A business strives not on revenue numbers and profits alone. Critical thinking in any business leads to a robust business model. This is what will ultimately drive revenue and profits for your business. Critical thinking is a skill that is quite underrated. Everyone can start from 1. But, the person starting from 0 and making it 1 is the game-changer. For any business or startup to excel, critical thinking should be appreciated. However, critical thinking is done by humans. And humans tend to be biased toward a particular direction. This can hamper your critical thinking process at large. As a result, your business plans can get affected as well.
You cannot simply change the way someone thinks and take action. But, a business can surely discuss how certain thought processes should be dealt with. As critical thinking is so important for any business model, there are many barriers to it as well. These barriers can cause critical thinking to be affected in a negative, producing negative results.
So, what are the barriers to critical thinking in a business?
In this article, I highlight some barriers to critical thinking and how they can hamper your business growth.
What Are The Barriers To Critical Thinking
For any business, there can be many different barriers affecting their critical thinking process. However, as humans, we tend to have some common thought processes. These can ultimately hamper and become a strong obstacle in your critical thinking process.
Let us see some barriers to critical thinking!
1. Unnecessary Work Pressure
For any business to stand apart, you require a lot of work. No doubt, it is the only way to taste success. You rely on every employee of your company with their work. Every work combined together makes a business successful.
However, in all this, a business needs to ensure that the work pressure is appropriately built. Work pressure is a must for every employee. But many businesses have a toxic work culture leading to unnecessary work culture. This leads to employees not being productive when critically thinking about a solution.
Unrealistic targets, project deadlines, extra work hours, and much more can lead to exhaust any employee. As a result, you hamper their ability to think. Employees deliver quantity and not quality. Just like machines, we as humans need rest too. It is proven in multiple pieces of research that the mind controls the physical body and not the other way around.
So, having a flexible work culture is important to keep your employees ready for critical thinking,
2. Personal Bias and Conditioning Of A Employee
Every person in your business will come from a different background. This background entails personal experiences, different living standards, people around them, and so on! All this tends to have an impact on their thinking ability.
As humans, we may not realize but our personal experience leads to a personal bias. This affects our ability to think logically and critically. No matter the situation, this personal bias can kick in. Once it kicks in, your thinking tends to move in a particular direction.
As a business, you need to come up with a workflow process to ensure that any employee’s personal bias is not reflected in their work. This is quite tough but not impossible. This is where the HR department works with the employees on a regular basis to keep in check their experience with the work culture.
3. Mundane Work Culture
Every employee has a set of tasks for which you hire them. But, every employee needs to be challenged in work and in their daily tasks. A person that is performing the same tasks every day without much thinking wouldn’t be able to think out of the box.
Most businesses nowadays provide different and dynamic work routines for their employees. This ensures they are not in a bubble. Some of the tasks would include clerical work without much thinking. But, the other tasks rely heavily on the way you think and execute.
As they say, you cannot run without walking. Each employee’s work profile needs to have a dynamic set of tasks. This would require them to think critically to execute their work. In the long run, the same employees provide valuable inputs changing the face of your business.
4. Low Ownership For An Employee
This one aspect of many businesses is quite ignored. Every employee needs to get ownership and be held accountable for a particular task. Employees without ownership or low ownership tend to execute tasks with the same logic and survive on the same performance graph. This allows the employee to be in their comfort zone. As a result, it affects the way they provide inputs for decision-making in the company.
Many employees are not made part of the decision-making process of the company. This is the most harmful work culture you can ever have. I am not asking you to ask a fresher to perform the responsibilities of a CEO! But, every employee in the hierarchy should contribute to the decision-making process of the company.
When every employee is asked to provide input, they tend to start their thinking process and try to provide valuable input. You cannot expect any employee to provide business insights if he is not a part of it in the first place.
5. Personal Growth Over Business Growth
There are many employees who focus more on their personal growth in the company than any other thing. They tend to overlook the nature of their work relating to the company’s success. Every employee needs to be realized how their work is contributing to the business.
If any employee doesn’t know the impact he is creating in any business, you cannot expect critical and logical thinking from them. All their actions and decisions are ensuring their growth and not the company’s growth.
As a business, it is important to let your employees know their impact on the business. Then only they tend to contribute more. Else, they stay in a bubble, perform their tasks, and leave!
Bottom Line
I have tried covering the basic barriers to critical thinking. There are other barriers to critical thinking as well. But, having been working in multiple companies, these 5 are the most important and necessary to work upon. I am sure you can think of a lot of other barriers. As every business is different, there may be certain barriers specific to a particular business industry. However, the above 5 barriers to critical thinking are quite common. They can hamper any business.