How Your “Caring” Leadership Style Is Hurting Your Well Being and What You Can Do About It as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Could your leadership style be the hidden cause of your stress and burnout?

You may think you are leading in a way you feel is "caring" for your team and helpful, but in reality you may be impacting your wellbeing and theirs as well. This episode uncovers the direct link between your leadership approach and your overall wellness, offering practical insights to transform your leadership style for better health and productivity.

In this 11 minute episode you'll learn:

• Learn how the CHS Alliance "Leading Well" Report connects leadership styles with well-being.
• Discover which leadership style creates the highest levels of well-being.
• Get actionable tips to start improving your leadership approach and personal well-being today.

Don't miss out on the chance to revolutionize your leadership style and boost your well-being—tune in to this episode now and start your journey towards becoming a more effective and healthier leader!

Resources mentioned:

CHS Alliance and ICVA Leading Well Report - Aid Worker Perspectives on Well Being and Organizational Culture

What Is Your Leadership Style?  Free Quiz:

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 international development and humanitarian leaders to achieve high performance teams, fostering diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing, overcoming burnout and overwhelm, while maximizing impact and productivity.

FULL TRANSCRIPT:  

Find out on today's episode, how your leadership style might be sabotaging your wellbeing.

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, my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. In today's episode, you'll discover one how the "Leading Well" report links wellbeing and leadership style, number two, the style of leadership, which results in the greatest wellbeing, and number 3, three ways to start leading to improve your wellbeing even today.

So I mentioned this report previously, but I think it's worth bringing up again. And that is the C H S Alliance "Leading Well" report and it attributes some reasons behind leaders or humanitarian and development leaders burning out to be directly linked to leaders not delegating or sharing responsibility or not giving space for people to do their jobs. And in other words, part of the reason leading to burnout is your leadership style. So when you lead by needing to tell your team what to do or have all the answers, your team becomes reliant on you.

They don't develop and you become the bottleneck for getting things done.

Also this type of leadership style, the more managerial one or directive means that you feel that you need to be available all the time, because you're the one that has all the answers. And so you have to be available in order to tell your team what to do. Otherwise, they won't get things done and things slow down. So the style of leadership that a modern humanitarian and development leader uses more over the other in order to delegate and give your team space to do their work. Is a coach approach leadership style.

And a coach approach leadership style I've talked about before, but it basically means you remove yourself as a bottleneck. That you empower your team to find their own way of doing things, rather than having them rely on you to tell them what to do. This also means that you will not need to be available all the time. And it means that your workload will be less because this way of leading is empowering others to take greater responsibility.

You remove yourself from being needing to be there all the time, that frees up your time more and leads to greater wellbeing. And I've seen so many leaders who take my course become so relieved when they start empowering and trusting their team to do the work they were hired for and take responsibility and how much their own workload decreases and therefore their stress level.

So three ways that you can lead to improve your wellbeing starting today include the first one is by starting to have a discussion with your team about how you want to strengthen them and help them reach their professional goals and how part of that is getting them to come up with their own solutions. Even asking your team that when they come to you, they should automatically have, let's say two solutions for every problem, can be very impactful. But remember that actually happening that another words them coming to you with solutions depends on you as the leader, because you need to show them that you're serious about this by expecting it to happen.

And being patient and repeating if you need to, that you do want to hear from them and their answers. And that also that you're doing it because you care. Because sometimes I also hear leaders say that, "well, my team will think that I'm not doing my role as a leader if I don't tell them what to do or they think I will, I'm not caring for them that, I'm just leaving them on their own", essentially.

So that is all the more reason why you need to communicate, why you're doing it and showing them that actually this is a more caring way of helping them grow if that's that's what they want.

So a second way that you can lead to improve your own wellbeing starting today is using some of the ideas or solutions that your team comes to you with. So if you ask them to come with two or three Solutions to every problem, then as much as you can, you want to use those solutions.

So if your team comes to you with solutions or ideas, around their problems and you give them advice or you never accept their ideas, or you always tell them an alternative thing to do, or even if you just add on top of what they've already said, you are undermining them. And they will stop coming to you with their solutions. So be aware of how often you want to add advice or change what they say. and instead of doing that, coach them around potential challenges with their ideas. So if you see that their ideas won't work or the solutions they need to be strengthened, well, that's an opportunity to use coaching. It's better to ask them to think about how to strengthen their own ideas then to just give advice or tell them what to do instead. And this also will encourage them to start thinking more about the solutions they come to you with, and it will show them that you're serious about wanting to hear from them and that you're actually going to use some of the things that they contribute. And the third is starting to be less available in order to get people to think for themselves. I know that many times we think that we're more caring as a leader if we're available all the time. But sometimes if you want your team to develop, you need to be less available. I had a supervisor that was available all the time. And then suddenly he started having a lot of meetings and I would usually come to him asking him for solutions to things, but when he wasn't as available, I suddenly realized that I had to come up with more of my own solutions unless I wanted to wait around for him to become available. And of course, some things your team might wait and come to talk to you about, but at any rate, not being available means that they'll have the opportunity to think for themselves, or the chances will be greater that they will just go ahead and resolve their own problem rather than relying on you and interrupting you every other minute to ask them what to do.

The benefit of this as well in terms of your own wellbeing, is that when you become less available at times, I'm not saying all the time, of course, we need to be available for our teams. But when you become less available and you use some of that time for focused work to get things done during work hours, that will also lessen your workload after hours.

And. Your stress levels and also impact your wellbeing as well. So just to say, if your team is used to you telling them what to do this transition may be a little uncomfortable for both you and for them. And that is why it is also important to discuss why you are doing it and how it will help them. That way, you're not just making these changes and they're just coming up with their own ideas of why they're happening.

This is where gossip comes in. In order to prevent the gossip and prevent the negative, thinking about these changes that you might make in terms of not being available all the time or expecting them to come up with their own solutions. This is why it's so important to communicate.

All right. So as I recap in today's episode, we discussed: how the way you lead impacts your workload and consequently, your wellbeing. Number two, the style of leadership, which will result in the greatest wellbeing, which is of course a coach approach. And number three, three ways to start leading to improve your wellbeing, which include giving your team more responsibility by asking them for ideas,

using those ideas and then not always being available.

And on Wednesday's episode. Find out how looking differently at what you label as bad can help you become a stronger humanitarian and development leader. Until then. 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.