wide range of impacts.

Checking emails, social media, text messages are all tasks that compromise your quality of thinking due to task switching.

Now thinking about this within a leadership context, we can agree that leaders need an extended period to concentrate on making good quality decisions.

Shallow thinking has no place in a leader’s mind.

Find time to unplug and spend time away from others for deep thinking or deep work for an extended period.

Deep work is especially crucial if you’re a thought leader or a CEO of a startup.

Extended periods of deep work will give you an advantage of producing depth of thought that only comes from sustained concentration over long periods.

As we continue to venture into an increased variety of distractions while the occurrence of deep work decreases, supply and demand kick in. And you’ll stand to profit from producing ideas that can only come from deep work.

According to Cal Newport:

“The myopia of your peers and employers uncovers a great personal advantage. Assuming the trends outlined here continue, depth will become increasingly rare and therefore increasingly valuable. Having just established that there’s nothing fundamentally flawed about deep work and nothing fundamentally necessary about the distracting behaviors that displace it, you can therefore continue with confidence with the ultimate goal of this book: to systematically develop your personal ability to go deep — and by doing so, reap great rewards.” — Deep Work, Cal Newport

Turn off your phone, close your computer, forward your calls, and get in the zone. Sharpen your critical thinking skills by concentrating.

Listen More Than You Speak

We have two ears and one mouth for a reason. Sit back, ask provocative questions then listen.

Everyone’s input matters.

Encouraging input from each of your team members is a great way to facilitate an environment where everyone contributes to a cohesive plan.

To do this, remember to keep an open mind. Every idea has value. Listen with the intent to learn something new, not to shoot it down after pretending to consider your team members’ input.

Ultimately it’s up to you to sit and access all of the ideas and identify the most valuable points with the intent to promote balanced, critical thinking.

Ask The Right Questions

One of my favorite movies is “iRobot.” And there’s a particular scene in the film where Dr. Lanning’s hologram says:

“I’m sorry, my responses are limited. You must ask the right questions.”

Most people think that searching for the answer is all they need to do. But the answers are predicated on the questions being asked.

Learn to ask the right questions, and you’ll deepen your capacity for critical thinking.

Write Out Your Thoughts

I don’t know about you, but I don’t know what I think until I write it out. It’s how I do all my planning and strategizing as a leader.

Some people talk out loud.

That’s alright if you’re by yourself, but when in the company of team members, it’s best to combine active listening with note-taking to articulate your ideas while including your staff’s input.

You can also use mind-maps. Mind mapping is the process of visually organizing information around one concept. You can use mind mapping to solve complex problems that have a series of complicated parts.

Think It Through

Every decision has consequences. It’s up to you to figure out your level of comfort with each consequence.

The way to do that is to think everything through.

Of course, there’s no way to know each variable in any given problem. But, at the same time, you have to be careful not to overthink.

When there are situations where you know the exact outcome due to past experiences or maybe the upfront costs are readily apparent, think about its impact in a variety of cases.

A Final Thought

Critical thinking is yet another skill that has to be consciously developed as a leader.

But with consistent honing and practice, it will make you an effective leader because of your above average ability to make sense of the world while introducing new, innovative ideas.