There is a scene in the Tina Fey/Amy Pohler film “Sisters” that is hilarious. The scene takes place in the dressing room of a trendy shop where the eponymous sisters go shopping for dresses for a party they are hosting that night. They go to a boutique and try on a number of party dresses, but they are clearly clueless. Each dress the sisters put on is completely unflattering as they wear the dresses in all sorts of inappropriate ways.
The shop clerk watches them in deadpan horror and her face expresses what we are all thinking: each dress is worse than the next. The clerk, however, doesn’t help them put the dresses on correctly or offer them sizes that fit; rather, she says “that looks amaaaazing” in a completely flat tone. This character is the epitome of the lackluster clerk who clearly has been told to compliment the customers. No. Matter. What.
Service that is inauthentic, unhelpful or pushy is the stuff of horrible Yelp reviews and comedic movie scenes. But service doesn’t have to be like that. Businesses that take time to connect authentically to their customers will build a client for life. And businesses that ignore service in the sales moment are doing themselves great harm as sales are based on a human connection. Here are some easy ways to connect with your customers that will make the sisters of your business – service and sales – shine.
Establish Customer Quotas, Not Sales Quotas
Too many businesses focus on the number of sales rather than the number of customers. You must remember that customers make sales. Ask your salespeople to create relationships with every type of customer – not just the ones they already know.
In this article I will tell you an interesting story about how I became a successful CEO and what I believe was my biggest lesson. I have just published a book called The Buddhist CEO, but in many ways I was the accidental CEO.
Ten years ago, I joined a large not-for-profit organization in my native Scotland. I was in charge of all their daily frontline operations and was part of a four-person senior leadership team. Four months into the job, our then CEO died suddenly due to a very unexpected illness. Cutting a very long story short, this resulted in me becoming the CEO.
It was clear to me that the organization was in some difficulty at the time. It had made significant financial losses for two years running, staff morale was low, and our services didn’t perform anywhere near the level they should. Some people might have said I had inherited a poisoned chalice. However, I was able to turn the organization around quickly. In my first year in charge, we made a small profit, staff morale increased significantly and our services started to dramatically improve.
How did I know things were improving? Improvements to the finances were easy to monitor by analysing our management accounts, but how did I know morale was improving? I decided that if the organization was to improve, we needed to boost staff morale. How could we expect staff to provide fantastic services if they didn’t enjoy their job? I set up meetings with different staff groups and asked them directly about what they liked and didn’t like about the company. Clear themes emerged. Staff really wanted to work for us as they loved the idea of helping people. We were a not-for-profit organization helping people to stay warm in their homes and were involved in other environmental projects. Our staff wanted to help people, but they felt our company got in the way.
They were unclear how their job contributed to the company, managers were reluctant to take decisions, nothing worked, the IT was useless, our company cars were old and broken, our phone system was frustrating to use, and they had no idea where the company was heading strategically. In the office, people were not always nice to each other as they were just so frustrated. I realized quickly that our workplace culture was awful and if we were ever to become a high functioning organization we needed to make significant changes and quick.
This was when I started to learn my biggest lesson as a CEO. Workplace culture matters and if it is broken then your organization will never be as successful as it could and should be. I set about fixing the structural issues first. A complete overhaul of our IT, company vehicles and telephone system. This was a big call at the time, after making such heavy losses for two years prior. The board took some persuading that spending more money was the way to go. The impact of this act alone was huge. Staff felt they were being listened to and they could see that things were now working.
I then set about trying to change the culture. I introduced the term ‘world class culture’ into our meetings, our policies and strategies. This lifted the aspirations of staff. I am not sure we ever became world class, but I am certain that just by introducing the notion that we were trying to deliver everything we do internally and externally, at a level that could be described as world class, raised everyone’s game. Our performance went from okay to very good/excellent. This resulted in more contracts coming our way, as partner organizations could tell they could trust us to deliver.
We then brought in an HR specialist to help us train our managers in how to be better leaders. I empowered them to take decisions on their own with clear instructions on when they had to push a decision up to their senior manager. In conjunction with staff, we developed company values that we agreed as a company and then held people to these values. We treated people well but we expected them to treat the company well. This meant that when a staff member clearly wasn’t acting in line with our company values, we intervened and addressed the behaviours being shown.
I believed the culture was changing from negative to positive, but how could I be sure? I decided to measure our culture and we entered the prestigious Sunday Times Top 100 Companies to work for in the UK awards. Why? As part of our entry, staff had to complete an anonymous survey asking them for their view on the company’s leadership, strategy, terms and conditions, ethos, their team, their manager and how we looked after their wellbeing. Every year we got a score which was benchmarked against other companies. Over time we could build up a picture of our culture through this and other measurements we used. To my surprise and delight, we were listed in the top 100 companies to work for in the UK during 6 of the 7 years I was in charge.
This is a brief outline of how I transformed a company. None of this was easy and it takes time and effort to really engage with your staff. In my experience though, it is always worthwhile putting this level of focus on your staff as they will go on to help your company thrive and achieve great success.
The person at the top sets the tone, so make that tone a positive and inspirational one. Put time and energy into developing an aspirational and supportive workplace culture. In my novel The Buddhist CEO, the main character sets out to lead like a Buddhist CEO, applying a compassionate and caring approach towards his staff. It brings his company great rewards, but he still faces great challenges.
Thane Lawrie was CEO of an organization called Scarf, in his native Scotland, and is now an author. He recently published his first novel, The Buddhist CEO (CLICK HERE to get your copy). Thane also writes a regular blog on his website. You can follow him on Twitter at https://twitter.com/BuddhistCeo or visit his website at https://www.thanelawrie.com/.
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Leaders can learn a lot from comedians. They’re captivating public speakers, they practice economy of language, and they’re experts at insight. Insight is a critical leadership skill.
To be clear, I’m not saying that it’s the leader’s job to joke their way through the difficulties of the day. Nor am I saying that the leader’s job is to find something to lampoon in order to amuse others.
No, my argument is this: comedians are experts at insight: they are wonderful at drawing seemingly unrelated pieces of information together in new and unexpected ways. The best leaders have a similar gift: they have the ability to ‘see beyond the data’ and notice patterns, trends, or truths that nobody else sees. And then, like comedians, when they draw attention to the path of their particular perspective, suddenly everyone else sees it too – this is insight in action.
Comedy is Insight in Action
Have you ever noticed how often comedians say, “Have you ever noticed how…?”?
Have you ever noticed how…
you’re never quite sure whether it’s okay to eat green crisps.
triangle sandwiches taste so much better than square ones.
you’ll always pour a glass of water from the sink faucet, but never ever the bath faucet.
“Have you ever noticed how…?” is an example of cultural referencing and looking at the world from a different perspective. Comedians are brilliant at finding ways to come up with a new way of perceiving the world. We don’t see insight till we see it, and then once we do, we can’t ever unsee it. The best leaders do the same. The best leaders use insight to see what others don’t or can’t yet.
Great Leadership is Also Insight in Action
If real leadership is about ‘future proofing’ (future proofing themselves, their people, and their business), then the ability to see the as-yet unseen or unrevealed is critical. This is why Steve Jobs insisted the iMac was launched in four bright colors (not beige), because he realized color is a critical way for people to express themselves. Insight. This is why Bata Shoes opened a shoe factory in Africa where nobody wore shoes, because they saw a potential opportunity where every other shoe manufacturer saw, well, a market where nobody wore shoes. Insight. And this is why Sam Walton of Walmart insisted on building superstores between towns, and not in them, because of lower rates and fewer competitors. Insight.
Insight, as comedians will tell you, can be developed. And you can’t get more insightful without getting more creative. Creative insight is what we’re after. The most creative leaders are, at their core, playful – playing with ideas and scenarios and messages. Great leaders have creativity sessions actually scheduled on their weekly calendar.
Take a look in your calendar right now. Go to next week. How many scheduled, blocked-off slots are there for “thinking” or “creative time” or “idea generation?” How many?
Count again. None? Exactly.
What you should see in your calendar is forty-five minutes peppered here and there for blue-sky thinking and ideation. Or even better, five minutes every morning and evening dedicated to creative thinking in your Leadership Journal. If you don’t make time for creativity, for insight development, you’ll find a million less important tasks to do.
As the extraordinarily insightful Maya Angelou once said, “You can’t use up creativity. The more you use it, the more you have.”
Lighthearted, Not Lightweight
The best leaders, like comedians, are lighthearted, not lightweight: we often confuse the two, but there’s a difference.
I’ll never forget how one of the best leaders that I ever had the pleasure of working for always took time to start every speech with an amusing anecdote or observations (insight). He used this insight skill to great effect too when studying a lengthy balance sheet, or considering the salient KPIs of a particularly complex plan.
He would even charge the HR departments to specifically identify candidates who would test high for insight when recruiting new leaders.
Here’s an example of how this inspirational leader would begin a typical meeting. How’s this for the opening line of an annual general board meeting to announce that year’s performance? It’s probably important to note that the company was a world-leading lock-maker with global revenues of around 100 billion.
He began, “Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for attending our annual general meeting. It’s a little-known fact that my entire work life has been involved in security in one way or another. You probably don’t know this, but my first ever job was selling security alarms door to door. I was really, really good at it. I’d knock and if there was no one at home, I’d always leave a brochure on the kitchen table. They’d call me right away.”
Okay, so that’s not the best joke you ever heard, but for that particular audience it was the perfect opener to a discussion that would at times, he knew, be rather difficult. It probably goes without saying that this particular leader was a master at insightful strategy development.
Insight is a Key Leadership Differentiator
In terms of leadership, insight is one of the key differentiators – it separates the best from the rest. Insight allows the leader to peek into the future and helps them to start creating a pathway into it today.
Too many leaders rely on their intellect, or experience, or tried and tested methodologies. Unfortunately, though, the future is increasingly uncertain. This means that new directions and new and uncertain futures will require, if anything, new insights. Wayne Gretzky skated to where the puck is going to be, and not to where it is now – and that’s the leader’s job too. Intellect and experience might have got you here, but insight, will get you there.
In closing, comedian George Burns probably said it best: “Look to the future – because that is where you’ll be spending the rest of your life.”
Antonio Garrido, author of MY DAILY LEADERSHIP: A Powerful Roadmap For Leadership Success, has over twenty-five years in senior leadership positions with world-class businesses. He is a serial entrepreneur, successful business coach, author, and charismatic speaker.
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The key to weaning squeaky wheels is to boost their confidence and make them more independent.
Your high-cost producers are in the upper-left corner of the leadership matrix. They deliver great results, but they consume a lot of your time and energy. The squeaky wheel is the epitome of a high-cost producer. They need to be weaned off of taking up all of your time.
Your goal with a squeaky wheel is to make them more independent. Make their check-ins less frequent. Limit their ability to just drop in and talk. Provide them boundaries within which they’re expected to make decisions on their own. Try boosting their confidence in their abilities so they’ll be more independent.
To improve a squeaky wheel’s performance, leaders must take control of their interactions with them. Put structure to those interactions. Reduce the likelihood that they overuse informal channels with you, like sending you emails or just picking up the phone and calling. Give them clear parameters where they should act autonomously, and reward or praise them when they do.
I had one squeaky wheel on my team who was constantly in my office, and I would always talk with him because he was delivering great results and working on cool projects. Eventually I figured out how much of my time he was consuming, and I decided to make a change. I went to him and said, “Hey, from now on, any decision that’s below $50,000 you need to make it. Just tell me after you’ve made it. I trust that you’re gonna make the right call. When it’s above $50,000, make sure you involve me earlier.”
What happened was all those small decisions were no longer coming across my desk. All that time I had previously been spending on $5,000 or $10,000 decisions became my time again that I could spend somewhere else. The benefit of more effectively leading a squeaky wheel and weaning them off of the need to see you and talk with you all the time is that you reclaim your leadership capital. You can invest that leadership capital in other team members who need it more. You’re also building this individual’s self-sufficiency. You set them up for success and encourage them to be a higher performer on their own.
With a squeaky wheel, the sooner you can pull back from the amount of time and energy you invest in them, the faster you’ll be able to reinvest that time and energy in other members of your team.
Want to learn more about developing your team? How about taking an entire course on it? Check out the video below to learn more about the course and get started. Or you can go directly to the course and start learning how to assess and improve your strategic plans. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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I recently sat down with David (Ledge) Ledgerwood from the Leaders of B2B podcast to discuss improving leadership skills through better planning and decision-making.
On this episode of the Leaders of B2B podcast, David Ledgerwood and I discussed some leadership lessons that can help B2B business leaders become more successful.
We talked about the importance of making decisions quickly but rationally. Leaders also need to be flexible enough to recognize new information that allows them to correct a course of action.
We also touched on the importance of maximizing your time by building the right team. Leaders shouldn’t sweat over the small stuff. They need to identify people’s strengths and have them run with tasks that require those skills. It’s equally important to know when someone on your team isn’t in the right place and help them find the right role.
Freeing up time is vital because it allows you to focus more on strategy and development.
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There are no stupid questions. There are only stupid people who don’t ask questions.
Today’s post is by Gary Douglas, the founder of Access Consciousness®.
People have always told me that the way I do business is different. I may indeed have a slightly different point of view about most things in life – and I’ll change my point of view on a dime. I question everything all the time.
Innovation occurs when you are willing to be in the question and to ask a question always. Whatever conclusions we come to become the limitation of what we can actually achieve and receive. Don’t assume: “We’ve got this part of the business right,” which is what Kodak did. They assumed: “We’ve got it right. There will always be film.” They didn’t get innovative. They knew about digital and electronic imaging.
Did Kodak look at that and ask: “Which is the direction we need to go? What do we need to create here?” Or did they go to the conclusion that they would always have the answer? Once you decide that you have the answer, nothing that doesn’t match your conclusion can come into your awareness. You’ve got to be willing to see what kind of awareness you could have if you were willing to question.
The purpose of a question is to gain awareness. With increased awareness, different possibilities become available to you. When you become aware of the possibilities, you can make choices. Choice creates. With each choice, you can look at: “If I choose this, what will this create?”
A great executive assistant is only half the equation. Learning how to work with him or her effectively is the real key to maximizing your productivity.
For my new book, The CEO’s Secret Weapon: How Great Leaders and Their Assistants Maximize Productivity and Effectiveness, I interviewed the world’s #1 leadership thinker, Marshall Goldsmith and management guru Ken Blanchard, who expressed a deep appreciation for the value executive assistants bring to the lives of time-constrained executives. Business leaders Richard Branson, Donald Trump and others echoed their sentiment.
Yet, despite the ringing endorsements of assistant’s capabilities by these and other business luminaries, many executives don’t capitalize on this resource that can help smooth out their day and relieve them of untold minutiae.
By not capitalizing on the advantage assistants bring to the table, executives are cheating themselves out of an abundance of talent. While a minority of executives do this because they just can’t let go, many executives are oblivious to the expertise of their assistants because they’ve never learned how to utilize an assistant, or experienced top quality support before. But you can have this support if you consciously recruit and develop an assistant who can take on a leadership role and serve as your “right arm.”
To find your exceptional assistant, start with a candid analysis of yourself. What is your work style – big picture, or myopic? Do you prefer someone whose work habits mirror yours? Are you a micromanager? If so, you will be irritated with a self-starter who takes the ball and runs with it. If you don’t want to be bogged down with details, a self-starter will suit you just fine.
Nurturing employees to be the voice of the brand sustains an ecosystem for innovation, bridging marketing efforts and connecting them with the stakeholders.
Today’s post is by Dhanshi Kittusamy Murthi, Regional Head of US Marketing at Vuram, a global hyperautomation services company.
Organizations across industries are exploring ways to shape a sustainable work culture that enables their people to perform at their highest levels. One way to do this is by presenting people with opportunities to be recognized for their expertise: this not only nurtures outstanding results by building confidence among employees but also boosts the visibility of the brand.
Enabling employees to be the voice of the brand sustains an ecosystem for innovation and productivity, and content is the vital piece of the puzzle to achieving this. It boosts brand awareness and acts as a means through which an organization’s employees can showcase themselves.
Generating Content that Represents the Brand:
According to a 2021 Statista survey involving business-to-business (B2B) content marketing professionals, 91% of the organizations responded that creating brand awareness was one of the goals of their content marketing activities. While chalking out the marketing plan or budget for branding campaigns, marketers should factor in an essential segment that can champion the voice of the brand in the truest sense: its own people.
Every growing, successful organization is driven by passionate people and a work culture that appreciates their efforts. When the employees love what they do, they take pride in what they learn and advocate the best practices. Encouraging them to share their expertise builds a repository of trustable knowledge and content that truly represents the brand.
Building Trust-Based Stakeholder Relations:
Showcasing people as the face of the brand allows businesses to communicate authentically while having a host of benefits. Beyond making an impact in the industry, the ripple effect drives innovation and progress in society by organizations committed to making a difference. In the B2B context, the content created by people who directly work with prospects fosters a bond between the company and its clients, when the spokesperson directly interacts with customers, potential or active. This not only boosts the brand image but also uplifts the morale of the employees and builds trust-based stakeholder relations.
For instance, let’s take an organization specializing in emerging technologies; they constantly innovate and experiment to deliver cutting-edge solutions to solve the problems the customers are facing. The technology experts within the organization can talk about the technologies they are passionate about through short knowledge-sharing videos covering technologies tied to their core work or those they are passionate about. Video being a powerful form of content as it is, reaches business audiences multifold. According to a Forbes Insight report, 75% of the surveyed C-suite executives stated they “watch work-related videos on business-related websites at least weekly”. Imagine speaking to these decision makers about various technologies, in this example, how the company can help solve the crucial challenges they are facing.
The Power of Authentic Content:
People who are camera-shy or prefer writing over the visual form can write about how their core expertise can help their target audience. Coming from a valid source, such knowledge-sharing assumes more value among the audience; it helps resonate with the brand image—of innovating and experimenting—and what the company stands for. Down the line, such authentic content inspires prospects to follow the company updates and be interested in its offerings and, not to mention, form a personal brand for the spokespeople. At a company level, it attracts fresh graduates on the lookout for a learning environment and inspires new employees to conquer the steep knowledge curve and explore ways to innovate as they pursue their careers.
Representing the Brand in Their Own Way:
As organizations embrace the new normal and transition into hybrid working, content generated by experts expands into meaningful branding and visibility opportunities for employees and the organization. Within the organization, the activity instills a learning culture that nurtures future spokespeople. Hence giving people the freedom with responsibility to represent the brand and share ideas and knowledge that matter strengthens the social and professional well-being of employees in an organization.
Creating opportunities that give people exposure and recognition is vital to increase job satisfaction and happiness at work. With remote working, similar initiatives help employees to showcase their potential, initiate internal conversations, and strengthen their visibility among their colleagues. These initiatives will deepen the foundations of open communication and transparency in the workplace, motivating people to share new ideas and focus on ways to innovate.
At a time when trust and transparency are paramount for businesses, shaping a healthy brand image driven by sincere communication from its people matters a lot. Strengthening the brand message is crucial for resilience and building confidence for all stakeholders involved in the ecosystem.
About the Spokesperson
Dhanshi Kittusamy Murthi is the Regional Head of US Marketing at Vuram, a global hyperautomation services company. Her 8-year career experience spans teaching, content writing, and marketing. In her current role at Vuram, she is responsible for strategizing and executing marketing campaigns for the US region.
About Vuram
Vuram is a global hyperautomation services company specializing in low-code enterprise automation. Since its inception in 2011, Vuram has maintained 100% customer success and 100% customer references. Powered by passionate people, Vuram has successfully driven digital transformation for several happy enterprise customers across the globe.
Vuram has received several prominent recognitions, including being featured among the Inc 5000 fastest-growing private companies in the United States, HFS hot vendor (2020), Rising Star- Product Challenger in Australia by ISG, Fast Company – Best Workplaces for Innovators 2022, and recognized as a finalist in the Excellence in Change Communication category in the Gartner Communications Awards 2022. Vuram has consistently ranked in India’s Best Places to Work, certified by Great Place to Work® institute.
Vuram’s hyperautomation technology stack encompasses business process management (BPM), robotic process automation (RPA), optical character recognition (OCR), document processing AI, machine learning (ML), and analytics.
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https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/10/20221010-Two-Employees.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-10-10 08:00:052022-10-10 00:38:32Reimagining B2B Brand Awareness Through Real Faces: How it Benefits Organizations
“Who is mighty? That person who can control their own emotions and make, of an enemy, a friend.” – Talmud
Our 16th U.S. President, Abraham Lincoln, was one of the best when it came to turning adversaries into allies.
“…{On one occasion}, when another official sharply criticized Lincoln’s judgment, the president responded to a reporter’s interrogation by saying he had great respect for the other man, and if this official had concerns about him, there must be some truth to it. Such discretion disarmed divisiveness that was intended to draw Lincoln into side-skirmishes, it won the hearts of his friends and foes and it allowed Lincoln to maintain focus on more important issues.”
What Lincoln did was to utilize the tactic of “deflection.” This means to softly “parry” a challenge or accusation, deflecting it into another direction where it misses entirely.
This is actually a common boxing move. When one fighter throws a jab, the intended target will, very coolly, simply wait until the punch almost reaches him. He’ll then just parry it away with a very slight flick of the wrist. Harmless.
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Speaking spontaneously can be a powerful way for leaders to communicate with their teams. But such spontaneity comes with many pitfalls that can derail the speaker’s message. Beware of rambling on, using inappropriate humor, and not staying attuned to your audience.
A senior vice president I know had just joined a firm and was asked to speak at the next town hall. He was excited about the opportunity to address the company’s 3,000 employees and carefully prepared a scripted speech. But when he began to rehearse, the CEO took one look at the script, and asked,
“What’s that?”
“It’s my speech,” the new executive replied.
“Oh, we don’t give speeches here,” the CEO said. “Just talk to our employees.”
Fortunately, he had time to mentally master the thoughts he had written out, and he spoke without a text – to rave reviews.
Such spontaneous dialogue is the new normal for business leaders. No longer hidden behind podiums as their predecessors were, today’s leaders are far more likely to engage their audience in dialogue. These conversations might be interviews, town halls, elevator conversations, corridor exchanges, or brief remarks sparked by “Do you have a minute?”
As casual as these extemporaneous situations seem to be, they can be high stakes situations for leaders.
If you want to speak as a leader in impromptu situations, avoid the following pitfalls:
Pitfall #1: Not Preparing
Many leaders think of impromptu speaking as “winging it,” but doing so will lead to many stumbles – and who wants to be known for that track record?
Winston Churchill had fun with speakers who talk without thinking. He observed: “Before they get up, they do not know what they are going to say; when they are speaking, they do not know what they are saying; and when they have sat down, they do not know what they have said.”
As counterintuitive as it may seem, you can prepare to be spontaneous. There are times when you know you’ll be part of an impromptu event – a client chat, a conversation with a team member, a networking event, or a Q&A. Take whatever time you have to prepare notes, or a mental outline of what you will say. Even if you only have a few seconds, pause and decide what your message is.
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Writing a problem statement helps you define your goals, boundaries, constraints, and assumptions when faced with a challenging project.
One of my favorite critical thinking and problem solving tools is a good problem statement. You should never just take a problem and rush off in a general direction, thinking you’re going to come up with a solution that will satisfy the needs of your requester. If you don’t know the destination, you’re going to get lost. It’ll take you a long time to get there. The corollary here is with your problem solving and critical thinking. You need to know what that destination is. What is success for your problem solving?
Your problem statement defines that endpoint. Without a problem statement, you’re going to spend a lot of wasted hours, wasted work, and have excessive revisions because your recommendation won’t make sense. Nobody will know what you’re trying to solve for. When you put together a good problem statement, it becomes your charter for your critical thinking efforts. It’s going to spell out your goals. It will lay out boundaries on the problem solving space. It will define success criteria. Your problem statement should spell out the constraints you’re going to face. It should articulate your assumptions, who the stakeholders are, and any timelines that you’re going to face.
I have one client organization that didn’t spend the time laying out their problem statement. They ended up with major issues for their charter for a huge technology project. Because the team was trying to solve all different problems, they didn’t have clarity on what the ultimate goal was, what the metrics were, who the stakeholders needed to be, and what the boundaries were for the space they were trying to solve in. This led the team to write a lot of code, have multiple revisions, and multiple attempted roll-outs. They couldn’t solve the problem because they hadn’t defined what the problem was in the first place.
Take a look at a problem you’re trying to solve. Is it clear what the problem statement is? Do you know what the goals are? Do you know what the boundaries, constraints, and assumptions are? Do you know who the stakeholders are? The time you spend with this type of critical thought is going to help you be more effective in solving the problems that you face.
Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning about critical thinking. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
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Stopping and considering decisions before you make them is only the start to critical thinking and building on those skills makes all the difference.
The importance of critical thinking
Let’s look at the importance of critical thinking. So many times when people ask us, “Can you go solve this problem,” we rush off and start solving it without stopping to think before we do.
We’re facing new demands that require extensive amounts of information before we can make a decision. There are multiple departments involved in all of your problem-solving efforts, and each department is contributing its own input. As part of your problem-solving process, there are going to be multiple stakeholders involved. This increases the complexity of trying to get to an answer.
When you do ultimately come up with a recommendation, those big decisions will involve numerous trade-offs. Not everyone is going to be happy with what you recommend. There are going to be long lag times in acquiring the required data to make your decision, and when you finally do make the call, there’s going to be high scrutiny over whether you were right or wrong. And a bad call can have both business as well as personal and professional implications. Add to this unforeseen bottlenecks in getting the process done of getting to that answer, multiply it by the number of problems you’re trying to solve every single day, and then divide by the limited amount of time you have to get to an answer.
The importance of stopping and thinking critically before you rush off and undertake all these very comprehensive efforts is very high. That critical thinking process is what’s going to differentiate you and the solutions you develop versus rushing off without any thought at all.
Distinguish causes vs. consequences
As you begin your critical thinking efforts, I’d like you to think about causes and consequences. One of the biggest challenges we’re going to face with any problem solving is that desire to rush off and get to an answer quickly because we feel like we’re being responsive to our stakeholders when we do. But think about it.
Have you ever solved a symptom only to find out there are other symptoms that arise after you solve it? Have you ever put in place a recommendation only to find out you created new problems down the road? When you’re going through this critical thinking process, first, consider causes.
Look at the symptom that is problematic. Then figure out the real reason it’s happening. And come at that possible symptom from multiple perspectives. Once you generate a recommendation, stop and think critically. What new problems can you create if you implement this recommendation? What are the new symptoms that will be caused? Think that through before you implement your recommendation.
Let me offer an example. I know a client situation where the organization was going to roll out a brand-new website that would be facing their customers. The problem was they continued to miss deadlines for rolling the website out and going live. Now let’s look at causes and consequences. What was the cause of the website not rolling out? Well, the code wasn’t ready. Yeah, but that’s a symptom. That’s a symptom of a problem. Why wasn’t the code ready? Well, the specifications weren’t done. Okay. Well, that’s also a symptom. Why weren’t the specs done? Well, because they didn’t agree on the features and functionality of the new website. But let’s not stop there. Why was that symptom happening? Well, they weren’t given clarity by leadership around one aspect that was a major strategic decision in terms of how they would roll the website out. That was the cause of all these issues and why the rollout wasn’t happening.
Now let’s think this through. Once that strategic decision is made, what are the consequences of it? So leadership finally decided to make the website a closed network. Therefore, new customers would have to call in to register instead of registering on a website. Let’s look at the consequences of that decision and the new problems that can emerge. New customers are now going to have to call a call center associate. That’s then going to flood the call center with incremental calls. The consequence of that is the staff in the call center is going to be over-worked. And then the consequence of that is current customers are going to experience service issues. They won’t get their calls answered as quickly. And then the consequence of that is we might lose current customers.
By stopping and thinking about causes first and then consequences, once you do make a recommendation, you’re going to identify the true problem that you need to solve and, hopefully, you’ll be able to avoid causing future problems. When you go out to solve a problem, think backwards about the causes and think forward about the consequences.
As you go to apply these notions to your critical thinking processes, I’d like you to think about a problem you’re working on. Look at the causes. Spend some time thinking about what’s really causing this issue. Continue to work backward until it’s clear you’re solving a problem and not a symptom. Then, once you’ve generated a recommendation, think through the consequences. What are the new problems that could emerge if you implement your recommendation? Think about a problem that you made a recommendation on where it didn’t go so well. Which of these two did you miss? Did you miss the real root cause? Did you miss possible consequences of your recommendation?
By spending this extra time thinking about these aspects and putting in the critical thought, there’s a much higher likelihood that whatever recommendation you come up with is going to solve the true problem and you’re going to account for some of the possible consequences down the road.
Want to learn more about critical thinking? How about taking an entire course on it? Go directly to the course and start learning about critical thinking. The entire course is available at LinkedIn Learning. Enjoy!
Did you enjoy this post? If so, I highly encourage you to take about 30 seconds to become a regular subscriber to this blog. It’s free, fun, practical, and only a few emails a week (I promise!). SIGN UP HERE to get the thoughtLEADERS blog conveniently delivered right to your inbox!
https://i0.wp.com/www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/08/20220801-Man-Thinking.jpg?fit=1920%2C1280&ssl=112801920Trevor Joneshttps://www.thoughtleadersllc.com/wp-content/uploads/2022/04/logo.pngTrevor Jones2022-08-01 08:00:482022-08-01 02:27:28The Importance of Critical Thinking
