How Note taking Is Hurting Your Ability to Lead as a NGO Supervisor
Do you believe that taking notes during one-on-one meetings makes you a more attentive leader? What if it’s actually doing the opposite?
In this episode, we challenge the widely accepted habit of note taking during one-on-ones—especially among humanitarian and development leaders—and explore how it might be silently damaging trust, connection, and communication with your team. If you’ve ever felt disconnected or like your team isn’t opening up, this might be the missing piece.
In this episode you’ll discover:
- Why multitasking—even something as “small” as jotting down notes—breaks presence and leads to poor listening.
- Learn powerful, practical strategies to stay fully present without sacrificing important information.
- Walk away with a new approach that improves trust, communication, and the quality of your team’s problem-solving.
Press play now to learn how dropping the pen could be the key to becoming a more trusted and impactful leader!
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.
FULL TRANSCRIPT BELOW:
What if the very thing that you believe makes you a better leader? Taking notes actually makes you a worse listener. So in today's episode, I'm gonna share with you why note taking during one-on-one meetings may be holding you back from truly hearing your team. And what you can do instead to become the type of leader who people trust, respect, and look up to
and open up to.
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 [00:01:00] worker, Torrey
Peace. Are you ready? Let's get started.
Hello, my aspiring modern NGO leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. So I've had so many leaders ask me in the past, can I take notes while I'm coaching someone? And I actually think this question could be extended to, can I take notes and have a one-on-one meeting?
At first I used to actually think that note taking was harmless even helpful. But over time I have realized that it actually pulls us away from being fully present. When we're writing something down, our brain is splitting its attention between capturing and listening, and the quality [00:02:00] of our listening and our presence suffers. So in this episode, you are going to discover why taking notes may lead to poor quality solutions and decision making and how to reverse it. The key qualities that separate good listeners from great leaders. And simple techniques that you can start using today to build trust, empower your team, and improve communication.
Let's get started, shall we? Okay, so why does this even matter? Once again, when we are splitting our attention, because it has been proven that multitasking is impossible, we can only really focus on one thing at a time, and that means that when we are doing something like taking notes
we are focused on that and we are missing information. The person in front of us may be communicating, so that means you might miss their words, you might miss their tone, their [00:03:00] emotion or their body language, all of which can communicate more information. And when we miss these things, this leads us to make lower quality solutions or problem solving because
we are missing information. We are not fully understanding the situation like we could be if we were fully concentrated and present. So without full presence, we risk shallow problem solving. And then finally, we erode trust. I don't know about you, but I had a few supervisors who would take notes on their computer.
Or would be on their phone while we were in a one-on-one meeting together. And I always felt like they weren't fully paying attention to me. I would've rather them made eye contact really focused on me. And then in between the pauses in our conversation, take those opportunities to take [00:04:00] notes.
It's not that you can never take notes or I'm saying that all note taking is bad, but I think it's important to realize that when we do choose to take notes, a lot of times, depending on the way that we do it, we may be distracted and actually taking away from the conversation. So great leaders aren't remembered for how detailed their notes were, right?
I don't know about you, but we don't ever talk about the type of notes that, some of the great leaders in history have taken. They're more remembered for how deeply they listened, how deeply they felt and understood other people. So there's a time and a reason to take notes. Once again, if you are easily distracted and you need a way to focus and you feel that taking notes or writing something or doodling something, helps you that's okay.
[00:05:00] But I want you to also understand the potentially missed opportunity in really making a more human connection when we take less notes and we focus more on the other person and being present. And when I say being present, I just mean really fully focusing on the moment on what the person is saying and everything about, being, what makes a better listener.
So what can you do differently? You can stay fully present and maybe just making eye contact. Sometimes people take notes in order to pay attention. So instead of paying attention to the notes, maybe you can pay attention to the mouth of the other person or really tune into their
emotional tone of voice, or, really tune into the details on their face or other things that will also help [00:06:00] you to focus and become fully present. Of course it helps eye contact, nodding, reflecting back, resisting the urge to have to write everything down. Instead, focus on really connecting and understanding.
And then also trusting yourself to recall the idea behind the conversation later. And I promise you, the more fully present and focused you are, the more you'll be able to recall later. And so then you can take your notes on the things that are most important to remember about the conversation rather than trying to write everything down.
So here are some practical alternatives that you can use to taking notes. One is of course, technology. We have so many great things technology wise, which can help us to take notes. There's the AI apps. [00:07:00] There's, zoom I know has note taking features. Now you can ask the person to record the conversation and use Otter or one of the other transcription services approved by your organization to take notes for you.
I see these things all the time already being used, so why not allow that to take notes for you? Also, practice exercises. If you are having trouble staying present during a conversation or focusing, one thing you can do is just practice. And this is something that I actually teach in my course, becoming the modern humanitarian and development leader, and that is how to listen without an agenda.
In other words, really fully focus and listening on the other person without thinking about what you're saying next or a question to ask or anything like that, so your only job is to just really focus and pay attention to what the other person is [00:08:00] saying. So this might be a journey for you to become a better listener.
So challenge yourself to take notes and slowly move toward none at all, or fewer, at least. Those new to coaching or doing this type of thing in a one-on-one meeting may take notes in the beginning, but the best coaches are those who really just listen and only take notes very rarely on occasion.
If you absolutely must jot something down, just do it sparingly. And if you are on a call, then let the person know why that you're gonna be taking notes so they know why you are either typing on your computer or why you are looking down. Okay, and then after the meeting, take a few minutes and write down the three most important points that you need to remember, or that you know your action plan and next steps [00:09:00] while they're still fresh.
Also, I like the idea of asking the other person to take a few notes after the meeting and send them to you so that you have a, an agreed upon understanding of what was discussed and what are the next steps. Okay, so here's my challenge for you This week. Have one one-on-one meeting where you put down the pen completely, you put away the phone, put away the computer.
If it's not online and you don't take any notes, you just listen and really pay attention to what the other person is saying. And afterwards, write down only the top three takeaways from your discussion. Notice how the conversation feels different and how much more connected your team member may feel to you and you to them as well.
If [00:10:00] you want to go deeper into exercises like this and develop the qualities of a modern humanitarian development leader then registration is open right now for my course, becoming the Modern Humanitarian Development Leader. So you can check out the link for that in the show notes and sign up for the October 14th course.
I hope to see you there. 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 a 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 [00:11:00] 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.