3 Uncommon Performance Plan Goals To Make Your Team THRIVE as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader
In today’s fast-paced humanitarian and development landscape, the traditional approach to performance planning often falls short, leading to uninspired teams and stagnant results. This episode dives into how you can transform performance plans into powerful tools for motivation and change, addressing a common challenge many leaders face—how to drive engagement while preventing burnout.
By tuning in, you'll discover how to:
- Create leadership impact goals that align your actions with your vision, making it easier to lead effectively.
- Integrate team values into performance planning to foster a thriving organizational culture.
- Prioritize well-being in your team to enhance overall performance and job satisfaction.
Don’t miss out on these transformative insights—hit play now and start reshaping your team’s performance approach today!
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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:
Learn how performance plans can have tremendous impact for you and your team when used effectively 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 learn: why the way we usually do performance plans isn't that impactful, three ways to use performance planning to create teams which are motivated and make impact beyond the day-to-day work. And how to put this all together so that you can have a more motivated and thriving team.
And just to say that even if it's not performance planning time for you right now, This could still be a really great reminder to start thinking about and being more intentional about the types of goals that you might want to create for your next performance plan. And that includes not only yourself, but your team as well.
So from my experience, performance plans are taken seriously to the extent that it formalizes a goal. And the reason it formalizes it is because usually it's put into writing.
It's agreed upon by ourselves, and our supervisor. And we sometimes even send it to HR and maybe in some of the organizations it might even go to headquarters or beyond.
And yet, usually these goals are very related to a person's job description or, you know what they're supposed to be doing in their role, as a project manager or a finance manager or finance officer or admin officer, whatever it is. And they are usually focused on implementing projects and very focused on the doing part of managing parts of a project and just keeping things going.
Those are all the typical ways that performance plans are used in terms of the goals that we create. But what I found and what I tried to address when I was a country manager in Timor is how to get beyond the day-to-day job description and project management type stuff and really make use of the performance plan to create change in terms of the type of culture that we want for our team. And the type of behavior we want to see. More into how can we really make an impact and create the type of culture that we want through using our performance plan goals? So here are three ways that you can do this, which I have seen to be very impactful.
So I encourage you to listen to these and, and think about which one you would like to start with in order to really make an impact and some change.
Torrey: The first one is what I call a leadership impact goal. A lot of times, like I said before, performance plans are very focused on the doing part of the job description or a project management. But they're less on who we are being or who we need to be an order to get the type of performance that we would like from our team and really make a greater impact. I even have incorporated this because I believe in it so much. Into my course "becoming the modern, humanitarian and development leader"
we spend time really forming the leadership impact goal, because what I've found is once leaders have that, and they understand who they want to be, in other words, who do they want to become? Who. Do they, what kind of values do they have as a leader? And once they understand that the being part, then the doing part, the action part, becomes easy. And what I have found, which is really interesting is when we don't have a clear vision of the type of leader we want to be, then we might not even align our own behavior to become that leader because we don't know, we haven't really thought about it.
What I see with a lot of my students is they come into the course and they consider themselves caring leaders and they're doing their best with what they can. But once they sit back and intentionally think about who do I want to become and what does my leadership impact goal look like? So, for example, a goal might be something like you want to be a leader who trusts your team. And so then maybe you would define what that means.
For example, maybe it means that you allow your team to come up with their own ways of doing things. In other words, you empower your team to make their own decisions. And once you decide that, that you want to be a leader who empowers their team. Then the action part of that becomes obvious. And it makes it, so when you go about your day-to-day work and you're doing all the things. You're more easily able to align with that vision of who you want to be as a leader, because there are all kinds of decisions we make every day.
Right? So for example, Someone comes into your office or they come up to you, one of your team members and they say they have a problem. Now, if you have this leadership impact goal, which says that you want to trust your team to, to find their own solutions. Then your actions around how to help that person might be something like asking them questions about what do they think they should do and coaching them through how they want to move forward. But if your leadership impact goal is not clear, or you do not have one, or you haven't really thought about the type of leader that you want to become. Then you might be more tempted to just tell them what to do. Because it's easier,
it's faster. I see this all the time.
So once again, Creating a goal around who you want to be as a leader.
And then the actions below that, because I know usually you have a goal and then you have several actions under the objective or the goal. Those might look something like, Coaching your team more regularly in meetings or asking your team for three solutions when they come to you, rather than just telling them what to do.
This is one of the ways you can use her performance plan to decide who you want to become as a leader, and then to actually be more intentional about your behavior and how you interact with your team. And I promise you, it can make a really big difference. I have seen it. Okay. The second one, the second way to use performance plan might be through putting in some kind of a value that you want to focus on, and this could be for yourself or your team or all of you together, deciding on values that you want to focus on.
And when I say values, I mean your team's values or your organizations values. So I did this in Timor Leste and I'll explain a little bit about how we did it. We had several values as a team that I knew if we were to live into, if we were to actually follow those values, we would create the type of organizational culture that would be very impactful and productive and, and teams would thrive. And so I had everyone pick one of our team values and put it in their performance plan as something that they wanted to focus on over the next year. And then underneath that so underneath that goal or objective, which would be the value itself how they would do that. So, for example, one of our values was open communication. Some team members said that they would want to focus on becoming better at open communication. And then under that, they said they would do that by, using email less and going to talk to people personally more or encouraging each other to say what's uncomfortable. Or bringing up problems as soon as they arise and so on.
And I know some of these things like open communication can be a little bit difficult to measure sometimes, but also like they can be really powerful ways to change behavior and show that you're serious about the values of the organization or the team. So you can have discussions as a team, and this is why it's great to do this as a team, about how are we doing with open communication? What are examples of how we've done well? What are examples of where we could improve?
And you have those conversations regularly, because of course, part of the magic of performance planning is ideally you're not just having a conversation every quarter, but you intentionally have these things on your mind so that you're able to make them happen and achieve them.
Those are the first two, the first one being creating some kind of a leadership impact goal.
The second one being deciding a value that you want to concentrate on you yourself, or as a team or each team member comes up with their own value that they want to concentrate on for the year and saying how you're going to do that.
And then the third one is around wellbeing. So this is also a great opportunity to take the performance plan goal, and make it to have greater wellbeing in some way. And you all can decide what that looks like for yourself and for your team.
What I see a lot of times is that organizations say that they value wellbeing, but then they don't really have the, well, we would say teeth to back it up. And I'm not really sure where that saying came from. But it's like we say, or organizations say they value something, like they say they prioritize wellbeing, but then they're not saying anything if people are working long hours. So this is a way to make it more formal and give yourself permission to be able to, for example, maybe your wellbeing goal might be something like creating boundaries on your time, being better about saying no to extra work, things like that.
So in other words, maybe underneath your goal of setting better boundaries would be having hours where every week it's designated for focused work time and you communicate that with others so they know that not to bother you during that time, every single week. Or maybe asking a supervisor to help you prioritize when you feel like you need that help. Or being honest and open about workload and when feeling overwhelmed or stress with others, like with this team or with your supervisor. And you could, like I said before, about the the previous goal around the values, you can make this a team goal. For example, you all share a goal such as creating boundaries between work and off time.
And that would give people more permission to be able to do that because it's easier for people to change their behavior when they feel like they, other people are also doing it and they're not the only one going against the grind. And so the more you can make this a team activity, probably the better.
And then ideally, I have to say that ideally as the leader, you would want to role model what you say you're going to do and actually follow it. So if you say you're going to be better open communication as a value, then you actually make an intention to do that. If you say you are going to be better at not working on weekends, then you actually show that you're doing that. That can be huge for your team because they look to you, whether you like it or not on what is permissible.
And just as a review, these three performance planning goals are number one, creating some kind of a leadership vision or impact goal. Number two, creating some kind of a goal around a value that you really want to follow or lean into this year. And number three, is around wellbeing. And how to really prioritize that and make that a goal. These are goals that not only benefit you, your team, but also your organization. Because when you are in a better place in terms of actually following values, which interestingly enough is related to our own wellbeing when we are going against our values, oftentimes our wellbeing suffers. But also having goals related to our wellbeing or related to our leadership and who we want to be as leaders can be very motivating and a very powerful way to be able to create change beyond just our day to day actions because we have more of a vision of who we want to become, the values we want to lead by and the values we hope that our team will lean into as well.
Once again, I encourage you to pick one of these and think about how you can incorporate it into your performance plan. Talk about it with your supervisor, share this episode with them or with your team so that you can do it together and just have fun with it. It should be fun.
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.