How Great Leaders Create Independent Teams While Also Holding Them Accountable as a NGO Supervisor

Have you ever given your team full independence on a project—only to be disappointed with the results?

Many NGO leaders fall into the trap of thinking empowerment means stepping back completely. But what your team experiences as “independence” can easily feel like abandonment if there’s no structure or support. This episode explores how you can strike the right balance, so your team feels trusted and empowered while still delivering the quality outcomes you expect.

By listening, you’ll learn:

• The common myth that causes leaders to fail at creating truly independent teams.
• A simple framework of four steps that helps you give more independence without sacrificing accountability.
• How to make your leadership more strategic—guiding your team like a pilot adjusting course—so they stay aligned and supported while they grow in confidence and responsibility.

Press play now to discover the four steps that will transform how you empower your team—while ensuring they deliver results you can trust.

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 EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:

You want an independent team, but you also want accountability and quality results. How can you get both things at once? 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.

Hello, my modern NGO leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And have you ever [00:01:00] given your team full independence on a project only to find the results were not what you expected? It's a common leadership trap, confusing, empowerment, and abandonment. But today I'll share four simple steps that will help you and your team become truly independent without sacrificing accountability or equality.

The modern NGO Leader way. So in this episode, you're gonna discover the common myth that leads some supervisors to fail at creating a truly independent team. Why creating an independent team does not mean allowing that team to do whatever they want and how to find the balance between independence and also support accountability.

I see this all the time with my students. One of the things that I really emphasize and I teach is empowering and providing [00:02:00] more independence to our teams. But what I found is that leaders tend to move from one extreme of telling them what to do to and how to do it to the other of stepping back completely and leaving them to figure it all out.

But independence without support doesn't feel like empowerment to your team. Instead, it will feel like abandonment. They may feel lost, unsupported, and you won't know if things are getting off track until it's too late. So true independence requires structure. It's not about less leadership, it's about more strategic leadership.

So this is the way I like to frame it. Think of your team like a plane on a long flight. If a pilot never adjusts their course throughout the flight, they [00:03:00] can end up really far off track. In the same way, if you never check in with your team, their results may veer away far away from your expectations. So strategic course correction keeps them aligned without taking away their independence.

So here are four steps that I teach in my course that help leaders empower their teams while still maintaining accountability. One is to tell them what you're doing. It's really important that you're going to inform them that your plan is to give them more independence and how and why you're doing that, and especially the why.

We need to understand or make them understand why we are choosing to give them more independence and how it benefits them. [00:04:00] And that is we want them to become more independent so they can grow professionally, so they can advance, but also so they can get stronger at what they do. And so you can show that you really, truly trust them.

This is one of the most important steps that you can take when you're moving from more of a telling leadership style to a empowering leadership style. I think this is, so Im important that I actually dedicate a week of my course to this. Alright, so that's the first one. Tell them what you're doing.

Number two, safe failure. That is setting up boundaries. If you delegate something or you allow them to do it in their way, make sure that you don't just allow them to do it without any type of guidelines or guardrails. You need to give them a budget, a [00:05:00] timeframe, some parameters so that they have independent thinking between those parameters.

It allows for creativity without them going way off the deep end. Number three is to focus on results and not the how. So in other words, being very clear and defining upfront what's the success of whatever it is, the thing the project done looks like. Make sure that you both agree on the end result and what makes a high quality result,

and that way you can both agree on this is the destination. And yes, it is important that we, go along smoothly along the way, but it's okay if the how or how they reach the destination might look a little bit differently from the way we would do it. [00:06:00] Number four check-ins, having regular check-ins, and once again, upfront deciding how often you want to have these check-ins.

But it's good to have these regular checkpoints and you can agree when to check in and what type of progress should have been made by those points, especially for larger projects, so that you don't just abandon them or assume that they're doing what they need to do, and then when you check in at the very end, it is too late.

So when we establish upfront these checkpoints, we feel more comfortable that we've agreed to these things upfront. And so holding them accountable is part of the process. It's already built in. So once again, the four steps are inform them why you're giving them more independence and how it benefits them.

Allowing for safe failure and setting [00:07:00] boundaries so they don't go way outside the lines. Focus on the results and what the results look like by the end of the project and not the how to get there. And establish check-ins in advance so that you both agree how often you'll be providing support. So the key here is to set up your team member for success from the very beginning.

This way, you'll feel more comfortable giving them the independence. They will feel more supported. And you've already agreed for ways to stay on track. Remember, they have the same goal as you to create high quality work. And also to grow professionally.

So by following these four steps, you can help them take more responsibility while also feeling like you're not abandoning them and are still providing support. Okay, so here's my challenge for you this week. Choose one [00:08:00] project or task that your team member is doing and apply these four steps.

Communicate clearly, allow for safe failure, agree on the results, and set regular check-ins. Notice how much easier it feels to empower your team when you're built the right support system around them in advance. And if you wanna go deeper into this process and learn how to consistently balance independence

with accountability, join me inside my course, "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader". You'll find practical tools to empower your team without micromanaging and lead them to more confidence, clarity, and trust. You can find the link in the show notes. Alright, until next week, 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 [00:09:00] 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 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.