Question

Critical thinking in the workplace
Discuss a time in either your work or personal life in which you needed to be able to use critical thinking to either solve or acquire a skill.
Determine the manner in which you would show a potential employer that you posses solid critical thinking skills. Give your opinion on whether or not you believe that individual can increase their critical thinking skills.

Answer 1

Critical thinking is the ability to think logically and rationally about an issue with the proper analysis of facts and figures. I would like to share an incident about my professional experience where I had to take bigger decision in the process I was handling and with a proper analysis I took right decision.

In my professional career I was working as a Manager for one of the Accounts payable team in a reputed organization. Working in Accounts department is not an easy task. We will need to work with a lot of pressure with a tight deadlines. Any adhoc work would be difficult to be accepted. One fine day during the busy season, I get an email asking for a report for the last 6 years of the payments being made to all the external vendors of the organization and it also had a lot of specifications to the report to be sent. The request was sent with high importance. Since we were already working with high pressure we did not have enough bandwidth to provide the report which is so time consuming and the client was aggressive that he needs the report. This was situation where I was in dilemma whether to focus on the regular work or adhoc.

In this situation I first glanced the requirement of adhoc report and realised that it is going to be a time consuming task and with proper analysis of the work to be done, I prepared a estimate of time the report is going to take and the estimate of regular work which is to be completed and then sent it my Leadership letting them know the situation. Even the Leadership team agreed my proposal to respond the customer with a timeline of 1 week to prepare and send the report. It was known that if we just say no, the customer will bounce back to the top leadership. Hence we made this plan and responded to the customer with below note.

“We have analysed the requirement and the task is going to take minimum of 14hours of the job and currently we are running with busy season. Hence this report will take time for a week to pull the data and produce the final report as you expect. We will need to accommodate time to do this task in the busy season. Kindly confirm if this is ok with you”

After sending this note, the customer agreed to it and confirmed that he is ok with 1 week.

Yes, Individual can increase their Critical thinking skills and it is just that the person will need to constantly focus on asking few questions to himself – why, what, when, where & How. This will answer most of the questions. Also the person can refer to the old situations as a reference and learn from it. In a professional organization there are plenty of chances that a person can showcase the critical thinking skills. When there is a chance the person should take lead and start working towards it which will enhance the Critical thinking skills.