The Unbelievable Way your Leadership Style can Decrease your Workload and Increase Productivity as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Discover how your leadership style impact your workload and your team's productivity in this episode!

As a humanitarian and development leader, finding the balance between managing and coaching can significantly affect your team's performance and your own efficiency. This episode tackles how understanding and adjusting your leadership style can reduce your workload and boost productivity.

In this 13 minute episode you'll learn:

• How to identify your default leadership style and its impact on your team's effectiveness.
• Practical strategies to balance managing and coaching for optimal team performance.
• Understand how empowering your team through a coach approach can lead to greater innovation and less dependency

Listen to this episode now to uncover how you can optimize your leadership style for maximum impact and efficiency!

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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:

Maximizing Impact: Balancing Leadership Styles to Decrease Your Workload and Increase Productivity in Humanitarian and International Development

 How does your leadership style determine your workload and productivity levels? Find out and 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 development and humanitarian leaders. In this episode, you're going to discover the two primary ways of leading and how yours is influencing your workload and your team. How your leadership style could be preventing you from having a higher performing team and become a better leader and more effective leader by learning how to determine your leadership style. So let's begin shall we? So I want to start with a story from one of my former students. And I actually did a podcast in my previous podcast, which is called Aid for Aid Workers, on this particular case and this leader his name was Salif. And he was in charge of a Senegalese NGO. And he took my coaching course at the time. And when he came into the course, he was basically doing what I see a lot of leaders do, which is doing a little of everything. He had his team coming to him at all hours of the day asking him what to do. And so when he started learning more of a coach approach way of leading

then he noticed that people started coming to him more with solutions over questions. In other words, he shifted his leadership style from telling people what to do to asking what they thought they should do.

And what happened was he was able because of this because of his team becoming more proactive because that they were becoming more innovative. They were coming to him with solutions and it actually freed up a significant amount of his time. In that particular podcast episode, he shared what a shift it was for him, because he was able to, instead of getting in the details, and as we say, in the weeds of the day-to-day activities, he was able to shift his focus to more of the big picture, strategic things. Which is really where more of his value lies.

So, this is just one example of how understanding and knowing the way we lead and the different ways of leading can be really powerful.

And on a basic level, there are two primary ways of leading your team. One is managing or consulting, and that is telling your team what to do. And being somewhat directive. The other one is coaching, which is more of asking your team what they think they should do. So the main difference is that in managing we give advice or we tell or instruct. Whereas in coaching, we ask our team for their own way of doing something or how they want to proceed. And in coaching, we do not give advice or tell our teams what to do.

I know so many leaders who come into my coach approach course, which is now called "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader" and they think they have been coaching all this time when really they have been advising. So it's really important to understand the differences because when we understand the differences and we understand how to know which is which, and when to use them, then we're able to do it more efficiently and effectively to really create a high performance team.

So just to say that there is no one best way to lead.

However, there are certain situations where one way might be preferable to another way or more efficient or effective. So sometimes we need to put on our managing hats, like I say, and sometimes we need put on our coaching hat. But what I find is a lot of leaders they think they are coaching when they're actually really managing. And so how do we create that balance?

So I hope what I share with you today will help you to understand yourself a little better and what you can do to make the changes that you think you need to in order to create high-performance team.

So another thing that happens when we have this more directive way or the way of telling others what to do in our leadership style is that if we use that too much, we create dependency. In other words, we create a greater workload for ourselves because our team becomes reliant on us. Just like what happened with Salif.

He was the bottleneck for things getting done. So whenever his team had a question, whenever they had a problem, they felt like they needed to go to him for answers because of his leadership style. It wasn't because they thought his answers were better. It was because of the way he was leading. And so when he changed that he was able to free up, like we said, a lot more of his time because they were coming with solutions instead of problems. So one of the best ways to create a high-performance team is to trust them, to do the things that they were hired for -to do things their way and encourage them to take responsibility through a coach approach type leadership style.

So this is in line with the modern humanitarian and development way of leading, because we are encouraging our teams to be more proactive, more confident, and to trust themselves. And we're essentially creating a more inclusive environment where diversity of thinking is encouraged. So when we show our teams that we believe in them through using a coach approach to leadership, we empower them to do more and to grow. I want you to think of someone in your life, maybe it's work,

Maybe it's in your personal life who really believed in you before you believed in yourself? And what was the impact of that?

We can really sense when others like leaders or those around us, our family members really believe in us. And it can really encourage us to have more belief and faith in ourselves. And that's something I want you to think about and apply with your own team. Because what I see with so many of my students who take my course is that they start off by thinking that they need to tell their teams what to do. That their team culture or the culture itself, or their personality of the team requires this. But once they try and learn how to use the coach approach, how to introduce it to their team in a way that their team finds acceptable, then they start seeing their team become more motivated, take more responsibility and be able to make a greater impact because of it. So when we understand how to balance between coaching and managing, and the reason that I'm focusing more on coaching today is because what I see as most leaders tend to manage. Because coaching is not as intuitive.

It's not something that we learn. We learn how to tell others what to do growing up. We give all kinds of advice, but we don't necessarily learn how to coach. This is why there are coaching schools devoted to teaching what coaching is and how to do it. And that is why most of the students that take my course, and most of you are probably using more of the managerial style than the coaching style.

And that's why I'm focusing on it today because I see that the future, the modern, humanitarian to development leader, the skill set that is needed is to use a coach approach style more to empower others, to shift power to those around us to be able to perform their best. So now we come to, how do you determine what is your leadership style?

As I said, many leaders think they are leading one way. They think they're coaching. But maybe they are actually leading another. And that can lead to a greater workload and less impact. So I have actually designed based on this experience, a five question quiz. Specifically for you to determine what is your default leadership style? So, if you're interested in taking this leadership quiz and finding out your leadership style, Then you can find a link in the show notes or go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz and click on the quiz button there. And after you take the quiz and you click submit, you're going to receive an email with your results as well as more about your particular leadership style, what are the advantages and the disadvantages of it and how it may be impacting your team's performance and therefore your impact. Okay. So the summary for today, there are two main ways of leading: coaching or managing. In other words telling if we're managing or asking if we're coaching. The way that you lead is impacting your team, whether it is positively or negatively. And leading too much

in one way, for example, if you are too directive, can create a greater workload for yourself and create a dependent team. As opposed to using a more balanced approach, like the modern humanitarian and development leader knows how to do. Where you balance between managing and coaching and knowing when to use one over the other in order to create a more proactive, higher performing team so that you have less workload. And finally it's really important to become aware of how you are leading.

So you may think you're leading one way, but you might be leading another. So why not take the quiz to find out, go to www.aidforaidworkers.com/quiz, or find the link in the show notes. All right. And on Wednesday we will be talking about what is the greatest impact that you can make as a 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.