How You Can Develop a Higher Performance Team DAILY as a Humanitarian and International Development Leader

Are you struggling to find time to develop your team while juggling countless responsibilities?

Many leaders feel overwhelmed and believe they simply don’t have the time to invest in team development. Yet, the absence of regular development can lead to stagnation—both for your team and yourself. This episode addresses this common struggle, offering practical strategies to integrate team development into your daily routine without adding to your workload.

In this episode you'll discover:

• How to seamlessly incorporate team development into everyday tasks
• Understand the consequences of neglecting this vital aspect of leadership
• Learn to prioritize team growth even amidst a busy schedule.

Tune in now to transform your leadership approach and create a high-performing team without feeling overwhelmed!

WHAT IS YOUR LEADERSHIP STYLE?

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:

How you can find time to regularly develop your team. And reduce your workload while also making a greater impact 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 as a kind of conclusion to the several part series on development and performance planning, I have a final episode, which I think you will find useful, whether you are performance and development planning right now or not. I want to show you today how you can develop your team at any time, any day of the week. And I know that sounds like, well, of course I can, but what I mean by that is you can do it and feel like you're not overloaded or overworked or taking time away from other things. So in this episode, you're going to learn how you can find time weekly to develop a higher performance team. What happens when you don't develop your team regularly and finally, what will help to prioritize your team's development even when you already have a lot going on and I'm sure most of you listening to this probably have a lot going on.

I think it would be helpful to look at this first. This, this idea of, I don't have time to develop my team. I'm too busy. This is what I hear a lot from leaders is that, we create these wonderful development plans and performance plans, but then I am too busy with my own things or with the project or with managing donor relationships or with whatever. And I am so busy

Torrey: I don't have the time to develop my team. And another thing I hear a lot is that, well, if I do make the time, it means I'm sacrificing something. It means that. I will become more busy or more overloaded because I'm not focusing on all those things that I need to do on my to-do list. And then finally, also I think there is this belief or the thought that developing my team means I need to spend time one-on-one with them or spend time with the team, but I need to put a lot of thought into it.

I need it to be a formal training. Or somehow make it something apart from my everyday work. So here are some things that I think will help you to overcome some of these obstacles. And a lot of it just has to do with the way we look at the situation. Because the things I just mentioned to you are actually perspectives. They are thoughts around this idea of team development. Now.

The reason that we think that there is no time when we think about developing our team has to do with making it a big deal to develop our team. That we think it has to be something like I was saying, that's a formal training or something we have to plan for or something that is going to take away from other things that we have to do. But that is not necessarily true.

And especially if you make the way you lead, such as what I talk about for the modern humanitarian development leader, the coaching approach leadership style. When we lead in a way of coaching, we are automatically developing our team as we are leading. Just through the way we are communicating with them, we are getting them to think for themselves,

we are getting them to be more proactive and we're getting them to take more responsibility and therefore become stronger. And so when we see this as not something that's a separate thing, developing our team, but just the way we interact and communicate with our team and the way that we expect from them, for example, when they come to us with a problem that they already have a few solutions in mind for it. Things like that can go a long way to creating an environment where you are constantly helping them learn and grow.

And that really is what coaching is all about. When we coach someone, when we use a coach approach leadership style, we're creating a learning environment. We're creating an environment where we're challenging our team to think more for themselves and come up with their own solutions and by doing that, they are growing.

They are learning. They are developing. So, this is one thing, is that developing your team does not mean you have to spend a lot of time and it can even be something that you do while you're doing all the things that you have to do anyways. For example, if you have a proposal to write and you want to take that time or opportunity to develop your team, How can you involve them in that? How can you delegate little pieces and maybe ask some questions around how they might do things? And maybe just have them in the room while you're going through writing the proposal and just verbalize or talk out loud about your thought process.

Just that alone, that type of, even on the job training can be very powerful in terms of team development. I would argue in a way that that is more powerful than sending them to a training or doing a formal training when we are learning by doing, and as we go. That can be way more effective and impactful then sending them off to a two or three day training.

Now, still, even though I'm telling you these things, I know you probably have some belief or some perspective that even if I do that, it's going to take more time because I have to slow down in order to show them things or teach them things and whatever.

Okay. That may be true, but if we don't do that, if we don't take the time to develop our team Then what's going to happen? They're not going to grow. They're not going to evolve. They're not going to take more responsibility. Meaning we will all be in the same place a year from now. Meaning that you will still be overloaded and overworked and possibly they will as well. And that they're not feeling more independent.

They're not feeling more proactive because they just haven't grown. You will stay busy. So instead of prioritizing a bit of time upfront, In order to really help them become more independent, more proactive and take more responsibility. If we don't do that, then we're going to end up just spending the same amount of time all the time, being busy instead. And I don't know about you, but I would rather be busy or have a little bit more work upfront and developing my team so that in the long run they're stronger.

I'm stronger. I can focus on the things I want to do. I'm less overwhelmed, worked and overwhelmed, and they feel more confident in their work and they're able to grow.

Now another reason I hear commonly, why leaders say that they cannot develop their team or can not delegate to their team, or however you want to say it, is because they think that their team does not know enough, that they will have to end up correcting everything anyways, or that they won't come up with the way or the right solution. And I would also challenge that as well, because if we don't allow them to take more responsibility and try to do things their way, then first of all, they're not going to gain the confidence to learn and grow.

And remember when you first started, you probably were in a similar position. Where you might not have had all the answers. And also what if you just allow them to do things their way and see what happens? And I think that scares a lot of leaders because they think, oh, things are going to be out of control.

They're going to spend all the money they're going to do. Like, I don't know., Go crazy. I don't know what we think. But our brains tend to go to this place of, oh my gosh, my team is going to go crazy if I let them do things their way. And that has to do with feeling like we need control and that we need things done our way. But number one, Things done our way aren't always the right way. And who's to say what the right way is? And number two, you can still put parameters around what you allow them to do. So for example, give them a budget, give them a timeframe, put some parameters around their ideas or what they come up with so that you feel comfortable taking that risk. But also realizing that our idea of needing to control everything is just an illusion.

We can't control everything. It's impossible. We can try, but, you know, even when we think that we're controlling things by controlling our team, at the end of the day, it's impossible to control everything. So basically we can find time weekly to develop a higher performance team by just doing it on a regular basis through the way we're leading, through the way we're interacting with them, through these opportunities that spontaneously come up throughout our day. These are all ways that we can develop our team on a daily basis. The way that we interact with them, the way we use a coach approach leadership style with them, these are ways of developing our team.

When we don't develop our team on a regular basis, no one grows.

We don't grow and they don't grow. We aren't freed up so that we can focus and grow and learn other things. And they're not, they're not growing and learning and taking more responsibility. And then what will really help you because I know what happens. You get caught up in the day to day busy-ness or your to-do list, and you push to the side, the opportunities to be able to develop your team or engage with them in this way. And so one thing that's been very effective, which I talked about in the past, but which I share with my students and my course "becoming the modern humanitarian and development leader" is what will help you to prioritize our team's development even when you have a lot to do is your vision of who you want to be as a leader. When we have a strong vision, it becomes our, why.

I don't know if you've heard of Simon Sinek and his Why, the motivation behind why we do things like why we choose to spend time developing our team rather than just doing the proposal ourselves. The Why - our leadership vision of who we want to be as a leader -and who we want our team to become, becomes our motivation to stay on track.

Even when we become very busy, I've seen this happen with the people that I've taken my course, and have developed these leadership impact goals, and then are able to use that as a way to steer them and their actions and their decisions and a way that best benefits themselves and their team. Even when they get busy, this is why it's so important to have the vision. Okay. So just a really quick summary, you can develop your team on even a weekly basis just by the way you're leading and engaging with them, encouraging them to become more proactive and learn. It doesn't mean you have to do a formal training. When we don't develop our team regularly, then we all just stay in the same place they do

and so do you, and then finally, what will help you to prioritize your team's development, even when you get really busy and overloaded, is your vision, your why, your leadership impact goal. And the reason why you want to do this even when you're busy. Because you know that this is the path to creating that higher performance team that you want. Okay 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!