Monitor and improve thinking practices

Critical thinking road map

Monitoring team skill development plays a fundamental role when developing recommendations on future learning arrangements to be implemented in future planning. Now that you have a bank of questions to ask, you can use them to assess the level at which they sit.

Each phase is paired with five generic milestones so they can be applied to various roles and industries. These milestones include:

1. Beginner
2. Progressing
3. Intermediate
4. Advanced
5. Threshold

The roadmap works from left to right; the skills can be built on each other. Once the Threshold milestone has been met, it means all other milestones to the left of that threshold have been accomplished.

Monitoring team skills.

One of the key aspects of your role as a leader is to monitor the development of your team, especially when it comes to critical thinking. Your skills and knowledge in this area will be a fundamental teaching tool.

According to Harvard Business Review, there are four phases with a set of questions that need to be considered when monitoring your team’s skills. These stages include:

Phase 1: Execute

The execution phase will often have people who have not experienced critical thinking or are pushed to think for themselves. If you ask them to do something, they will simply do as you have asked. The execute phase is the ability to convert instructions into action. Actioning instructions requires another layer of skills, including:

• Verbal reasoning
• Decision-making
• Problem-solving.

The questions you should ask to monitor or assess their skills in this phase include:

1. Do they complete all parts of their work tasks?
2. Do they complete them on time?
3. Do they complete them at, or close to, your quality standard?

If you can answer yes to all three of these questions, you will know your employee is understanding/ comprehending.

If you find an employee(s) struggling with your instructions, the first step you can take is simply to ask them to reiterate the task back to you to gauge their understanding. Additionally, consider the following recommendations to help support their understanding.

• Give a smaller task with a short and more immediate deadline.
• Once the task has begun, ask them to explain what they did, how and why they did it
• Ask them if they have any suggestions for improvement next time.

When employees can identify and make suggestions for improvement, they are ready for the next phase.

Phase 2: Synthesise

During phase 2, the employee(s) and the team members learn to filter through a range of information and summarise key points from meetings. To determine whether the employee has established these skills, you should ask the following questions:

1. Can they identify all the important insights?
2. Do they exclude all unimportant insights?
3. Do they accurately assess the relative importance of those insights?
4. Can they communicate important insights clearly and succinctly?

Ideally, for people in this phase, you should be able to answer yes to these questions.

It is important to consider. However, synthesis is a skill that grows with practice. For those who find it difficult to synthesise, giving them as many opportunities to practice this skill as possible is important. You can accomplish this by:

• Share what they took away from a meeting
• Encourage them to share their insights first; these should be shared in a clear, structured manner
• Where struggle is present, lead them in the right direction to tease apart the important bits. For example, what would you share if you could share one thing you got out of the meeting and only had 5-10 minutes to do so?

When employees are put on the spot and can summarise the important insights and implications for future work and projects, they are ready for the next stage.

Phase 3: Recommend

In phase 3, the employees should be able to move on from identifying the important aspects to determining what needs to be done next. The key goal is for the team to make appropriate and well-rounded recommendations to suit the context. In some cases, their recommendations may not align with your opinion. The following are questions to consider when assessing their progress in Phase 3:

1. Do they always provide a recommendation instead of relying on you to come up with answers?
2. Have they considered the potential downsides of their recommendation?
3. Do they consider alternatives before recommending them?
4. Are their recommendations backed by strong, sensible reasoning?

When the team has entered this phase, as their leader, you will need to foster their skills. You can achieve this by:

• Start by encouraging them to make recommendations and then share your opinion.
• Asking them:
  • to share their rationale?
  • what alternatives did they consider?
  • what downsides were there to their recommendations?

By asking these questions and probing for a response, you encourage them to think beyond their first thought. You will know they are ready to move to Phase 4 when the team members can make reasonable recommendations that reflect sound business judgment on work that is not their own.

Phase 4: Generate

In this final phase of thinking, your team needs to be able to create something out of nothing. For example, the staff need to participate in professional development; the team should be able to create a program to cater for this. During this phase, your team can competently translate their vision and the visions of others into a project. You can assess progress in this phase with the following questions:

• Do they propose high-value work that does not follow logically from work they are already doing?
• Can they convert your and others’ visions into achievable plans for realising those visions?
• Can they figure out how to answer questions you have but do not know how to answer?

Nurturing evolution in this phase is critical, and you will often find yourself modelling this thinking for them. Many people do not make it to this thinking phase because they do not allow themselves to think openly.

The following are some practices you can implement to foster the evolution of your team in Phase 4:

• Invite them to attend your brainstorming session; you show them it is not only okay to spend time thinking, but it is required.
• Ask them to keep a list of their ideas for improving the project, department, or organisation.
• Invite them to share those ideas with you regularly.
• Check the ideas with them to show them the exercise was more than a practice activity.

Feedback, as you will have come to learn, is an invaluable practice to implement to regularly improve the skills of the employees and the organisation/ workplace as a whole. Part of your role as a leader in providing opportunities for the team to practice their critical and creative thinking. But how do you know if the options you have given were helpful? The answer is collecting and analysing feedback from the team.

There are several ways you can collect and analyse feedback. Some of these include:

• Employee engagement survey
• Pulse survey
• Check-in Meeting
• Manager's meeting
• Employee suggestion box
• Performance data

Employee engagement survey

Employee engagement surveys are generally developed by management to issue to their team to determine how they are feeling about work, their satisfaction, engagement and retention. These surveys are often completed annually, twice a year, or quarterly and are a reliable way to collect feedback in one go. Employee engagement surveys can be conducted anonymously or non-anonymously, be sure to stipulate this when developing them.

To maximise the success of using these surveys, you must inform the team of what you seek from them. Once collected, you can share the results (keeping them anonymous) to encourage continual input.

Survey questions

Employee engagement surveys are usually comprised of open-ended questions related to their role, the workplace, or the task they are working on. Questions should continuously be developed with constructive feedback in mind. To do better, you need to know what your team requires from you.

The following are some examples of questions you may wish to use.

1. Explain what aspects of the project you enjoyed the most and what factors you least enjoyed.
2. What can we do as a management team to give you more opportunities to practise your critical and creative thinking skills?
3. What can we do to improve the working culture?
4. What ideas or contributions do you have to our approach to projects, deadlines and training?
5. How can we better support you within the workplace? (Wonderflow, 2019)

Pulse surveys

Pulse surveys are shorter than employee engagement surveys and, therefore, can be completed much more frequently (either weekly, fortnightly or monthly). Pulse surveys are a vital tool to determine current employee satisfaction promptly. Pulse surveys can also be used to track progress on critical initiatives. For example, if you have been addressing feedback about lack of career advancement and opportunity to practise critical thinking, use your Pulse surveys to see if your projects have been hitting the mark or if more work is needed.

Pulse survey questions

Pulse surveys should ideally have no more than five questions, as they are getting completed in a shorter period. One way to address this is by using a scale. The question you may pitch to pair with the scale may be

On a scale of 1-10, with one being poor and ten being outstanding, how do you find management support towards independent and critical thinking?

As follows:

After they have indicated the score on the scale, ensure you provide a space for them to explain why they gave the result they did.

Check-in meetings

Check-in meetings are a face-to-face method of collecting feedback whereby a manager arranges time with individual or group employees to discuss the following:

• What they are enjoying about the project
• How they feel about the work and workload
• What would they like to see more of
• What opportunities would they like
• What do they like least about the project or job?

During the interview, ensure the employee feels comfortable and assured their input is essential to help provide the best working experience for everyone. Be sure to capture what the team members have stated in the discussion to reflect on later to plan for future improvement and engagement.

Manager's meeting

Most businesses have more than one department manager, such as a Human Resources Manager, Project manager, team manager, etc. Managers are usually on the frontline and should know everything that is going on within their team. They will have unique perspectives on how the team copes through one-on-one meetings, meetings, and lunch conversations. Because of this active involvement, they will likely know what motivates the couple, engagement, and productivity.

Managers should find the time to meet and discuss what is happening within the team and seek feedback from one another. This is to determine where they may need additional support or advice they can implement within the group. These meetings are integral, and the lines of communication should be left open to ensure all feedback is captured, even those off comments. They are incorporating related questions into employee surveys to learn whether the rest of your workplace feels the same way.

Employee suggestion box

Hybrid and remote work environments make employee suggestion boxes slightly more challenging. However, they should not be overlooked entirely. Wherever possible. They should be used to encourage the team to anonymously put their honest opinions and suggestions, and ideas without the concern of a digital footprint.

If you are using a suggestion box, it should be somewhere that is easily accessible, not in a high-traffic area. A front desk is usually an excellent place for suggestion boxes as employees walk passed it daily and can drop their feedback in on their way out.

Analysing feedback

Once you have collected the feedback from the team or other managers, you will need to analyse it.

Analysing feedback involves carefully reading the collected data, notes and meeting minutes. Let us look at the following steps you can implement to analyse input.

1. Collect the data in one place

   • While this may seem obvious, it is possibly the most crucial step in analysing feedback. All collected feedback must be stored in one place before you conduct the analysis. If feedback is collected digitally, keep it in a folder about that feedback; for example, there should be a folder for employee engagement surveys, one for pulse surveys and so on. If obtaining hard copies, the same concept applies, files or folders labelled with what feedback has been collected. Complex feedback documents should be filed with the most recent at the front. Be sure to keep all feedback forms, regardless of if they have been completed in full or partial.

2. Categorise

   • Once you have organised the feedback, you need to categorise it. Your organisation or workplace may have a system for classifying feedback, or you may devise your plan. Feedback should be organised and then sub-categorised. To categorise, you must carefully read through the collected data to identify common patterns. You will need to choose a common theme or topic from the designs that will help the team categorise. For example, the data you have collected may have a common theme of employees identifying the lack of processes as a blocker; all of those responses would be categorised together. From there, you can sub-categorise further based on the expansion they have given; perhaps you may find a handful of responses that would like more style guides implemented or a step-by-step process to complete specific tasks. Categorising and sub-categorising the feedback helps paint a picture of what is going on and how to implement a plan of action to address the team's needs.

3. Divide the feedback into positive, negative and neutral

   • After categorising the feedback, you will need to identify the nature of the input, starting with dividing it into positive, negative, neutral and what is not required. These properties will help analyse what works very well, what needs work, what does not, and what can be discarded. Focussing on these properties can help direct your focus equally. The negative feedback will help identify areas of gaps; positive will keep motivation, while neutral helps to identify where areas of improvement are required.

4. Look for the root problems

   • Once you have been able to analyse the nature of the feedback, you need to identify the root causes. Positive feedback rarely needs additional work; why fix what is not broken? However, just because there is no need to fix something does not mean acknowledgement should be overlooked. Ensure you are reiterating the positive feedback when it comes to using it as a driving motivator to keep up the excellent work. The negative or neutral feedback, however, is where work is where the action is required. It would be best if you found out why this feedback was received in the first place. Once you know the why, you can analyse this further to pinpoint the contributing factors, for example, lack of resources, finance, etc.

5. Plan to take action.

   • Now it is time to plan how you will address the root causes of the negative and neutral feedback you received. You may need to consider additional training for the team, is this going to be formal or informal? For example, seminars or webinars, workshops and so on. This training will have to align with the highlighted issues found within the feedback.

6. Inform the team.

   • The final step is informing the team. Once you have carried out each of the steps in the analysis process and identified a plan of action, the team needs to be made aware of what will happen due to the feedback they provided. There is little point in asking them for feedback if you are not going to auction it; they will feel their voices are not being heard and will likely show reluctance in providing further feedback.

Performance data

The work performance data are raw measurements and observations identified during the tasks performed to carry out a project or job. Performance data is measured against company policies for compliance.

Performance data looks into the current status of different tasks, projects and parameters, for example, how much time has passed, how much was done, costs and the progress of the project. This data encompasses the scope, time, costs, communications, quality, risks, and procurement. (Project Management Knowledge, 2022)

Inform the team of what common feedback was identified and the plan you have; if this is more training, then you will need to tell them this is going to happen and where it will take place. Invite and encourage further questions and be open to hearing their responses. Finally, ensure they have time to process any changes that are being made.

Additional support

Additional support refers to the help required to help build on an individual’s and team’s skills and knowledge. As a leader, it is within your role to offer such support to the team where applicable.

At this stage, you will have been equipped with the tools, such as critical and creative thinking models and roadmaps, to identify where the team or individual needs additional support.

Critical and creative thinking is very complex in nature and takes practice to master.

Providing support

The following table outlines some areas where the team or an individual may require additional support and what that additional support may look like.

The following video outlines 7 things you can implement to support your team as a leader.

Developing improvements

For the individuals and the team to continue to improve, it is important to provide opportunities to do so. When identifying gaps, problems, or barriers, it is important to look at the data (feedback) you have collected based on programs that have been implemented to help support the team's needs.

Consider the following process when developing improvements.

1. Collect program information, including surveys, feedback forms and so on.
2. Analyse the information to determine what areas of the program were unclear, lacking or not meeting goals.
3. Identify the additional support and advise recommendations based on the collected data.

Developing recommendations

Providing recommendations for improvements can be viewed similarly to issuing feedback. However, like most feedback, careful consideration needs to be taken to ensure you are advising on these improvements to meet the needs of the individual and align with legislation.

Where team members or individuals are finding tasks involving critical and creative thinking difficult, consider the following table.

Congratulations! You have made it to the end of the module. Throughout the learning, you will have developed your understanding of:

• Research techniques.
• Critical and creative thinking models and application in the workplace.
• Identifying gaps in learning, including questioning techniques.
• Facilitation opportunities to build on these skills.
• Facilitation of formal and informal learning opportunities.
• Creating a safe working environment that fosters and encourages critical and creative thinking.
• Relevant legislation and how to ensure learning opportunities are aligned with said legislation.

Knowledge Check

Test your critical and creative thinking knowledge by answering the following eight (8) questions. Click the arrow to navigate between the tasks.