3 Tips to Immediately Make a Greater Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

How do you know if you are leading to make the most impact on those around you?

In today's episode you'll discover how to:

• Harness the power of silence to foster deeper conversations and uncover hidden insights from your team.
• Align your actions with your words to build trust and integrity within your organization.
• Shift your focus from authority to influence by truly serving and developing your team, creating a more engaged and motivated workplace.

Press play now to discover simple, actionable strategies to evolve into the impactful leader your team deserves.

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:

Discover three practical ways to make a even bigger impact as a leader 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 humanitarian and development leaders. I hope you're having a wonderful week. And today's episode is inspired by my interview, Monday with Kofi Dugu. If you haven't listened to that yet, please go back and do so. And in that interview, Kofi references several African Proverbs and I wanted to mention one that I also think is very impactful today.

And that African proverb is: "much talking, does not make you a leader". Once again, the proverb is: "much talking, does not make you a leader". And I think this is a great thing to remember for several angles and. One of course is reflecting on as a leader,

do you talk more than you listen?

I know when I was a leader at times I would find myself explaining, giving advice, talking a lot and not listening as much. And there's a lot that is lost in that. And like this quote says. Just because we are sharing and talking and we are giving advice doesn't mean that we are being leaders. Because being a leader to me means that people are actually engaged and following you. And when we are doing more of the talking, it is less likely that that is happening.

So to make a bigger impact as a leader, you must do some of the following: one is listening at least as much, if not more than talking. In order to understand your team and really understand what motivates them, understand maybe where their challenges are and what they need in order to develop, understand their perspectives and their ideas. And to really understand when they are seeing something differently than you do that might actually be very important. To make the most impact as a leader, we should try to give less advice. And I've talked about this a lot before, so I'm not going to go into it in too much detail, but if we're listening more than we're talking, we're probably also not giving as much advice, but we're getting ideas from others. And then finally actions speak louder than words.

So just because we're talking a lot and we're saying we're going to do all these things. If we don't then go and do them then we fall out of integrity and a lot of times people will question how truthful we're being, when we say we're going to do something and then we don't follow through. So here are three tips that you can practice an order to make a greater impact as a leader.

One: practice silence. This is so powerful and something that a lot of my students, in my course "Becoming the Modern Humanitarian Development Leader" find very practical and very powerful right away. When you are listening to one of your colleagues explain something, after they are done talking a lot of times we have a tendency to fill that space and want to talk and, immediately add something that we are thinking about or ask them a question.

But instead of doing that to actually pause and maybe even count to five and give the space or the time for that person to maybe add something or just allow a pause in the conversation. It's not always comfortable, but it will be very interesting for you. I promise. Just play around with that and see what happens when you pause, because sometimes people need time to think, or they might add something to what they've already said. You might learn a lot more than if you just filled that space with your own talking.

Number two: don't say you're going to do something unless you actually plan on doing it.

Be careful about what you tell your team. And for example, if you say that you're going to promote wellbeing and encourage your team to take time off, but then you either don't do it yourself or you look the other way when they're not able to, because they're overloaded or overworked. This to me is contradictory and actually undermines the very thing that you said you were going to do, which is promote wellbeing. I see this happen a lot with organizations.

And of course this goes beyond just wellbeing, but that's the one I'm focusing on because I see this, as, an area where we do a lot of talk, but we don't do a lot of action. And this comes to when you know, we're talking about values as well. How are some of the values that we're talking about, or even the things that we teach the community, how are we somehow, sometimes not practicing those ourselves?

I'll give you an example of that. When I was in Timor, we were doing nutrition programming. And we would teach the communities how to eat well and how we should not put ajinomoto or MSG in our food and so on. And then we would come back to the office. And we would order food from catering companies that would add those things. That would have fried food that would have ajinomoto and all those things.

So we decided to make the 10 commandments of nutrition and followed that in order to really practice what we said we were doing, which, you know, when it came to the community, it was following better nutrition. In order to be able to tell people and teach people that we also need to be practicing it first ourselves.

So look for those contradictions and especially in yourself, when you say you're going to do something. And then you don't. If I wasn't able to follow through with something with my team that I said I was going to do, I would always explain why, so that they weren't left wondering why or it wouldn't undermine my credibility or my integrity.

And then finally, number three, reminder that just because you are in a supervisory role, that it does not make you a leader.

To me, like I said before, being a leader means that you have a following. People are following you and in a formal role, like a supervisory type leadership role, people might feel forced to follow you, but they might not choose to if they were not in this hierarchy or this forced situation where you have more power. So you will make a lot more impact by truly becoming a leader by focusing on your team and their development. By listening to them. By really focusing on helping them and making an impact on them over the everyday results. So rather than focusing, only on let's get things done, the results at the community level or let's, let's just move things forward really focusing on your team and how you can best serve them and how you can best help them to develop and to understand their needs and their challenges. And to ask for their contributions and so on. Because after all the greatest impact that you will make as a leader, Is on your team. Okay until then 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!