How Your Leadership Style May be Adding to Your Workload as a Humanitarian and Development Supervisor

Have you ever considered the way you lead others could be adding to your workload?

Just as the way humanitarian and development work has evolved over the last 50 to 60 years, so has the need to lead differently.  

In this episode you'll learn:

• How leadership has evolved in the humanitarian and development sector and current requirements of the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader 2.0 (today's leaders)
• When to use different leadership styles effectively to get the most from your team
• How to know if your leadership style is adding to your workload, or lessening it

Stop creating more work for yourself and learn how to become the Modern Humanitarian Leader by listening now!

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EPISODE FULL TRANSCRIPT:

Welcome to the Aid for Aid Workers Leadership Podcast. I'm Torrey Peace, a former aid worker, now leadership coach, whose mission is to help you achieve the impact you're seeking while empowering your team and stepping away from the hustle so you can focus on the things you love the most. Sound good?

Let's get started.

Hello, my aid worker friend. I hope you're having a great week. I've been really enjoying the last week because I just had several groups of students join my coach approach course and they're from all over the world. I have some wonderful leaders from Syria and Afghanistan and Pakistan and East Africa and UK [00:01:00] and Portugal.

And I've been partnering with the Aga Khan Foundation to help bring this coach approach leadership style to their teams. And it's so fun, so fun to see how well they respond and how excited they are to learn this new way of leading. So that has been my week, but that's what keeps me going. It's my students.

I so enjoy working with them. So. I wanted to outline something for you because I feel like this is a very interesting way of looking at the evolution of humanitarian and development leadership over the last 40, 50 years, and also in terms of how we work with [00:02:00] communities and depending on where you are in this phase of leadership.

And sometimes it's necessary to be in a certain phase, just like when we have an emergency, it's necessary to respond in a certain way. But sometimes I think that leaders don't always recognize how their particular leadership or way of leading is actually kind of, let's say old school or needs an update and upgrade because the way that they're leading now is actually creating more work for them and possibly for you if you're listening to this.

So let's get to it. Shall we? So, I think we've all experienced when we are out in a community doing a project evaluation and you see that the community [00:03:00] has not exactly acted as you had planned. In other words, they're not following the project plan. They're not following the outline of what we thought would happen.

For example, I've seen times where grain barrels were distributed and when we went back to see how they were being used, they were being used for water storage. Or maybe you distributed some seeds and the community, instead of planting them, actually traded them for some other food item or for flour or something else that they needed.

Or maybe they actually sold something that has been donated, like hospital equipment and used the money to pay for school fees for their kids. So, you [00:04:00] know, whatever it is, we can't be mad at the community in these cases. It definitely can be frustrating, but it's really more our fault in this situation than it is theirs.

And there's a clear reason why this happened. And that is because we did not do enough work up front to understand their real need, but also maybe we were restricted in some way from being able to do that work. For example, I know a lot of proposals, are very restrictive and how you can use funding.

And so this also can lead to this kind of a situation. But I find it interesting that there's this whole evolution of humanitarian and development work, and I see it paralleling in some ways the development of, or the evolution of, leadership in the humanitarian and development space. [00:05:00] And that's what I wanted to talk to you about today, because these stories that I'm telling you now, where we go out in the community and we see that, "Oh, this isn't happening the way it's supposed to" I think there's some recognition now that we need to get the community more involved in the project proposals and so on. But we need more human centered design. We need this different way of engaging the community to have more effective development and humanitarian work. And in the same way, we also need to engage our teams in a different way

if we want to empower them and so also create less work for ourselves. So let me just outline what I mean by this. In the beginning, and this happens still sometimes, but, I think definitely in the old [00:06:00] days of humanitarian work, when there was a crisis, we gave a man a fish. You know, that saying, give him in a fish and he'll fish for a day or he'll eat for a day, sorry.

So in this phase, we were giving men fish or hopefully women as well. And we were just distributing whatever it was because there was no local market and they just needed the basics. They just needed food or just, to survive. And so we were just giving them those things. And this I parallel to when a, maybe a new leader comes to a team, or a leader has new team members who, have little experience, so they don't have something to, draw from just like the community doesn't have a [00:07:00] local market

-it's been destroyed in the natural disaster or whatever it is, the, the conflict... In the same way, our team maybe comes to us when they're new with nothing to draw from no, no experience or, um, not knowing what to do. And so what we do, we also give a man a fish in the sense that we just tell them what to do.

We give them information or instructions and then they go and do it. So this is the, the first stage of what I see a parallel between humanitarian and development work when we're at a very early stage of just giving, and the same with our leadership. When we first start leading a new team, then maybe they're starting from not knowing.

And so we just need to tell them what to do. ---

Stranded vehicles? Oh [00:08:00] no. Donor visits?. Oh, man. And delayed procurements. You've got a lot on your mind and we want to make it easy to get the best leadership content delivered directly to your inbox. All you have to do is join our weekly email list and you'll receive a weekly email with the latest podcast episodes, as well as any additional tools and tips to sign up now go to www.aidforaidworkers.com. That's www.aidforaidworkers.com and click on the sign up for weekly emails in the navigation bar at the top of the page. Now back to today's episode.

So the next stage of development, is to teach a man to fish, right? And so, in that case, when we're talking about working with the community, they're stable enough where they have time and the ability to learn a new and perhaps better way of planting or improving [00:09:00] on what they are already doing. So we teach them some kind of agricultural technique or maybe how to save their money in a certain way or whatever it is.

And so this is the next phase where they're a little bit better off so that they have something to draw from. And this is the same in the next phase of leadership. So in this phase, we go from telling our teams what to do because they have no experience to teaching them how they can do something for themselves.

So we teach them how to do a detailed plan or monitoring and evaluation or how to write a report or whatever it is. So in this stage of development and in leadership, it's a bit more sustainable in terms of getting someone to do things on their own, right? Just like that saying, teach a man to fish, he'll eat for a lifetime.

However, now we're entering a new phase of [00:10:00] development and humanitarian work. And this is where we are now and where I see the future is going. Where we empower a man (or woman) to do his own thinking or to decide, does he even want to fish? Maybe he wants to do something else, or how does he make his fishing business grow?

Or how does he create a business? So it's becoming more common now to empower communities to do things themselves by giving them money and asking them, what do you want? How do you want to develop yourselves? We believe you are capable and that you know better than we do. And in terms of leadership, this next phase, this, this phase now that we are entering and we have been entering is what I am calling the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader [00:11:00] 2.

0. So in this phase, we empower our teams to do things their own way. Just like we offer the community money and allow them to buy what they need or to do what they want with it. We allow our teams to take what they know and be able to implement or problem solve and do the things where they take greater responsibility and feel confident in their own ability to do something.

This is where we come to how you may be adding to your own workload according to the way you are leading. So if you are in the first phase of leadership, the telling phase. You might be in that phase if there's a new team and they really don't have experience or they don't know what to do, then yes, you probably need to tell them what to do. Or in certain situations like high risk [00:12:00] or reputational risk, those kinds of things.

However, eventually we need to evolve to at least the second phase of teaching them how to do things for themselves. And that is also very good and more sustainable. Like we said, teach a man to fish, but now we are entering this third phase of the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leadership 2. 0, which involves how do we empower our teams and really trust that they have enough experience to draw from where they know what to do, but we need to have a conversation with them where we can help them find out what are the obstacles, what are the blocks, and why they're not taking action? This is what I'm teaching in the Coach Approach because it's not something [00:13:00] intuitive.

These conversations on how to help others become more confident or aware of how they are doing things right now that might be keeping them stuck, that they know what they want to do, but we can help them uncover why they are not taking action, why they're not doing it. And this is the way of the Modern Humanitarian and Development

leader. Not only in the way we engage our team, but also in the way we engage the community, the government and implementing partners so that they take ownership over what they are doing, that they take more responsibility. And that leads to them taking more of the workload from you. Because like I've seen with so many of my students, when they start using this style, they see the communities start to take ownership over what they want to do, or they see the government [00:14:00] organizing their own meetings, they see their team starting to make decisions for themselves and be more proactive.

And this in turn allows you to free up your time and changes your role as the leader to help make your team stronger and to make an impact through them rather than with them. So I want you to notice throughout your week, how often are you creating more work for yourself by the way you are leading? Are you creating dependency or are you having conversations that empower those around you?

And where will this way of leading that you are currently doing now bring you in a year, two years or three years from now? Will you evolve to be the Modern Humanitarian and Development Leader 2.0 or will you stay in the old [00:15:00] school way of giving a man a fish? The way we are doing development is evolving and our leadership style should too.

But being aware of how you are leading now is that first step to change. And then the next step is how do I now empower those around me to do their best work so that we can broaden our impact? All right, that's it for this week. So great to talk to you again and see you next week. Bye for now. Hey, if you are ready to step up your leadership game, I want to invite you to join my coaching course for aid worker leaders, where you're going to learn how to master coaching skills in order to empower your team to become more proactive, confident, and motivated at what they do, which of course will help you [00:16:00] achieve more impact for them and for you.

Just head over to www. aidforaidworkers. com and click on the coaching course waiting list. So you'll be the first to know when doors open for the next enrollment. Can't wait to see you there.