Are Your Leaders Thinking Critically and Clearly?

The age of Twitter has people wired in and thinking in 140 characters or less. The development of corporate social networking tools has honed the focus of department heads on the minutiae of an organization. And the advancement of technology has made this narrowed thinking easier and more efficient.

But all of this may be crippling managers’ ability to make critical decisions that will brew benefits on a larger scale. Perhaps, amid the hectic pace of the new business environment, managers and leaders are losing sight of the bigger picture. While they may be focused on the finite goals of their department, leaders are ignoring critical decisions that could not only pay off for their department but the organization as a whole.

“Leaders just aren’t thinking with the right mindset these days,” said Catherine J. Rezak, chairman and co-founder of Paradigm Learning Inc., a training and communications firm that specializes in the design of business games and simulations. “Things are so fast and furious and there’s so much information coming at them all the time that they’re scattered in their thinking.”

This is the argument she scribed in a recent white paper, “Developing Critical Thinking in Today’s Leaders: No Room for Old-School Leadership Development in the New Normal.”

In it, she challenges corporate learning leaders to adapt and implement more active learning systems to change this behavior. Rezak writes: “Critical thinking enables leaders at every level to understand the impact of their decisions on the business as a whole and ensures both alignment with organizational goals and accountability for results.”

In other words, managers are too bogged down and most learning programs designed to fix issues related to critical thinking simply scrape the surface. “We’re going too much in the direction of cutting our training short, doing things in little bits and bites, and not really developing the kinds of critical thinking skills that our leaders need,” she said. The good news is that a deeper level of critical thinking can be taught — although the process isn’t simple.