Healthy organizations (and their leaders) encourage critical thinking at all levels.
Of course, critical thinking doesn’t mean negative. It just means thinking with perspective, pausing, questioning assumptions, and verifying alignment with goals and values.
A brief aside about critical thinking for folks who are “othered”
It’s worth noting here that frequently, people who are “othered” are told they are being negative. This is due to unconscious (or conscious) negativity bias applied to those who are othered, such as racialized or neurodivergent people, whereby people (including othered people who have unexamined internalized systemic “stuff”) may experience someone raising a new perspective as negative.
While it should never be on an othered person to change themselves to be acceptable to the dominant group, it’s also useful to use skills and techniques learned from the field of EQi, by always proposing potential solutions in addition to issues when raising discussion topics that are based on critical thinking. But if you’re an othered person, and no matter how solutions-oriented, self-aware and emotionally insightful you are, you are minimized or undermined as a pattern? That should be a prompt to find another place to contribute all of your insights.
To wrap up…
Regardless of sector or size of org your in, it’s worth considering whether you allow space for critical thinking both laterally and downward. If you’re not in a formal leadership role, it’s worth considering whether leaders seem to encourage critical thinking in others.
Long term outcomes will happen one way or another based on cumulative decisions (and non-decisions) made now.
For that reason, it’s always useful to pause and reflect on what long game looks like if critical thinking – of both the what and the how – is not sufficiently fostered.
Just some food for thought. You can find more thought-provoking and career/leadership-related posts over here.
Otherwise, if personal growth and spiritual development is more your thing, you can find empowering posts over here.
