How Doing Less Can Lead to Bigger Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader
Ever feel like you're drowning in your workload and still not making the impact you want?
In this episode, we tackle a critical issue facing humanitarian and development leaders today: burnout. Discover why traditional ways of working are causing you more harm than good and how you can break free from this cycle.
In this 11 minute episode you'll learn:
- The real reasons behind burnout that you might not be aware of and how to address them.
- Gain insights on how to become a modern leader who maximizes impact while reducing stress and overwhelm.
- Learn how to acquire practical skills to empower your team, enhancing productivity and fostering a high-performing, inclusive work environment.
Don't let burnout hold you back—listen to this episode now and start your journey towards more effective and sustainable leadership!
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Want to know how to lead better? It starts by understanding your leadership style. To find out yours, take my free quiz “What Is Your Leadership Style” - you’ll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team and a few practical ways to become an even better leader. Just click on the link fill out your quiz and click submit.
This podcast empowers humanitarian and international development leaders to achieve high performance teams, fostering diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing, overcoming burnout and overwhelm, while maximizing impact and productivity.
Full Transcript:
How Doing Less Can Lead to Bigger Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader
Have you given up on making a greater impact in your work while also having a manageable workload and a high-performing team?
Welcome to The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader podcast, the podcast, helping humanitarian and development supervisors make a greater impact by taking control of your time, leading more inclusively and empowering your team all the while avoiding stress, burnout, and overwhelm. I'm your host, leadership coach and former aid worker, Torrey Peace.
Are you ready? Let's get started.
Hello and welcome aspiring modern humanitarian and development leaders. I am your host Torrey, and today we're going to talk about how you can do less and make a bigger impact and avoid the big B. That is: burnout. So in this episode, we will cover the reason that so many humanitarian and development leaders burnout, which you probably haven't heard before. How becoming a modern humanitarian and development leader will allow you to step away from overwork and overwhelm and toward greater impact. And how this podcast will provide you with the skills you need to become more productive and create a higher performing team. Sound good?
So I myself have about 12 years experience in international development and humanitarian work as a leader across five continents, and I am a leadership coach. I have coached over the last five years and taught hundreds of aid worker leaders globally. And I have observed certain patterns that are the main contributions in my opinion leading to burnout.
And that's what I want to share with you today. Because the more we understand about the contributions and the factors leading to burnout, the sooner we can address them, which of course I want to help you with as well. So here are three primary ways of thinking and leading that are causing burnout.
The first is that the leader is unclear about the impact that they want to make. So maybe you are not clear about the exact impact that you hope to make as a leader or in your work. And that means that you don't have a very descriptive or clear vision.
And when we don't have a clear vision, sometimes it can make decision-making difficult around how we use our time. And there's no way to prioritize and no way to gauge how productive we're being. So this is one of the things that I see, which is leading to just mindless work on whatever comes our way rather than being strategic about what we take on, because we have this clear vision of what we want and where we're going.
The second thing is that the leader adopts a way of thinking and working which seems normal and is normal in the humanitarian and development space, but is not helpful. So for example, maybe you are needing for everything you do to be perfect, which of course is rooted in perfectionism. Or maybe you need to be available all the time, or maybe you need to be a team player.
There are certain patterns in the way that we believe or think about things that are leading also to being overloaded and overworked. And I will get into those later in future episodes, because there's so much to say around that. And then the third thing that is leading to a lot of burnout is that leaders do not have the skills to empower those around them to do their best work in order to take the burden off of themselves and also create a more inclusive and diverse way of thinking by including the opinions of those around you. And I know from my own experience, when I first started leading in humanitarian and development work, I never was trained on how to empower those around me.
How do I shift power to those closest to the problem? How do I have these conversations and ask questions that can get others to find their own way without me having to tell them what to do? So this is a skillset that is not intuitive and really falls under coaching. But yet we think we are coaching, or that we are empowering others
when in fact we're actually doing the opposite by telling them what to do.
So these are three of the reasons that I see that are very common leaders like you may be working which are leading to overwork and overwhelm and therefore burnout. The reason that I started this podcast is because there are certain characteristics or skill sets that we need to learn in order to become a modern humanitarian and development leader so that we can step away from this traditional way of working and become what this sector needs
in order to advance.
And so some of these characteristics of the modern humanitarian and development leader include: understanding how the way you lead can impact those around you. This is so important. I have actually developed a quiz called what is your leadership style, which you can find a link to in the show notes and that quiz will help you to determine what is your primary leadership style and how is that impacting your productivity level.
Because the more we understand how we are leading, the more we can decide when we need to lead differently in order to produce greater results. I highly recommend that as the first step, you go and take this quiz. Becoming clearer on the impact you want to create is also and an attribute of the modern humanitarian and development leader. They are very clear on where they're going, what they want, their vision,
and they have communicated that with their team as well.
A modern humanitarian and development leader is able to not just blindly accept the way things are done
but to really think about what ways of doing things ,are actually helping me get to where I want to go and what is not.? So taking a step back and taking a look at what is helping and what is not. The good news is by becoming a modern humanitarian and development leader, you will overcome these causes and sources of overwhelm, overwork, and burnout. And so my goal is through this podcast to help you become a modern humanitarian and development leader by providing weekly practical steps that you can take to become a leader who is clear on the impact you want, takes control of your time, is more productive and creates a higher performing team without burnout and overwhelm.
And by doing these things, you are going to start enjoying your work more and start looking forward to going to the office or to getting online every day, because you focus on what you're passionate about, which of course is helping others and becoming the best leader that you can be.
And then finally, you will actually make a greater impact than you are now because you are working more efficiently, and your team is too. And when your team is making an impact and you're making an impact, you're compounding that effect and making an even greater mark in the humanitarian and development space. So just to recap, after working with hundreds of leaders globally, as well as my own observations and through teaching, the three main reasons that I see for burnout include when you have an unclear vision of the impact that you want to make, when you have traditional ways of thinking and leading which are keeping you stuck and you don't have the skills to empower yourself or others to overcome challenges and do your best work. And once again, we will also be covering all of that on this podcast. So, if you want to start the journey to becoming a modern, humanitarian and development leader, every Monday of this podcast, you will receive practical tips on how to do just that. And on Wednesdays, I'm going to share a shorter episode with an inspirational quote, applied to the humanitarian and development context in order to enhance the way you think and lead.
I think quotes can be so powerful and helping us to think differently and thinking differently is the first step toward acting differently. So how can you become a modern humanitarian and development leader? Well, the first step, as I mentioned is to take the "what is your leadership style?" Quiz, which you can find by going to the show notes or going to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz.
When you take the quiz and click submit, you'll get an email which has your results and how you are leading which may be impacting not only your team and those around you but also the results that you're getting. All right until next week. Keep evolving. Bye for now.
Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do? Or do you let them figure it out for themselves? Understanding your leadership style is the first step to deciding what's working for you and what's not. To find out your leadership style, take my free quiz "what is your leadership style?" You'll immediately find out your default style, how it may be impacting your team, and a few practical ways to become an even better leader.
Just click on the link in the show notes, www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz fill out your quiz and click submit. So what are you waiting for? Go to www.aidforaidworkers.com.Quiz and discover your leadership style now. Your team will thank you for it!