Coaching for critical thinking, part two: What does it mean to coach critical thinkers?

With the continued growth of automation and artificial intelligence, we will lose the ability to earn a paycheck for rote, repetitive thinking (see part one for more). The only problems that we will have left to solve are the messy, complex, and cumbersome problems that require critical thinking. This presents an opportunity for today's workplace leader, to coach their employees not merely to be more productive and engaged (though certainly, these are important), but to be critical thinkers.

What does it mean to coach critical thinkers?

It starts with challenging easy assumptions and rapid reactions. NYU moral psychologist Jonathan Haidt (author of "The Righteous Mind: Why Good People are Divided by Politics and Religion") suggests that our minds operate with two competing systems: a rational rider, capable of critical thought and strategic thinking, and a reactive elephant, driven by emotions, assumptions, and subconscious thinking. The elephant is physically stronger than the rider and lumbers wherever its elephant mind would go.

For Haidt, the critical thinker is not one who never acts with emotion, assumption, and subconscious thinking, but one who can put emotion, assumption, and subconscious thought into conversation with logic, reason, and evidence. To coach a critical thinker is to facilitate this dialogue.

Emotions and assumptions are fundamental to who we are as people, but in and of themselves aren't particularly useful in a workplace where all of our problems require long-term, perspective-expanding consideration.

In today's complex work environment, emotions and assumptions need to be balanced with strategy, direction, and data. Accordingly, today's managers should think of themselves as quasi-elephant tamers, tasked with helping their teams to be more consciously aware of how emotions and assumptions are shaping their behavior.

This can begin with the simple act of thoughtfully challenging snap-judgments. Coaching for critical thinking involves pushing back on snap-reactions, personal criticisms, and negative opinions that seem divorced from facts and data. This push back should come with a fair bit of humility - as leaders, it's not your job to eliminate snap-reactions, personal criticisms, and negative opinions, but to bring them into alignment with the big picture, with an organization's mission and vision, and with the objective facts of the situation.

This thoughtful challenging of perspectives can be applied in a rather common workplace situation: griping about decisions made by our leaders. It seems that many of our reactions and assumptions are targeted at specific individuals who occupy higher positions in the company org chart. Strolling Madison's Capitol Square neighborhood each day over my lunch break, I overhear dozens of conversations where an individual is ruthlessly criticizing a manager, a director, or executive.

I've overheard these types of conversations from tech employees, state workers, baristas, personal trainers, and parking enforcement officers, to name just a few. It seems that "Wisconsin nice" doesn't apply when our bosses are out of earshot! Either all of our organizations are plagued by incompetent leaders, or we have a tendency to target our emotions and reactions to specific people!

Coaching critical thinkers involves cultivating empathy towards the targets of our assumptions. It does not mean we need to defend other managers, leaders, and executives.

Rather, as coaches, we should be placing our team members in a position where they can thoughtfully and carefully consider what they would do differently, were they in the leader's situation.

A good coach asks their team members how they, given an opportunity to confront the relevant facts, analyze the available resources, and consider possible alternatives, would decide differently.

After this careful consideration, if a team member would still decide differently, the coach must encourage them to articulate why they would do so - and ideally, to put this articulation into writing. This process isn't likely to reverse business decisions or convince an executive to change course, but it is likely to give the rider a less-obstructed view of the landscape.

To coach a critical thinker can involve many other practices: evaluating alternatives in the context of a guiding strategy, prioritizing work in the context of a shared goal or purpose, or charting a course based on the needs of multiple, divergent stakeholders. It's to some of these practices that we will turn in part three of this series, Coaching Questions for Critical Thinkers.

Coaching for Critical Thinking, Part One

Does your job seem excessively rote, tedious, and repetitive?

If so, automation threatens your job security.

According to Brookings, 25% of all American jobs are at risk of elimination from automation and artificial intelligence. While automation will first disrupt low-wage tasks such as food service, it will also change or eliminate jobs in high-tech fields like information technology and web design.

When we are reminded of this imminent automated future, it is natural to feel some anxiety and apprehension. Many stable jobs that exist at the start of 2020 will not exist at the start of 2030.

Yet many, myself included, believe that such disruption in the labor market will create more benefits than it eliminates. That's because these technologies create more jobs than they eliminate. The jobs they create will not be rote or tedious. Rather, they will require critical thinking, creativity, and innovation. They will allow us to be consultative, rather than transactional. These technologies will change the focus of our labor from task completion to problem-solving.

As an instructional designer for Zendesk's customer experience teams, I'm well aware of how automation and AI have changed the customer service space for the better. As automated bots and self-service content have reduced transactional customer contacts, customer support professionals have pivoted towards solving bigger, more audacious problems. The end result is that customer support agents spend less of their time repeatedly answering the same questions, and more of their effort experimenting, seeking to solve previously unanswered questions. The role of the customer support agent is becoming more dynamic, more fun, even more human.

As jobs evolve into more meaningful work, managers must evolve as well. Gone are the days of the task-master manager, focused on delegating to-do lists and enforcing completion. Today's workplace is the domain of the workplace coach who can empower their teams with critical thinking skills. The most effective leaders in this new economy are those who can coach their teams to pause and reflect and to consider many possible solutions. They are those who can coach their teams to be detectives, to find new solutions to questions that were previously unasked!

The manager in an age of automation must be a coach of critical thinkers.

What is a critical thinker? It is simply one who carefully aligns their thinking in service to a goal.

That might sound simplistic, even easy to do. In fact, it's incredibly difficult. Critical thinking requires the suppression of bias, implicit and explicit. It involves a commitment to slow and steady analysis in a world that expects velocity. It demands consideration of feedback and even pushback. In this age of 240-character thoughts and 24-hour news, it turns out that critical thinking is deeply counter-cultural.

In this blog series, we'll explore what it means to coach for critical thinking. In upcoming blogs, we'll look at:

• What it means to coach critical thinkers

• How to ask powerful coaching questions that lead to critical thinking

• How to determine whether your coaching is, in fact, creating critical thinkers

Together, let's hit the pause button on the rapidity around us. It's time to think, about thinking.

Football and workplace coaching, part four: Don't be a coach of players, be a coach of coaches

Those unfamiliar with American football might not realize that there is more to the game than size and strength. Toughness and force are important to a player's success, but limitations in size and strength can be overcome through technique, precision, and cinematic montages.

I spent my playing career on the offensive and defensive line, positions that I now coach. The best players on the line are those whose first steps are quick and decisive. I've always found that the best linemen are the players whose hand placement and pad level are calibrated to maximize leverage, and whose attention spans are capable of constantly critiquing the minutiae of the form. The adage "the low man always wins" remains true in the sport of American football - but being the "low man" requires a decisive mastery of a surprisingly complex skillset.

It's my belief as a coach that to be successful in the most physically demanding position in the world's most physical sport demands a commitment not just to aggressive play, but to consistent execution, evaluation, and improvement.

Yet despite the necessity of great technique, most football teams have only one coach to work with dozens of players in a given position group. In a fast-moving sport where up to five linemen can take the field on one side of the ball, the best coaches quickly realize that there's far more coaching than one person can realistically provide. There are too many movements to watch, too much technique on which to focus, too many moving pieces in the system. As a linemen coach, I am responsible for watching more than my eyes can take in.

In the workplace, people leaders are increasingly finding their coaching efforts limited by time and space. As remote working arrangements and geographical distribution of employees become normative in the digital workplace, people leaders have fewer opportunities to coach their teams, aside from a few minutes set aside for a weekly Zoom or a bi-annual performance review.

That's why the most influential coaches, in football and in the workplace, are not the best coaches of players. Rather, they are the best coaches of coaches. The most effective coaches build a culture of coaching, erasing the arbitrary demarcation between coach and contributor so that all are empowered to coach in the moment.

To be a coach these days is about training others to become coaches themselves. Coaching is about upskilling others on the team to ask powerful questions. It's about encouraging others to provide realtime, contextually relevant feedback. It's about helping team members to step back from subjective judgments and to lean into conversations about actions that will affect performance outcomes.

I regularly remind the linemen I have the privilege to work with that my role as their coach is to put them in a position to coach one another. When we get into a game and I stand on the sidelines, some 80 feet away from the action, I and the other coaches don't have a great vantage point. In these moments, there's not much that I can do to affect the outcome of a game. If I want the unit's performance to improve throughout the course of the game, I need to empower the players to make themselves better. I need to be a coach not of players, but of coaches.