I think this is a dangerous and fruitless line of reasoning. It halts the conversation. It makes it harder for management to be introspective. If you look at critical or creative thinking as an inherent skill [1] rather than as a measurable outcome of the right kind of environment and incentives, how can you create and improve a workplace in which your people think critically? [2]
I find that bad managers sometimes use the 'lacks critical thinking' criticism as an out for their own ineffectiveness. It's certainly not wrong for managers to delegate, to expect a high level of performance from their employees, to ask for creativity and mental agility in the face of a respectful amount of uncertainty. But when you combine vague goals and sparse planning with ego, bad managers wrongly attribute an employee's failure to correctly 'guess their will' to poor critical thinking skills.
It's natural for managers (myself included) to go into self-preservation mode when they've failed to give their employees enough direction, but the reality is that it's a relationship. There is, and there should be, push and pull. Sometimes the manager doesn't give enough direction or doesn't plan well. Sometimes the employee does some lazy thinking. Each needs to have enough humility and honesty to say, "I screwed up. How do we solve this and what can we do better in the future?"
If you want to make every decision from the top so that your employees never have to divine your will, you better be a planning savant. If you're a mortal like the rest of us, you need to figure out how to give your people just enough guidance to do their best work, and sometimes that means admitting you haven't given enough.
1. It may be inherent, but that's kind of beside the point. Wouldn't you want to keep the door open to improvement anyway?
2. Actually, the only way to do it is addressed in the article: search for 'critical thinkers,' whatever that means to you, in your hiring process.