3 Ways to Use Your Vacation to Create a High Performance Team as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

How would your team would perform if you weren’t there to lead them?

As a leader, your goal is to build a team that thrives independently, yet many teams falter when the leader steps away. This episode explores how your vacation time—whether real or simulated—can be a powerful tool to test your team’s performance, identify areas for growth, and refine your own leadership style.

In this 14 minute episode you'll discover:

• How to strategically assign responsibilities during your leave to empower team members and test their independence.
• Learn how to use time away to assess your leadership effectiveness and identify gaps in team confidence or skills.
• 3 Steps to using your vacation time away to build a higher performance team

Hit play now to uncover how your time away can transform both your team’s performance and your leadership approach!

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE? 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.

 
FULL TRANSCRIPT:

3 Steps to Use Your Vacation to Create a High Performance Team as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Discover three ways your vacation can create a high performance team on 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.

Hello, my aspiring modern humanitarian involvement leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And this episode, you're going to discover what we should be looking for in a high-performance team. How vacation or leave time is an under utilized way to test your team's performance. And a three-step process to use your leave or vacation days to build a stronger performing team.

So. Around this time of year, although this could apply to any time you take vacation or leave days, and especially when the entire office is not taking vacation, but part of your team remains in the office. This is the type of opportunity that I'm talking about. Where you're going on leave, whether it's for the upcoming holidays, new years, or whenever. This is relevant for you as an opportunity to be able to test your team's performance.

But you can also do this at any time by creating a faux, or a fancy word for fake vacation to test them. And when I say test, I don't mean in a negative way of testing them, but a way to not only test them in terms of how confident and how able they are to do things on their own, but also to test yourself so that you can reassess as a leader, how you're doing and what you might want to change in the future.

I think this is an underutilized way of looking at our leave time or our time away from our team. That we don't often see this as an opportunity to be strategic about how we really test to see if we are building a high performance team. And when I say "high-performance team"

what we should be looking for in a high-performance team is one that can operate independently. Or that is strong enough and has the confidence to take care of their own piece of the pie. Their own piece of the pie being, whatever it is they're responsible for. And maybe even a little bit more, depending on how they want to develop professionally. It's also a great opportunity to give them extra responsibility, to try something out of their comfort zone. This is a high-performance team because a team should not be dependent on their leader when the leader steps away, things should not come to a halt.

If they do, then there's a problem. And that is why vacation or leave time can be a great opportunity to see how well we are doing in different areas to build a high-performance team. But I don't just mean like keeping going with the day-to-day things. I mean, in general, also really looking strategically about how to use this time when you are away from your team to see how they're doing. So let's talk about that -this three-step process.

So one, the first step would be thinking about how when you step away from the office or on your leave how you want to use that time to give more opportunities to others around you? So for those who remain working during that time, it's a great time to allow them to take more responsibility or even step out of their comfort zone and really test themselves in a kind of, almost on the job training. I remember when I assigned different tasks to my team when I was away. When I was country manager, I was in charge of operations, finance, HR. Programming.

So when I stepped away, there was a lot that was still needed to be juggled or to be done. And I had managers for each of those areas. But I knew that by stepping away I could test to see how strong they were in terms of areas. I remember there was a donor meeting that was going to happen while I was on leave that I could not attend. And so I asked one of my team members to step in and they were not initially too comfortable with that, but they accepted it in the end.

And afterwards they came back to me and told me it was a great growth opportunity for them. And the difference of me being on leave during that time is if I had been around, they might have been more inclined to back out so that I would have been forced to have gone, or they might've been using me as a kind of a crutch or a way of, going to the meeting, but not taking full responsibility for it. But when we are not around as a leader then, it really is the ultimate test to see how independent or how confident our team is.

So I want you to think strategically about this. Who would benefit from this opportunity? To step into certain parts of your role? Depending on how your team wants to develop to depending on their professional goals, depending on how you think they could get stronger in certain areas or how you want to see them grow. You can make decisions around how you delegate or how you assign certain responsibilities while you are away.

How can you use this time as a way to test and see if they are able to take on these things and do them?

And using this opportunity reflecting on what might you learn about them by assigning them certain things and what might they learn about themselves? So, this is a really powerful opportunity to really think strategically about how you want things to operate while you're away and to see how things go .

So the first step, once again, is to assign your team members responsibility, but not just randomly or because that is their particular area, but strategically to help them grow and really see how confident and independent they are.

The second step is to test yourself. To see how dependent they are on you. So this is a good test for you as well , once again, thinking strategically about what you hope will keep running or going, even when you are not around. What do you hope to see when you get back?

What do you hope will be done? What do you hope will be different?

What are some ways that you would like to see that your team is more independent and how can you test those while you are away?

And not just looking at this as a test for them in terms of how much they know or how confident they are. But if we take responsibility as leaders, we could say the reason that they're not taking action, the reason that they don't know these things, the reason that they're not confident has to do with our way of leading. And that can be a wake up, call. If we realize that our team is dependent on us for answers or they are not very confident or that they rely on us in some way.

This is an indicator that you are creating that for your team.

I encourage leaders to take responsibility. For example when you get back and you see what things might need more support, you can take that responsibility on as an area where I need to strengthen my own leadership skills or style in order to really better support my team in order to empower them in order to make them more confident.

So once again, first step, be strategic about how to give them more responsibility. And second step is testing yourself and how well you are leading or doing as a leader to build their confidence, to build their skills in different areas and to allow them to grow the way they want to.

And then finally the third step is once you return. After your leave or vacation or your break, whatever you want to call it. Once you return you can assess how much were they able to do or move forward without you? How much was held up for reasons beyond their control? So maybe there were some things that didn't get done, but it was not something that was within their control.

So in that case, there was nothing that could be done about it.

But how much was not done for reasons that were within their control? And that is the area I would be most interested in because it's probably an indicator an area for growth, whether that's confidence. Whether that's overcoming some kind of a mindset shift or whether it is a area, like a skill set that they need to gain. And that is the kind of thing that, using a coach approach leadership style you can really help determine what prevented them from getting this thing done?

And based on all of this, you can assess how you are doing as a leader in building your team. And also what you may want to help them with to become more independent. And where you may want to develop or change as a leader to help them do so.

The modern humanitarian and development leader understands that we cannot do it all. We can not do everything and that we do not have to have all the answers. That actually we surround ourselves with people who have answers. And so the modern leader understands that if we build our team to be strong and confident and we use a coach approach way of leading with them to empower them to find their own way, they will make more of an impact and we will too.

So when we talk about building a high-performance team. And to me, that means a team that is strong, confident, motivated, independent without the need for the leader to always be around. Our vacation time or our time where we have to step away is a great opportunity to test our team, to test ourselves and how we are leading in order to build just that.

So once again, a few things to think about. When you're going on leave thinking about strategically, how you can use this time to really give responsibility to your team members, to help them grow and to test their independence or their confidence levels and getting things done? Number two it's a great opportunity for you to test how you are leading and what kind of a team you are creating. And if you need to adjust your leadership style.

And number three, once you return, you can assess what got done, what didn't and why, and what areas might you want to work on with them, but also on yourself in order to build yourself as a type of leader that can build and create a high-performance team? Okay until next time, 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!