The last line of the Toastmasters Promise is “To maintain honest and highly ethical standards during the conduct of all Toastmasters activities“. However, for some, ethics may not always be a sharp black-and-white line.
For example, hopefully no one would forge a VP-Education signature on a project completion page for something that was never done. But what about holding an education award past June 30 “because it won’t help my club’s DCP score”? Or what about claiming credit for club officer training, when you went to training but arrived when it was nearly over? What about being a judge in a speech contest where your spouse is competing?
We know that in the past, at least one district created “paper clubs” in order to meet their goals and be distinguished (they were disqualified). As the distinguished recognition programs have evolved, we’ve moved towards using easily-verified criteria that are harder to fake, and are less subjective.
Ethics may not always seem to be black and white, nor does everyone give the same answer to a given situation. The surrounding context is often important as well, and the motivation for the action. There are entire college curricula devoted to ethics, and degrees granted in various specialties, like healthcare ethics and business ethics.
One method I like to use is “How would you feel if your actions were on the front page of the newspaper?” Would you feel a need to explain them? Would you be ashamed? If so, then you should reconsider.
There’s also merely the appearance of unethical behavior — appearances can be just as bad as actually being guilty of whatever is charged. It may be impossible to prove your innocence (or motivation), so you never want to have the question raised in the first place.
I’m glad that ethical behavior is very rarely a problem in Toastmasters, but even one time is too much. Consider what you would do in a hypothetical situation before the real one comes up, so you can objectively consider your response. Feel free to answer the poll below, it’s as anonymous as I can make it, though your IP address is logged. Add your own experiences in the comments.
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Sandbagging – this can be a dicey subject as we walk the line between turning in awards and building a pipeline for the next year’s leaders. We should avoid pushing people to ‘get the awards in’, what I refer to as June Rush. Toastmasters is a self-paced program, and while some folks need a little nudge now and then, we should be careful not to push simply for the sake of the DCP. The benefit is a pipeline for next year’s leadership.
That being said, people should understand that while their club may not ‘need’ the award this year, perhaps their Area, Division or District does! Additionally, if a club can earn 6 CCs one year, there’s no reason they can’t earn 4 next year. Holding awards also reduces incentive to achieve the following year. The bottom line – if the award has been earned, turn it in.
You’ve swerved into one of my hot button issues – folks ripping through a CC every June in order to ‘make the points’. A club that promotes this is not a 10 point club in my eyes. If club members are working toward their goals for the right reasons. DCP success will naturally follow. I am not referring to all CCs submitted in June, just those where an experienced member completed the projects in a few weeks and turned in the award on June 30th.
What about club building? Perhaps we aren’t creating ‘paper clubs’, but are we so focused on building clubs that we fail to rebuild those that need our help? I’m not making the statement that we are or are not, merely throwing it out to provoke thought.
Ethics can be a contentious subject, but it is a necessary discussion to have.
Linda, exactly. My concern here is mostly with a club or VP-Ed who holds onto a completed CC application until July, even though the member completed it in April or May or June. A member who individually chooses to hold off on filing, of their own volition, is a different matter.
Members deserve prompt recognition for their efforts.
one can ask, some mind and then you would not hold, some do not mind at all then you give a ‘gift’ to the next president… I do not see the problem.
Rather than ethics, maybe we should talk about clubs and club activities having a high degree of integrity and what that means.
Pam, sure — what do you have in mind?
Sorry to say, I have reached the point at which I look at clubs that were either chartered between June 25-June 30 and multiple corporate clubs in the same corporation in a District that were chartered the first week in July.
In the first instance (6/25-6/30), I look for “advanced” and “specialty” clubs with special educational requirements. I then watch the membership of those clubs to see how quickly membership drops significantly. One real alarm bell? The club says it meets in “various” times and in “various” places—and efforts of an Area Governor to visit the club are rebuffed by the contact person. In retrospect, one can see rather solid evidence of a paper club having been formed.
In the second instance (multiple clubs in the same large corporation chartered the first week in July) , I ask myself if a previous District Governor might have been sandbagged.
Susan, you’re quite right. I know of at least one district with a “DEC club”, whose meetings ARE the DEC meetings. I haven’t seen the “many clubs in July” thing, but can imagine someone doing that, too.
First I question that holding back excess achievements to be used the next year is unethical. Corporations delay contracts when goals have been met and it is more like establishing a savings account for the lean year when you have had a good one. Submission of achievements is always at the discretion of the achiever and if they agree to the delay so be it.
As to clubs. In my humble opinion too much emphasis is put on club building and little on club quality. We have hundreds of clubs that are just getting by and are not good representatives of our organization. Numerous times I have seen district officers put new clubs in place right next to struggling clubs in order to get credit. The new club the competes with the old club for members and they both fall. This is ridiculous.
I won’t even start on corporate clubs. They seem to go up and down like mushrooms in the spring. I would like to see an accounting of corporate clubs chartered in the last ten years and how many of them are still functioning. The same is true of the so called advanced clubs which bleed members from existing clubs. Yes there is a lot to look at but few will look and even fewer International officers will take any real action to clean up the mess. William N Hodges, PDG-DTM
William, excellent observations! Yes, if the member who has earned the award is willing to hold it until July, that’s one thing — but I’ve also seen clubs where the VP-Ed just quietly sits on the application for several months without saying a word to the member, and that’s not acceptable.
Corporate clubs often thrive at the mercy of the sponsoring organization. In my experience, most such failed corporate clubs do so because they’ve lost the support of the employer. Corporate clubs are easy to build when they have employer support — but they can disappear just as fast, through no fault of anything we (Toastmasters or members) have very little control over. (Yes, we could do a better job of “selling” the sponsor on the long-term value of Toastmasters though!)