5 Signs Your Team Feels Disempowered and What to Do For Greater Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Supervisor

Is your team feeling empowered or could they be achieving more?

If you're supervising a humanitarian or development team, it's essential to understand how disempowerment silently sabotages motivation and progress. In this episode, you'll learn to recognize the subtle signs of disempowerment and shift your leadership approach to unlock your team's full potential.

Among other things you'll learn:

• Why even experienced team members may resist empowerment — and how to compassionately guide them out of it.
• A key leadership mindset shift that can reduce your stress and increase your team's ownership and creativity.
• Find out the simple, powerful question you can ask to immediately reframe a disempowered team member’s mindset.

Listen to today’s episode to uncover practical strategies you can use right away to build a more empowered, motivated, and high-performing team!

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:

How to know if your team is feeling disempowered and what to do about it 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 aspiring modern NGO leader. I hope you're having a wonderful week. Week. [00:01:00] And I just wanna say before we get started that I wanted to send out a congratulations to all my recent graduates of the Aga Khan Foundation who have just finished their six week course. And I'm already receiving so many stories of how they have transformed their leadership and are empowering their teams to do more.

And it is just so, so exciting to see and hear about, yeah. I look forward to continue to see how they evolve as we, continue to meet in the alumni group that many of them will be enrolling in. Okay. And then speaking of empowered, what you're going to discover in today's episode is why people sometimes slide into disempowerment symptoms that your team is feeling disempowered or helpless.

And how you as a leader can help to empower your team. [00:02:00] So to me, the definition of empower is make someone feel in control, like they have a say in their own destiny and their own future. And it is a beautiful thing when someone is feeling empowered, but sometimes people don't want to be empowered. They don't want to take power because it also means when we take power or when we are empowered and we realize that we have the ability to do something, it also means that we have some kind of accountability for doing so.

And I think that some people do not want to take that accountability or responsibility because it means that they have to take ownership over their failures or the things that they don't like about their work or their life, which can [00:03:00] be very scary and painful because you're basically acknowledging that there are actually things that you could be doing about it rather than just keeping safe and doing nothing and blaming a lot of other people for why things are the way they are.

And a lot of times our human brain wants us to stay in that kind of victim mode or to be safe because then we stay in the known and the brain likes things that are known, no threats or dangers and the known, or at least we know how to deal with those versus when we recognize or and are feel empowered to try new things,

to step out of our comfort zone to grow, to take action is not as safe because we're going into [00:04:00] unexplored territory. And so that can mean that sometimes our brain is actually what holds us back from taking action and staying in victim mode rather than wanting to feel empowered or letting ourselves feel empowered and take responsibility.

I. So I think it's just important to note that, first of all, because there are definitely a lot of things we can do to empower our teams or empower ourselves, but I think it's good to know why sometimes some people want to stay in victim mode and sometimes people are kind of stuck in this, state of disempowerment.

Because it's safer there. It's safer for them. And so knowing that we can also show empathy or compassion toward those people, knowing that they might need a little bit [00:05:00] extra validation or a boost from us in order to take action. Because probably a lot of what they lack is self-belief. But a lot of us only need a small nudge or maybe a reframing in order to feel more empowered.

So first of all, how do you know if your team is feeling disempowered or someone on your team? Well, a lot of times it means that you're telling them what to do. They come to you for answers all the time. They are not taking action. Maybe even when you show them how to do something.

They tend to have a victim mentality or blame others for things, and maybe they say they do not know how to do something or they cannot do something when you ask, even though you know they have enough experience to be able to find a way to do it. So as a [00:06:00] leader, you can help someone really gain the confidence and feel empowered in their own way.

And be able to take responsibility and achieve more and do more. And to me, this is one of the most powerful and beneficial parts of leadership, and this is exactly what I teach in my courses, is how to empower those around us so we can all operate at our full potential so that we can achieve more, we can achieve greater impact.

And we can all grow together.

So when we give power to others or we help them see their power, because as leaders, when we empower those around us, we're essentially kind of sharing our own power. We're saying that our idea or our way isn't always the best [00:07:00] or the right one, and we want to see what our team has to say, and we want to see their way, and we believe in our team and how they do things.

And when we do this, our team can become more motivated. They can become unstuck. They can seek action and take it. They feel uplifted. These are all things that my students have mentioned from their team, their own team members when they start empowering them. And another beneficial thing of empowering others is that they come up with their own ideas, which are probably different from ours and might be better because sometimes they are closer to the problem and sometimes they are when they're, when you're, when, our team members are in a place of feeling empowered they're also in more of a place of creativity. [00:08:00] So we as leaders also benefit when this happens, when we empower those around us because we help them grow. We help them take more responsibilities. They are more confident so that we gain back more time because we're not spending more time telling them what to do or showing them how to do it.

And that means we can focus on higher level, bigger picture, strategic tasks. And more important things that will make more of an impact. And it also helps our workload. And this is another thing a lot of my students say is my workload is less now because I have empowered those around me using the coaching techniques through the course to be able to take more responsibility.

So a specific example might be like one of my students said that they started trusting their team more to take greater responsibility for [00:09:00] organizing an annual meeting that they have. And normally this person would've micromanaged the whole thing or they would've, you know, been telling their team what to do. And instead of that, they took a seat back and took a step back and just watched their team organize the event.

And they were so pleased with the result and found that in some ways their team did better and more than they would have. And this is the type of thing that empowerment creates. So what does it mean to empower someone? Well, coaching by definition, like the coaching leadership style, which I teach in the Modern Humanitarian Development Leader course.

Because I believe modern leaders lead both from an managerial or a directive style, but also more from a [00:10:00] coaching style. And by definition, coaching is an empowering conversation. It's the whole theory behind coaching is helping others understand the power that they have no matter where they are in the hierarchy, no matter where they are in the org chart.

And how much they already know to help solve their own problems and grow into their full potential. So we help others focus on what's within their control. So what is within our control? Well, the really, the only things that are with our, within our own control are our own thoughts, our feelings, and our actions.

That is really it. We cannot control the thoughts, feelings, or actions of others. Only our own, let me [00:11:00] repeat that again because this is very important. We cannot control the thoughts, feelings, or actions of others. And yet so many of us want to, or we try. We have an idea of what we want others to do, how we want others to behave, and we get very frustrated when they don't behave in that way, even when sometimes we haven't even communicated it.

It's a very interesting human anomaly. One of my mentor coaches calls it having a manual for other people. So, in other words, we all have manuals on how others should behave, but the problem is that everyone's manual is different. And we, a lot of times we don't give them the manual. We don't tell them what we want to see, and so [00:12:00] they are just guessing or they are just completely oblivious.

And then we get mad when they don't behave in the way that our manual says they should. So I really like that, uh, analogy. But knowing that is power in itself, knowing that we cannot control others is power in itself. So, for example, there was someone I was coaching recently who was focused on what they wanted everyone else to do around them, how they wanted everyone else to change, but

they were not recognizing that that was not something that was necessarily possible, that we can't change other people's behavior. We can definitely do things like communicate how we would like them to change or, you know, do certain things to try [00:13:00] to motivate that change. But in general, the best way to get others to change is by first changing ourselves.

So when I walked this person through my coaching process, when I used my coaching process on them and asked more about what was within their control, and they realized that they could actually do a lot of things to improve the situation without having everyone around else around them change. That was a very empowering moment for them because when we are trying to control others, we feel out of control.

Why? Because we can't do it. But when we control ourselves, when we look at ourselves and what we can do, how we can show up, how we can think, feel, and act differently, that is very empowering.

So how can we help others? Well [00:14:00] like I said before, sometimes there are certain people that want to stay in victim mode. In some situations, no, how matter how much I have coached someone, they did not want to acknowledge their personal power, and they did not want to take responsibility and they wanted to remain a victim, and so they did.

And that is not something, like we said, we cannot control other people's feelings, thoughts, and actions. So some rare cases you are not going to be able to empower those people, but I think these are the very extreme cases when we focus on what, or we help others focus on what they control, uh, they can control.

There is a lot that they can do and the more that we help others take responsibility, [00:15:00] the more we can empower them to achieve what they want. So most people are somewhere in between a victim mentality and what I call a hero mentality or a growth mentality, like a growth versus fixed mindset. Most people are sometimes in the middle, and sometimes it depends on what it, what the situation is.

But what you can do as a supervisor or as a leader, is to listen for those times when someone is stuck more on the victim side, feeling powerless. Or they're looking for ways for their circumstance to change or their teammates to change, rather than looking at themselves. And when someone starts to talk about how to have someone else behave

or do something differently or feel differently, or they want [00:16:00] to something to happen that is not possible or realistic. For example, I want the government to change the holidays schedule. Then we can help them best by refocusing the conversation on what's within their control.

So I spend time on how to recognize this, how to recognize these instances of when someone is feeling disempowered and what to do about it using my coaching process in my course. But right now, you can just start by even asking one question. When you're noticing some of these symptoms, you can ask that person, what is within your control

that you can do right now? And this can help redirect the conversation from hopeless to empowered. [00:17:00] So basically looking first for symptoms of someone feeling disempowered, and secondly, getting them to refocus on what is within their control is a great step toward empowerment. It. And the other thing that you can do to empower your team is to really show that you believe in them.

This is one of the most empowering things you can do as a leader. And how do you show that you believe in them? Well, you ask for their ideas, for their solutions, and you show them that you trust their ideas and solutions by actually using them. And allowing them to take action on them and sharing your own power so they feel more powerful themselves.

This is the way of the modern leader. [00:18:00] Alright, until next week, keep evolving. Bye for now.

Are you the type of leader that tells others what to do or to 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 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 [00:19:00] it.