Why ‘Just Teach Them Again’ Is the Wrong Approach to Unlocking Your Team’s Potential as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Is your team’s lack of action a knowledge problem—or a confidence problem? Misdiagnosing this could be holding them (and you) back.

If you’ve ever felt frustrated by showing your team how to do something over and over only for them to hesitate or keep asking for help, you’re not alone. This episode dives into why this happens and offers a powerful framework to help you move from frustration to transformation in your leadership.

In this ten minute episode you'll discover:

• Learn the key differences between knowledge and confidence problems of team members
• How to address knowledge or confidence problems
• Gain insights into creating sustainable, high-performance teams that act independently.

Press play now to learn what may be blocking you from a high performance team!

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:

Find out why your team may not be taking action 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 wonderful week. And in today's episode, you're going to discover: the difference between a knowledge problem and a confidence problem when it comes to your team not acting on something. The symptoms of each and how to recognize them. And how to build a high-performance team depending on if they have a knowledge or a confidence problem.

So this is something that I have experienced a lot with various leaders that I've coached and that I've worked with in my course. And basically they become very frustrated because they know that their team is very intelligent. That they have the capability to go far and to be higher performing. But for some reason, and this could be an individual on a team or a group like the team as a group. For some reason, the team is not taking action even though they technically have been shown how to do something or taught how to do something many many times.

And what leaders do is they think that in order to solve for this they need to show the person how to do the thing again. I remember, for example, There was, someone I was working with who had shown this particular team member many times how to write a letter to the bank when they needed money. And for some reason, this person still came to this manager, whenever they were doing the letter. Like they still kept coming and what she did the manager- is she just kept teaching them the same thing. Over and over and over again, because her assumption was, they just don't understand.

The thing is we often times think, the problem is that the person is not understanding or they don't have the knowledge or the skill yet in order to take action. And so the leader solves for this by teaching them or showing them the same thing over and over, or even going to do it for them. And so if this is you, this is a sign that really what you have is not a knowledge or experience problem. It's a confidence problem.

So the way we know. If you have a knowledge problem or a confidence problem, is with a knowledge problem the person oftentimes has not done something before. They have no idea how to do something. They have no knowledge or experience to draw from. In that particular situation we want to use training to solve for that, because it just means that they need to be taught. But what I see is a lot of leaders trying to solve for knowledge problems, which are actually confidence problems. And the symptoms of a confidence problem are for example, someone that have the knowledge, they have the skills, they have the experience. They've been shown many times how to do something and they're still not taking action.

That is usually the sign of a confidence problem. They don't believe in themselves for some reason. They have some kind of a fear or lack of confidence in taking action on their own. And so solving for that by teaching them how to do it again, or by actually doing it for them is only going to make the problem persist.

It's not going to make it go away. And so the process that we use when we have a confidence problem. When you feel like you have shown someone how to do something multiple times and they still keep coming to you. Is coaching. And the reason we use coaching in this particular instance is because we don't need to teach them something. They already know what to do. But coaching can help understand the person's way of thinking about the situation or the way they're feeling about the situation in order to really, truly address the issue. So by coaching them and determining what is keeping them stuck. It's not a knowledge thing. It's a feeling or a belief they have about themselves. Maybe that they can't do it, or they're afraid to fail or whatever. And by coaching them around this and helping them understand it themselves, and also for you to understand it, then you can decide how to take action from a place of fixing or addressing the real issue.

And the result when we do that is sustainable and transformational behavior change. And that is one reason why coaching can be so powerful. Because when we are coaching to the person and when we say coaching to the person, that means we are looking at what is this individual's thinking or feeling or belief system that is keeping them stuck? That is not serving them in some way? And how can we help them overcome that through coaching, through asking them powerful questions and getting them to think through and kind of pick apart their beliefs. So that they can decide that they want to change those beliefs and move forward.

And that is very transformational because you're talking about not just teaching them something. But actually changing the way they're looking at themselves. And when it comes to confidence, That means that they have more belief in themselves. That they believe that they can handle whatever comes their way.

Once again, the difference between a knowledge problem and a confidence problem is a knowledge problem is where someone on your team needs to be taught something for the first time. Maybe the second time. They still don't understand or they still don't have the skills or the experience to reference in order to take action. That's a knowledge problem, but a confidence problem is where you have shown them multiple times the same thing. You know they know how to do it.

You know they have the experience and that they are Intelligent enough and talented enough, but they're still not taking action. That is probably more of a confidence problem. And once again, the best way to solve for that is to coach them through it.

This is something that I teach in "Becoming The Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader", my six week course, is how to identify these types of issues and how to coach someone to become more confident or to overcome their fears of failure or to build their belief in themselves so that they can truly step into the role and the person that they want to be.

In the meantime, I encourage you, when you find yourself becoming frustrated or seeing that someone keeps coming back to you over the same issue, to really question, is this a knowledge problem or is this a confidence problem? And see if you can determine the difference. One by addressing it, you will help that person to gain more skills, more experience the other, by addressing it, you will help that person to transform the way they see themselves. 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!