By Trương Chí Dũng, Director of R&D, Le&Associates. – http://www.l-a.com.vn/news/detail/1022/time-for-employees-to-think.htm

On SHRM some years ago, there was an article named Take a Time-out for Your Team to Reflect by Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg. The articles stressed that employees must know how to work and to reflect. Therefore, the manager must give them some time to think.

When working, many things happen in the employee’s brain such as questioning, investigating, analyzing, synthesizing and connecting information. These take a lot of time in an invisible way.

Time for employees to think
Last updated: 24/10/2012

By Trương Chí Dũng, Director of R&D, Le&Associates.

On SHRM some years ago, there was an article named Take a Time-out for Your Team to Reflect by Jonathan Gosling and Henry Mintzberg. The articles stressed that employees must know how to work and to reflect. Therefore, the manager must give them some time to think.

When working, many things happen in the employee’s brain such as questioning, investigating, analyzing, synthesizing and connecting information. These take a lot of time in an invisible way.

Reflecting does not show, therefore on seeing someone quiet, many people think they are not working. In fact, many valuable ideas are originated in the minutes of meditating with a cup of coffee or in front of the computer screen.

Consequently, the manager should not get impatient when his employees think quietly, but must be happy as there may be better results from those silent moments. The invisible activities take place in the head of employees and the manager cannot see them right away. However, they can be seen in their work results later on.

When the employees sit silently for a few minutes, they are thinking about what has happened and trying to get the lessons or to find out a more effective solution. If this secret is understood, then the manager will not break the silence or tell his employees “Relaxing time is over, get back to work!”

That is about one individual thinking. In the work place, there are situations when thinking must be done in team, especially the discussion among team members.

Then, each individual shows their thought and the manager can recognize who is active and who is passive in giving ideas. Sometimes, a clever team leader can make the “cold heads” interested in the team discussion.

Thoughts shown in the brainstorms are much more valuable. At that time, the thought of each individual will be specified by their own ideas for a mutual issue to which a solution is being sought for.

If the ideas of each employee are considered as the work results, in each meeting, the manager can also discover the creativity ability of his employees. In many cases, the brilliant ideas can come from very quiet and seemingly disinterested people.

As a result, besides managing, the manager needs to pay attention to reasonably exploring his employees’ thoughts, give them time to think, and organize things reasonably for this reflection to be most fruitful.

On the contrary, it is not a good thing to talk or assign a duty to employees at any time during the work hours. The sudden interference of the manager can interrupt the flow of thought of employees which not until much later they can resume.

It would be a great pity if that is the time when the thought is about to touch a bright solution!

Provided by Le & Associates.