How Busyness is Making You a Less Caring Leader in Humanitarian and International Development
Are you too busy to be a caring leader?
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FULL TRANSCRIPT:
Is your busy-ness making you less caring toward yourself and others? Find out in today's episode.
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.
Welcome my aspiring modern humanitarian and development leader. How are you doing this week? So, in today's episode you're going to learn how busy-ness is directly related to our level of caring.
What it means to be busy and four ways to overcome busy-ness so that you can have more time to stop and smell the roses, or to be a more caring leader. So. I thought I would introduce this topic with some very interesting research done by social psychologist, John Darley and Daniel Batson who wanted to understand why do people help others in certain situations, but not in others? So they decided to study this by working with a allegedly charitable group, which is seminary students. So seminary students are students who are studying to become priests. And the researchers asked each of the 67 seminary students to deliver a sermon on the parable from the Bible of the good Samaritan. Which is a story where the good Samaritan is someone who stops and help strangers in need. And so the researchers then randomly assigned the students to one of two conditions. In the hurried conditioned or the busy condition, a research assistant concluded the sermon instructions with, "oh, you're going to be late. You need to go now to deliver this sermon because they were expecting you a few minutes ago.
You better get moving." In the. unhurried condition n or the not busy condition, the research assistant ended the instructions with, "oh, it's going to be a few minutes before they're ready for you, but you might as well head on over." So each student walked alone to the building where they were supposed to deliver the sermon on the good Samaritan and on the way the student encountered a man slumped in a doorway with his eyes closed, coughing and moaning clearly in distress. This man was actually planted by the researchers to see who would stop and help the stranger in need. And what was interesting is that the researchers found that only 10% of the seminary students in the hurried or busy condition stopped to help the man. And in comparison, 63% of the participants who are not busy or in unhurried condition stopped. In other words, being in a hurry can lead even a seminary student with the good Samaritan on the mind to ignore a person in distress. And I'm going to include the link where I took this particular piece of research from, which was from the Stanford university website and also includes the full study. But just to say this is such a fascinating and intriguing story to me. And especially, I think it's very relatable for us as humanitarian and international development workers who want to really help people.
That's why most of us got into this work. And that's also what a lot of priests, I think when they go into the priesthood, it's because they love and they want to help others. And yet when they were busy, when they were in a hurry, They did not stop to help someone who was clearly in need. And so I think this relates to you and your work and, reflecting back, even when I was a country manager, when I had these very busy moments. When we are busy or identify as busy, which a lot of us do.
I hear this all the time from students I work with from those of you that I coach, that you are busy, you have a lot going on and I get it. You have proposals to write, meetings to attend, emails to answer, projects to manage, year end close. And it just goes on and on and on are so many things that you can focus on in a day. But when we take all of those things that we have to do, and we tell ourselves that we are busy. This busy-ness can really impact our leadership style and our ability to be a caring leader, much like what is shown in this study. It can really impact the way we're able to spend time and really help those around us. Ironically. It impacts our ability to being a more caring leader and really help those who we have the most ability to impact, which is of course our team. But it also impacts the quality of our work in terms of the time that we're spending with implementing partners or the time we spend with the government or with the community. And what I see after coaching hundreds of leaders is that they tend to feel too busy to do things.
I've actually been told this by many leaders, I'm too busy to coach my team. I'm too busy to develop my team. I'm too busy to stop and listen to my team. These are the same kinds of symptoms of this busy-ness, which is impacting and actually hurting our ability to really do the work we truly want to do, which is to help others.
So for example, you probably don't spend as much time developing your team or coaching them when you think that you are busy or when you feel busy. And when you are busy, instead of taking the time to develop our team, we take the shortcut, which is often to just tell them what to do.
It's easier. It's faster. Sometimes you might even do things yourself. But the thing is, this does little in terms of first of all caring for our team and our team's development, and also in terms of making an impact that we want as a modern leader.
So when you're busy, you're probably also less caring toward yourself.
You don't take the breaks you need. Or you don't eat a full lunch. You skip caring for yourself. You might stop or not exercise like you would normally, you might not take the time to make a healthier meal or a choice in terms of food options. You might work longer hours. These actions also all come out of the busy-ness just like we're too busy to help others. A lot of times we become too busy to even help ourselves. So in summary being busy does not help us to be more caring leaders toward our team or toward ourselves. So what can we do about this
busy-ness? Yeah, because I know that it seems like something that is just the way it is that we're just always busy and there's nothing we can do about it. But there are things that we can do about it if we just slow down enough to take a few of these steps, which I'm going to go over with you right now.
So there are four ways that I've come up with, which will help you become less busy. So the first one is just being aware of what takes up your time. The best way to do that is just taking a day from your week, your normal workweek, a normal day. And tracking what you do that day. This is what I call a time diary.
And just like we would do a food diary to become more aware of how we're eating if we're wanting to lose weight or learning to make different food option choices. The reason that we do that is to become more conscious of the things we're doing. Sometimes we go throughout our day and we're not even aware of the snacks that we're having or the food habits nor our actions. Same with the way we use our time. So tracking how you use your time can be a very good first step to understanding how busy am I really?
And how am I really using my time? Because I could probably use my time more effectively.
And once you understand the way you're using your time, you can make decisions around how you want to better use that time and even prioritize the things that you know will make the most difference. For example, coaching or developing your team.
The second thing you can do to become less busy is to schedule more buffer time or blank time in between meetings and in between the things you have on your calendar. Now, I like to plan out, not just meetings in my calendar. But things that I'm working on, like a report or a training that I'm doing. Even if it's just something that I need to develop, or even, for example, recording these podcasts episodes, I put all of that in my calendar. But what I also like to do is put blank space on either side of that 'cause you never know number one, what might come up during your day, which might disrupt your original plans. And number two, it's good to have that time, that extra time in case you need time to take a break in between things or maybe it will take a little bit longer than you originally planned. And so scheduling in blank time through your day, rather than having things back to back to back can be a great way of feeling a less overwhelmed and stressed. And having more blank time for things that maybe are unplanned and come up.
The third thing you can do is to be careful and more mindful about what you say yes to that might make you overloaded or overwhelmed with work. Especially things that are extra things that you're doing in order to be a team player. And this is one of those high-performance syndrome thoughts that I talk about. Which is, "I want to be a team player" and you are saying yes to extra work to be a team player, but you're actually doing the opposite because you're not able to do that work at the highest level of quality that you would be able to do if you said no to more things. So to me being a team player actually means saying no to things that will make you overloaded. So you can do your best quality work, but at any rate being more mindful about what you say yes or no to, if you need to just say, let me think about, or let me get back to you
if you feel uncomfortable saying no. Whatever it is you need to do in order to be more mindful about your workload and taking on extra tasks.
And finally number four is remember that being busy, the idea of busy-ness. Is really a mindset its a thought. A lot of people think it's a feeling like I feel busy. But it is not a feeling.
It's a thought. And the good news with that is that a thought is a perspective. It's an opinion we have about a situation. So let's say that your situation is in one day you have six meetings, you have two reports to do, and you have five approvals of something to make right? Let's say that's what your workload is. And your thought could either be, I am busy. Because I have all these things to do which creates a feeling of overwhelm. Or another person might look at that same workload and think, "oh, This will be easy. I can do this and two hours" or whatever. They might see it very differently. In other words, what you consider busy might be not busy for someone else.
So recognizing that busy-ness is something that is an opinion about our situation can be helpful in that we can realize number one, we don't have to choose to think that we are busy. And number two, a way to get out of that might be just to list all the things that you have to do and then determine how you're going to get them done.
Or maybe there are some things that you can ask your supervisor if you can not do or put aside, because there's only so much that's humanly possible to get done in one day, one week, whatever. And so, the more we can become clear on what is making us busy, what are all the things, writing down all the things that we have to do, can really help us make it more concrete what we actually have to do and how we might take action and move forward and plan our day and be more mindful about it because a lot of times what's making us busy or think that we are busy it's just because it's all so ambiguous.
Right? It's very vague. It's not clear to us. It feels overwhelm because we don't have a clear idea of exactly all the things that we are going to do or need to do. And so making it clear by writing it all down and then deciding how we're going to tackle it can really help in terms of you less busy.
Okay so once again, four things that you can do to overcome busy-ness so that you have more time for the things that make you a caring leader for yourself and others include number one, being aware of how you use your time, using a time diary, for example, number two planning your schedule with buffer time around it,
number three, being more careful about what you say yes to. And number four, remember that being busy is a mindset and it means we have a lot in our heads that is very vague and makes us think we are busy, but getting it on paper or down somewhere where we can actually see all the things we need to do can be helpful in order to prioritize and actually take action and feel like we are getting things done.
Finally, remember if you are feeling busy, your team probably is too. So, how can you help your team members become less busy so they can care for themselves and others more?
One example of that might be sharing this podcast episode with them and having a discussion around it. Or helping them protect their time and prioritize what's important. Think about it and try taking action this week. All right. 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.