Six resolutions for aid workers (and other people who want to change the world)

It's that time again!  Our opportunity to reflect on the year and commit to concrete goals for improvement in 2015.  I've been thinking of simple changes that development workers can make that are good for them and for their work.  These are not radical suggestions, but if practiced earnestly truly can improve an aid worker's performance as well as an organization's impact.  No excuses this year!!

My six suggestions

1. Be the best manager ever.  Too often, supervision evolves to nothing more than signing forms, dealing with HR issues, and barking out orders.  But helping people learn and grow is at the root of what development should be about.  In 2015, commit to making time for discussions about growth, giving feedback, understanding people's goals, and guiding them. The world needs more changemakers and inspired leaders, and we can help cultivate them.

2.  Read.  How often do you get an email with an article that sounds really interesting, that just sits in your inbox unopened for months?  It's hard to find time for reading at work, but it's dangerous to spend all your time focused just on the work you're doing.  There are hundreds of smart people working on development from all sides--research, implementation, policy, and more--and it's likely that you and your organization can benefit significantly from what else is out there.  Find 20 minutes a day to skim through key blogs or publications that relate to your work, and better yet, encourage others to do the same.  For those that prefer books, Bill Gates posts his reading list and so do I!

So many books, so little time......

3.  Write.  On the whole, development workers fail at knowledge management (institutionalizing the experiences, relationships, and information about past and present activities).  Everything seems to exist in someone's head, but never on paper.  This greatly reduces our ability to learn from each other, or even from the history of our own organization! Cultivate a practice of documentation.  Schedule an hour each month to sit down and write down key learnings on a new project.  Focus on questions including:
What failed?  What improvements have you made?  What surprised you?  What is working and why? How would you improve it if given the opportunity?
Share it with others that you think can benefit from your insights, and encourage them to share their own reflections.  A private blog can work well for this, but an email chain is a great way to get started.  I've written about effective ways my team tries to collectively learn and write.

4.  Spend more time in the field.  All of us believe that spending time in the community and talking with clients is valuable, but somehow it finds itself as a last priority.  Meetings, conferences, seminars, and other responsibilities stack up, and before you know it months have passed since you went out to the field.  But in many ways, these visits are the most clarifying and enlightening experiences you can have. So set a goal for yourself--a number of days that you'll spend engaging with clients and frontline staff.  Talk about your target with your boss as well, so that you have her support and can prioritize it.

Staff bicycles outside a wig factory in Kurigram, Bangladesh.
We spent an hour with the almost entirely female workforce
inside and left with many new ideas.

5.  Walk the walk.  So many organizations doing great work expect employees to work themselves to the bone under tough conditions.  Unfortunately a good number of organizations fail to establish or blatantly violate standard employee benefits or expectations, in areas including maternity leave, sexual harassment, and even regular payment schedules.  Why should development workers be expected to work for sub-standard employers in the name of the larger mission that they serve? Increasingly, I believe that organizations need to exemplify the change that they are trying to make in society--the behavior and attitude changes that they are encouraging others to adopt, as well as high ethical and moral standards. Alignment between organizational practices and stated goals undoubtedly increases staff commitment and probably effectiveness in spreading messages to others, both at home and formally.  

What compromises do you see in your own leadership or organization's policies?  How can you change them? Even if you're not part of the leadership team, you can change your own behavior, raise awareness among your colleagues about the issue, and potentially approach HR and your own supervision to try and stimulate more discussions at the top.  It can start with little issues, like ensuring that everyone washes their hands after going to the bathroom, or conversations, such as asking other staff about the organization's values and what they mean.  Commit to noticing instances where your organization's internal values don't reflect its values in its work and speaking up about them regularly.

6.  Renew yourself.  Development work can be stressful, intense, and at times overwhelming.  It's easy to burn out, especially if you find yourself putting in long hours and a lot of emotional investment into your work.  Burned-out staff are not particularly productive or happy. There's a lot of research that shows that carving out even small bits of time (20-30 minutes) for renewing activities--listening to music you love, going for a walk, reading poetry, or spending time with a loved one--can help you maintain your energy and passion over time.

Nothing like a 1000m zipline to leave you feeling renewed!
If only I could do this every day.

What else?  I'd love to hear other ideas that are out there, goals you have for 2015, and how accomplishing them will yield rewards to you, your organization and the world.