From Busy to Impactful: The First Step to Modern Humanitarian Leadership as a NGO Supervisor

Have you ever reached the end of a work week feeling completely drained — yet unsure if anything you did truly made an impact?

If you’ve been working harder than ever but still feel like you’re not growing as the kind of leader you aspire to be, you’re not alone. Many humanitarian and development leaders struggle with being busy but not productive — constantly reacting to others’ agendas instead of intentionally creating lasting impact. This episode dives into why that happens and what you can do to break the cycle.

In this episode, you’ll discover:

• The hidden signs that you’re lacking clarity — and how they keep you stuck in burnout and frustration.
• How clarity can energize you and your team to focus on what truly matters and make meaningful progress.
• A real-life story of how one leader’s clarity transformed an entire team’s culture and engagement.

Press play now to learn how gaining clarity can help you lead with focus, motivation, and purpose — and finally start creating the impact you’ve always envisioned.

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FULL EPISODE TRANSCRIPT:
From Busy to Impactful: The First Step to Modern Humanitarian Leadership

[00:00:00] Have you ever felt like you're working harder than ever, but you're not moving toward this type of leader or the impact that you truly want to be? Find out what the problem is and how to overcome it 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 and development leader. I hope you're having a [00:01:00] wonderful week.

So have you ever ended a work week and looked back with the exhaustion of being at the end of the week and you were really unable to pinpoint anything you did that truly made an impact or truly mattered? If so, you're not alone. Many leaders find themselves working harder than ever these days, but not actually moving toward the type of leader or the impact that you truly want to be. In this episode, we're gonna talk about why that happens and how to fix it. So in this episode, you're gonna discover symptoms of lacking clarity that keep you busy, but not productive. The kind of clarity that inspires you and your team to create lasting impact and a practical example of how clarity transformed leadership and team culture.

Are you ready? Let's [00:02:00] get to it. So the next few episodes are gonna be a more in-depth overview of the CLEAR Leadership Model which I introduced in last week's episode, which is basically a step-by-step framework that will allow you to go from being a overworked, busy, and not as productive and impactful leader to one who is clear, consistent, focused, and able to make a real impact on your team and your work. So the C in the CLEAR Leadership Model stands for Clarity. And why is Clarity important? Symptoms that you do not have Clarity include if you are feeling demotivated, you are burnout, you're frustrated, you're exhausted, you're feeling that you're always working without seeing the impact you want or you're not getting [00:03:00] anywhere.

So most of us walk through life in general without stopping to think about where we are going or where we want to go. In other words, the impact that we truly want to make. There might be project impact or other types of impact. But those are not created by us. They're not unique to us. And what happens is when we don't have Clarity on where we are going, we end up getting pulled by other people's agendas.

For example, maybe the regents or your supervisors or the donors, or even your teams - we become busy, but we are not productive, which means we take a lot of action without impact. This is in part what leads to burnout. When we are going and feeling that we are not arriving anywhere because we [00:04:00] have not put a GPS point or a defined destination into our GPS. It is very rare that someone has thought about the kind of leader that they want to be or the impact that they want to create.

From my experience, it's something that we just don't normally work into our schedule and that organizations don't prioritize. And to me that is a big detriment to ourselves and to others. So once again, I'm not talking about project impact here. I'm talking about leadership impact and there is a difference.

So we think that just knowing our project goals, when you put together your performance plan, you're probably thinking about how to achieve project goals or department goals. And you think that's going to give you this type of Clarity. And to an extent it does, it gives us some direction and purpose.

But when it comes to you as a unique individual, [00:05:00] your impact that you want to contribute may be different. From others or from your projects, from your supervisors, from your departments - because it is yours. It is unique to you. It's not something that can be found on a job description or a project proposal.

The only way to determine your impact that you wanna create is to sit down and understand what motivates and inspires you. Something that lights you up every day and gives you purpose on your work. So let me give you a real life example of how Clarity transformed not just my leadership, but an entire team culture.

So when I became a Country Manager in Timor Leste and I went from supervising a group of about 20 to a group of about 50 people, I happened to have a coach at the time because I was actually training to become a certified [00:06:00] coach, and part of that is coach mentorship. So this coach helps me become clear on the overarching impact I wanted to make.

It naturally became a question I asked myself when I was coached is that - What impact do I want to create here, with this team? How do I want to be remembered? And that impact is what motivated me over the next few years in that role, and what led me to actually achieving it.

If I did not have that Clarity, I would not have achieved the impact, I almost guarantee it. And so the impact was to make the INGO that I was working with at the time, the best place to work in Timor Leste. That is how I wanted to be remembered, is the leader who helped make this INGO and helped inspire the team to make this INGO the best place to work in [00:07:00] Timor.

And having that vision, I was able to have a direction in which to go. And once again, I truly believe that it is because I had that Clarity that we ended up having almost 100% engagement scores over the two years that I was a Country Manager there. And even beyond, once I left, that impact still continued.

The team was more unified. There was greater trust. People had more fun in their work, and this attracted more talent. This would not have happened, I truly believe, if I had not had Clarity on what I wanted to create. Because having that Clarity gave me the GPS point, it gave me the destination. Now, think about your own leadership.

If someone described your leadership five years from now and the impact you created, what [00:08:00] would they say? What do you want them to remember? I think this is why so many leaders are demotivated and burnout, in part because they don't have Clarity they have lost their way. And when you don't have Clarity, once again, you become the victim to other people's clarity and agendas.

You end up working on things that might not motivate you or make the most impact. And that leads to you just doing a bunch of things that don't accumulate to get to where you want to go. So this is not just me who's experienced this. This is what I've also observed in my course "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader" with my students who, once we sit down and we have a whole session around creating this Clarity, they say that before they have it, before they get this Clarity, they are busy, [00:09:00] reactive, exhausted and misaligned. But once they get the Clarity, once they take the time to really become clear on the impact that they want to create as leaders, they become focused, proactive, and energized while driving results that last.

And of course, having Clarity is an important first step to then looking at how you are using your time, and if the way you are using your time will lead you to this destination that you want to go or the impact that you want to create. Clarity gives you the what and the why, but next week we'll dive into Alignment,

part of the CLEAR Leadership Model, which ensures that your daily actions are actually leading you in the direction toward that impact. And if today's episode got you thinking about what kind of impact you want to make as a leader, [00:10:00] that's exactly what we work on in my course, "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader". You'll learn how to gain clarity, align your actions, and lead with purpose.

So you can learn more and register at  www.aidforaidworkers.com/course, which I will also include a link to 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 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 [00:11:00] 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.