For critical thinking to work, it is essential that the individuals involved experience a sense of psychological safety in their team. They need to feel free to share ideas, without fear of ridicule. They need to feel safe to challenge the ideas of others without fear of negative consequence.

Without this fundamental feeling of safety, even the most well-intentioned leaders will struggle to gain the full benefit of the collective brain power of their teams. The question is how to create and nurture that environment.

In my voluntary work as a primary school governor, I recently observed a class of 6-year-old children practicing their critical thinking skills to help and support each other with their ideas. They each had the opportunity for their idea to be reviewed and critiqued by their peers and to a child, each experienced a positive and constructive evaluation of their idea, ultimately leading to better outcomes.  In turn, each child presented their idea to their classmates and then they followed a simple 5 step approach.

Step one – Stop, look, think, and notice the idea being shared. Significantly without judgement or comment. Just a few quiet moments being fully present with the idea.

Step two – The owner of the idea would explain their idea and their reasoning behind it.

Step three – Wondering. Others are encouraged to ask questions to help them understand further. Interestingly the questions were prefixed with ‘I wonder…’  e.g., ‘I wonder why you took that approach?’ or ‘I wonder how you saw that working?’.

Step four – The group now actively come forward with their suggestion and ideas to add and build upon the original thought.

Step five – Recognition. Speaking with the teacher, they commented that the successful embedding of this approach hinges upon this last step of praise and recognition of the behaviours demonstrated by the pupils throughout the exercise. 

I share this approach in this paper for the simple reason, it is simple.

There will be enough complexity with the issues being dealt with without making the process overly complicated. And whilst my example comes from primary school children, I was able to observe first hand how powerfully it impacted the class dynamic supporting an environment where individuals felt safe to share and challenge.

To identify high potential, CEB highlight three key factors:

Aspiration – ability to rise to senior roles

Engagement – the ability to commit to the organisation and remain in challenging roles

Ability – to be more effective in more responsible and senior roles

At Arcadia we take a strengths-based approach to developing future leaders, using Zenger Folkman’s Extraordinary Leader and Extraordinary Performer assessment tools. These tools start with result first, including engagement and profitability, and then works back to identify competencies. As a result, Zenger Folkman have recognised which leadership competencies have the greatest and best correlations to business outcomes. There are 19 competencies in total across five main groups – personal capability, leading change, interpersonal skills, character and focus on results. However, one of the differences about this tool is that it identifies what people are great at, rather than finding out what the average leader is.

The concept is that an organisation is defined by its exceptional people rather than its average people, so it seeks to find out who has extraordinary competencies. Therefore, by identifying what people are extraordinary at and similarly what makes them so successful, we can help build these key competencies further. On the flip side, the tools also surface where your fatal flaws so these too can be addressed.

Many commentators are now talking about ‘Truth to Power’. Leaders will need to share as much truth as they can within parameters of risk and not status or ego. The absence of information and feeling ‘in the dark’ reduces the confidence to act. Be transparent with vision, strategy, data, finances, implications, risks. Leaders cannot always be around to share the information especially in a hybrid environment, so it is important to do this systematically and at scale. Create information sharing and knowledge sharing environments and management systems.

As Louise Hay stated: ‘People are doing the best with what they know’ and ‘if they knew better, they’d do better’.

With increased focus on learning and development, there comes more scrutiny on the structure of programs to ensure they are a success. Learning programs cannot simply be a tick box exercise to ensure that organisations can be seen to be developing staff. Instead, learning programs must be structured to help create and support a culture of learning. They need to be more customised to the individual learner’s capabilities and they must provide practical opportunities to implement the skills learned – this is particularly important to younger generations of employees who are looking for hands-on opportunities to demonstrate their capabilities. We are also seeing learning outcomes being tied to tangible improvements in performance such as revenue growth and quality improvement or to employee satisfaction scores.

Meanwhile, there is a definite trend for learning to become more bite sized and modular based so that learners can consume the content anytime, anywhere. Typically, we are seeing learning programs being structured so that initially the learner reads and watches content or completes an assessment before moving into an instructor led program containing individual or group-based exercises, receives coaching and/or mentoring and then applies the skills learned with work based projects, simulations or case studies.

Purpose & Direction –what sort of team they want to be, what binds them together and what do they stand for.

Trust – this means both trust in each other as individuals and also in the team itself as a whole. Credibility, reliability and intimacy and (lack of) self-interest are all important.