How to Know If You'll Achieve Your Goals as a Humanitarian or Development Leader

Will you achieve your goals within a year?

Many of us "hope" we will.

But hoping alone will not get you to that promotion or to achieve that certification.

There are two things that you need to do in order to successfully achieve your goals.

And it comes down to how you use your time.

Find out more in this episode.

 

NEW!!!!  Episodes are now accompanied by full transcript!!! 

Please find full transcript below, or you can visit the link here and when you push "play" the corresponding text will be highlighted.

Episode 286:  How to Know If You'll Achieve Your Goals as a Humanitarian or Development Leader

 

Hello, my aid worker, friend. I hope you're having a wonderful week. I remember from when I worked with the INGO sector, that this is around the time we would do our annual planning. Maybe that's not true for you and your organization, but I just thought I'd make an episode, which is relatable, regardless of whether you're doing annual planning or not. And that is how to know if you will achieve your goal. And when I'm talking about goal, I'm talking about your personal or professional goal, not just your team or organizational goal, which is more of the focus of the annual plan.

And of course we want to take the annual plan. And I remember doing all those like flip charts and post-it notes all over the room, and then it somehow gets funneled into an Excel sheet. And then you have an idea of what you're going to be working on over the next year and how [00:01:00] it lines up with the regional priorities and HQ priorities and so on, but you also have your individual priorities and maybe some of these you've already done for the calendar year, or maybe you have done when you did your performance plan. But, it's still important to take a look no matter where we are in the year, about how can you make sure that you are most on track and set up to succeed to achieve your goals.

And maybe your goal is something like you want to be promoted to another position or take on more of a supervisory role, or you want to learn something new, have a certification in HR or whatever it is. I want to tell you how you will know if you will achieve your goal over the next year or at least make progress toward it. So it [00:02:00] comes down to two simple things. The first is being clear about what you want to create. And I know that sounds obvious, but I say it because a lot of us are not so clear. We might have an idea in the back of our mind, what we want to create, or the impact that we want to make as a leader. And usually what I see with leaders is they take what is in their development plan and more of the project goals and they adopt those to become their professional goals. But I want you to take a step further and think about what is the impact that you want to make as a leader based on your unique, potential and skillset? What do you want to do? Not to add to your workload, but to motivate you to step into your role and make your own unique mark on [00:03:00] your work and what you're doing. A lot of us don't think about that.

We don't take the time to think about that. The impact that we want to create. And I'll talk more about that on a future episode. But that's the first step is just even really understanding what is it you want to create? Or what is the goal that I want to achieve over the next year, beyond just the project or the adoptation of the new system, whatever.

That's great, but impact goes beyond that. Right? Those will make an impact in a way, but how do we want to make our own individual unique impact? So the second thing that we need to look at to see if we will achieve our goal is how you use your time. And I've talked about this a little bit in past episodes, but I think it's worth spending a little more time explaining it, because it is such a key [00:04:00] thing. So are you spending time on the things which will lead to achieving your goal on a daily or weekly basis? And in the Coach Approach Leadership Style course, we determine this through what I call a time audit. So we look at how you're using your time and if it aligns with the impact that you want to create. And you have to be honest with yourself because sometimes we can trick ourselves into thinking that the activities or how we're spending our time is productive or leading to where we want to go, but when we really take a step back and look at it, we realize that they are not.. So it's really important to first of all, understand where you want to go or the goal you want to achieve, but then secondly, understand how you are currently working or not working [00:05:00] that will allow you to get there.

So, for example, if you want to create a more proactive team, but you spend all your time on business development or answering emails for other people, then guess what you're going to create over the next year? Yeah, more business development and more email. So if we take the way we spend our time and we amplify it, that will tell you whether you will achieve your goal or not. Where you will be in a year. And it's a really helpful exercise to do on a regular basis because sometimes we get so busy and wrapped up on the day-to-day work that we don't reflect on

will these things that I'm doing today help me achieve my goal a year from now? So we should try and spend more of our time on the activities or the [00:06:00] tasks that will lead to achieving our goal and less on what I call empty calorie tasks. And I talk about empty calorie tasks on a previous episode,

so I'll put that in the show notes. But basically those types of activities, which take up our time, but don't really lead to anything productive. For example, a lot of times it's email or approving things. So it's simple science, what we focus on and how we spend our time is what we are creating. But a lot of us become so lost in the everyday busy-ness that we are reacting to what others want from us rather than what we want to create for ourselves. And we also may not think that we have control over our time. So that's another thought leading to what I have [00:07:00] introduced in the past two or three episodes that is High Performance Syndrome. And it's another way of thinking about the way we use our time and the way we lead, which creates busy-ness without impact.

So when we believe we have no control of our time, this also will lead to us just being victim of whatever comes our way and so create whatever everyone else wants and not necessarily what we want. So I challenge you this week to reflect over how you're using your time. And ask if you keep spending your time, this way will it get you to where you want to go, or at least allow you to achieve your goals? If the answer is, yes,

great, keep going. But if the answer is no, you may need to make some changes. And the thing is we all are spending our time on things [00:08:00] every day, Every day, you make decisions on how you use your time, whether you're aware of it or not. And there's always something that will not get done. So do you want the thing that is not getting done to be the same thing that will allow you to reach your goals? Or do you want the thing that is not getting done to be the thing that will keep you in

busy-ness? It's up to you. All right. So until next week, keep broadening your impact. Bye for now.