Can You Teach Your Team to Think Critically?

This all comes down to having guidelines, in addition to your standard operating procedures (SOPs), which should teach your team how to do a task. These would be guidelines that you can create that tells them to analyze any number of things before approaching the project, and even before turning it in as well.

I usually break this down into two different categories: the things I want the person/team to think about when I transition a task or project over (i.e., how to approach it), and then the things I want you to review and think about before you submit it back to me for review.

This way, when the person/team transitions to a task, they immediately take stock of the available resources and what’s expected of them. Plus, having these guidelines lets them know where to go to figure out what the next step is, and what the task should be.

All of these things can be taught. You can tell someone how to find these things before actually turning things in to you. In other words, here are the 5 or 10 things I want you to think about as you wrap this task up.

For example, let’s go with visual formatting.

• Does this look right?
• Are there obvious typing errors?
• Or even simpler, is it all on the wrong template?

Broad things along those lines. And then I have a series of questions that I ask my team, things I would ask myself as I’m reviewing. Think of the questions you ask yourself as you review submissions and then hand those questions over to them.

Typically you may ask something like:

• Does this answer the problem or challenge for the assigned task?
• What are the next steps?
• What can I recommend for improvement?
• What are the challenges that they will encounter going forward if they were to implement this suggestion?
• What might they face during the next step?

And, it doesn’t have to be a full-on report, either – it could just be a couple of sentences in an email when your team members are turning something in; that’s often how I have my team do it. These initial thoughts processes get them to start thinking critically before, during, and after each assignment. Because, when you think about your experience and your ability to think critically, I bet you had some people who pushed you pretty hard to think and look at tasks a certain way. To find the answer for yourself. I know I did, and I was very fortunate to have had those people in my career who pushed me to the very edge in terms of try figuring it out myself.

The next step in the process is to create guidelines that not only teach them how to do the work but also the additional soft skills – the things that might not be in the step-by-step documentation on how to do the work.

Now that they have the whole package, an optional step that you can throw in there is for them to complete a submission project. Again, this doesn’t have to be a drawn-out project. Something I’ve done in the past is have my team document the actual process for me – as in, describe how you did it and what the workflows were. That’s a way for them to cement what the process is for themselves, too. And then, what’s the outcome? What are the recommendations?

Those are ways for them to think critically about the work they’re producing. And that’s part of their understanding of how to do the work. And then, finally, is just to let it all go.