Critical Thinking Application Paper

Critical thinking is important in the workplace as many decisions must be made that can affect not only the person making decisions but the whole company and all employees at times. This paper will discuss why this is so important and give a personal example of a time that required critical thinking in the workplace.

I worked as a manager of a call center for some time and part of my job was to make decision that affect the company on a daily basis. I was responsible to keep the employees in line with quality or how they handled the customers, as well as making sure they came to work. I also had to match the call volume to the number of employees to keep the labor count down. Without critical thinking this job would have been very hard and I may have made many mistakes. The labor rate was a large concern as if too high the company is paying out more than they are making as the client does not want to pay for services the company is not providing. So the issue is three fold. I must keep the client happy, the company upper management happy and the employees happy all at the same time. This is harder than many think in a call center where the call volume can go up and down.

The call center industry in itself needs critical thinking to survive as many things change each day as information is updated and changed. Without the use of critical thinking one does not go far as mistakes are made and in this type of industry mistakes cost a lot of money for clients. Example if the company males a training program without thinking they can set up the employees to give misinformation. This can lead to customer complaints which mean the company may need to give refunds and the company can get fined by the FTC (Federal trade commission, 1/22/2010). Critical thinking in this example can make or break a company and with a little effort one could avoid a costly mistake.

According to Paul and Elder ( 2006) critical thinking is basically thinking about thinking or analyzing...