A Surprising Way to Ensure Team Success So You Can Make a Greater Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Could your leadership style be holding your team back from success?

As a humanitarian and development leader, you may unknowingly be creating obstacles for your team's success by adhering to outdated leadership assumptions. Understanding and shifting your leadership approach can significantly enhance your team's performance and your overall impact.

In this 12 minute episode you'll learn:

• Identify and overcome assumptions  that may be preventing your team's success.
• Learn how to effectively communicate and implement a coaching leadership style to empower your team.
• Discover simple, actionable steps to foster a more proactive, self-reliant, and high-performing team.

Listen to this episode now to uncover the surprising ways you can ensure your team's success and make a greater impact!

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.

This podcast empowers international development and humanitarian leaders to achieve high performance teams, fostering diversity, inclusion, and wellbeing, overcoming burnout and overwhelm, while maximizing impact and productivity.

FULL TRANSCRIPT

A Surprising Way to Ensure Team Success So You Can Make a Greater Impact as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

On today's episode, find out what may be hurting your team success.

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. So here's what you're going to learn in the next 10 minutes. What you may be doing without even realizing it, which is preventing your team's success. Number two, how to make a change and get out of your own way, so you can gain more time and create better results.

And number three, one simple step you can do today to create a higher performing team. All right. So I want to begin with a story of one of my former students . I'm not going to name this person, but she worked in a country where she felt that she could not necessarily use all the coaching skills that she was using in my course, because she said that she felt the culture of the team, the personalities of the team, the culture of the country was such that it was very hierarchical and that the leader needed to know all the answers.

And so, I coached her around this and asked her, you know, w how she knew that to be true. And what came up was she realized she was making an assumption. She did not have any evidence or had ever even tried using a different approach with her team. And so I encouraged her to try it out and see what actually happened to see if her assumption. Had some fact based evidence for it. And so she did that.

And when she came back, she told me that the team was actually very open to using, or being able to come up with their own way of doing something without her needing to have all the answers. And she was very, quite pleased with some of the answers that they came up with because they are closer to the problem.

So they really understood it in a different way that she was not able to. So I tell this story because I think of a lot of leaders, I've seen a lot of leaders come to me who make these types of assumptions that based on my country's culture or where I'm from or based on my culture or the personality of my team or my organization the leader has to have all the answers or leader needs to tell others what to do. Otherwise, my team will lose respect for me.

And I just want to challenge that way of thinking, because a lot of times this first of all is an assumption. It's not a fact. And you might not even be realizing that this assumption just like when my former student is blocking you from taking action to give your team the opportunity to come up with their own way and do things in their own manner. So. What if it wasn't true, the assumption that your value as a leader is that the leader has to have all the answers.

It may be that they are just used to your current way of leading.

At some point we as leaders need to achieve through others, just like last week's quote by Aga Khan IV.

We need to understand how to help others find their own way.

Otherwise, if we just give them all the answers and are constantly managing and telling them what to do. There will be no growth. And there also will be no diversity of thinking because all the answers will only come from us. And your team will be reliant on you for everything. And that means you're going to create more work for yourself. And I don't think anyone wants that.

Right? So what if it is not that your team wants you to tell them what to do all the time or have the answers, but is more about the way you communicate to them your intentions? If we do not introduce a new leadership style that we want to try with our team. If we just start instead to switch from managing to coaching, for example, or vice versa, our team is going to of course, resist that because they don't understand the reason behind it

and they don't understand how it benefits them. This is why it's so important when you start to change your leadership style, you need to communicate the why to your team. How does this benefit them? How are you helping them grow? And also remember if they don't understand, for example, what coaching is, you need to explain what that means, because otherwise they might come with a pre assumed definition of coaching.

And a lot of times, from my experience, I see that people associate coaching with performance management, meaning "I did a bad job" and so now I need to be coached. When in actuality it really should be the reverse. So it's really important that we trust our team to find their own way. The modern, humanitarian and development leader understands that all individuals are unique.

So some team members might fully embrace and want to be coached all the time. Others might be more hesitant. And this is where your job as a leader is to gauge how much to use and be patient and depending on the person take it at their own pace.

So I encourage you to be open, to using different ways of leading, different leadership styles.

For example, more coaching if you have not been doing that before, in order to empower those around you, to make more of an impact. Even if your assumption is that they will not like that style or that they will lose respect for you as a leader. The reason that they would lose respect for you is because you have not clearly communicated to them

why you're doing it and the reason that it benefits them. So if this is you, here is the simple step you can do today. Have a conversation with your team about different ways of leading and your primary leadership style that you learned from taking the leadership style quiz and you can always find a link in the show notes to do that. And tell them you're going to ask them more for their own solutions to problems, for example, rather than telling them what to do. And then explain why it benefits them that you're helping them grow, that you're helping them to take more responsibility because if we keep just telling them what to do, or managing, then they're never going to grow.

They're never going to get the opportunity to be able to step into becoming the leader they want to be. And we're just creating a dependent team that's reliant on us, which also impacts our stress and our workload. Perhaps you could even make a policy with your team, that they automatically come to you with two solutions for every problem. And then once again, explain the why behind it.

So as this podcast speaks of frequently, the modern humanitarian and development leader needs to know how to empower and shift power to those around them. That means shifting power to our teams, to implementing partners, to government and to communities. And this is exactly what the coach approach leadership style does. And that means getting out of our own way and questioning the assumption. That our team's culture or personality won't allow us to do this.

How might that not be true? And how can you test that assumption this week?

This assumption that we're making may just be a way of protecting ourselves from the discomfort of trying something new.

Okay as a summary, your assumption about what your team wants as a leader, for example, that the leader's value is in having all the answers may be preventing you and your team from growing. Trying a new way of leading, such as a coach approach may be a way of giving your team more responsibility so you can make more impact and get better results. And finally you need to effectively introduce coaching

as a way of leading, before you start using it. And make sure your team understands the reason behind it and how it's going to benefit them.

And on Wednesdays quick quote episode, find out how else the way you are leading may be causing you unnecessary stress. 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!