Category: miscellaneous Toastmasters

Communications styles

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When you absolutely must get a message through to someone, how do you decide to communicate it?  What if this person is a complete stranger to you up to now?

One of the important lessons I’ve learned in Toastmasters is that you have to consider the recipient’s preferred channel of communication.  Just because I’m comfortable with e-mail doesn’t mean everyone I want to talk to is as connected as I am.  Some people still don’t have e-mail (like my parents!), some don’t check their e-mail regularly, and some may get a legitimate message caught up in an overly-aggressive spam filter and never see it.  (Though more and more, people who don’t like or use e-mail at all are becoming less common; even my parents will probably be getting e-mail later this year.)

The primary methods used in 2011 are electronic methods and phone calls.  Under “electronic”, I include e-mail primarily, but also things like Facebook (status posts or private messages), LinkedIn, Twitter, blogs, on-line chat, and cell phone texting.  I can’t imagine anyone relying on faxes for personal communications (the TM membership application form still included a space for a fax number until the most recent revision!), and personal letters by post are considered slow and quaint by most (though a handwritten card is often received with delight!).

So usually, the choice comes down to e-mail or phone.  When you want to talk to someone specifically, consider your past encounters with that person — what method did that person use?  And also consider your message; is it something sensitive, something that could be misunderstood, or something that requires a two-way discussion, where intonation may provide a critical subtext?  If so, use the phone!

Is it a simple announcement or routine request?  Is it someone you know well, who will understand your message, or at worst, if they misunderstand, it’s easily rectified?  Then electronic is OK, and you can use e-mail, or some other form (perhaps a Facebook message is more likely to get read, or you share Skype access?).

What if you need to get a message out to a lot of people?  E-mail is often the choice here, but at the risk of the recipients not really getting the message.  It may be necessary to follow up with individual phone calls.

Are you asking the recipient for a favor, something that may be hard?  Make it as personal a communication as possible.  Face to face is best, or perhaps a phone call.  E-mail to one person may be OK if you have an established relationship and trust, but a broadcast e-mail to a lot of people will likely be ignored.

For example, what if you need to find someone to be the Toastmaster of your next meeting?  If it’s someone you can readily see in person (maybe you work together), then ask in person (or perhaps a videoconference?).  A phone call is a decent alternative.  An e-mail may work.  But if you send an e-mail blast to 20 people in one message, you can likely expect no response at all (they all think someone else will do it).

The next time you need to communicate with someone, consider their preferences.  It’s the best way to make sure the message gets through clearly, without misunderstanding, and to generate the desired action.

Why I’m passionate about Toastmasters

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Leaders have to be passionate about their cause.  They have to truly believe in their goals, and inspire the same in others.  I’ve been asked why I’m passionate about Toastmasters.

The reason?  We create change.  Positive, constructive, uplifting change.  I’ve seen lives changed by joining Toastmasters, including my own.  I’ve seen shy people discover their innate abilities to speak up and speak out about issues they believe in.

I’ve seen Toastmasters members grow in so many ways, not just by becoming a better speaker, not just by becoming a better leader, but by becoming a better person.  They learn how to communicate, to listen, to give feedback, to think on their feet and sound smart when they talk.

Passion is what drives leaders to be great leaders — if you don’t believe in what you’re doing, your followers will notice, and performance suffers, if not turning into outright failure.  Passion is what drives excellence and success!

Toastmasters members get promotions at work, they find spouses, they find friends, they network, they find jobs, and most of all, they find themselves.  They discover abilities they didn’t know they had.  They blossom and grow and become outstanding human beings.

People enter Toastmasters at all levels and skills, and wherever they are, Toastmasters brings it up another level or two or ten.  There’s no passing grades, there’s no way to compare one DTM to another DTM and say they’ve learned the same set of skills.  Instead, we can confidently say that each member is better, much better, than when they gave their Icebreaker.

And confidence is one of the biggest things that Toastmasters gives people.  We show them that they can succeed, and succeed well.  That all they have to do is try, get (and give) constructive actionable feedback in a safe environment, and then do it again, even better the next time.

Some of the past annual themes have touched on these strengths, and the ones that have spoken the most to me include:

  • Friends Helping Friends Succeed (JoAnna McWilliams, 2000-01)
  • Changing Lives, One at a Time (Jon Greiner, 2004-05)
  • Confidence. Leadership. Service. (Gary Schmidt, 2009-10)

So many other annual themes are great too, I hesitate to name only a few.  But they really characterize well what we are doing in Toastmasters.  It’s not just giving speeches.  It’s more.  A LOT more.

Publishing ALL manuals on-line?

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Radical idea:  Openly publish all our manuals and education materials on the TI web site, for anyone to read or use.

Why?  Many members, especially those overseas, are affected by expensive and slow shipping.  That might be helped by having local contract printers in the larger countries or regions, but we can’t do that everywhere, and it still costs money to print and ship.

As well, a growing number of members would like to have their manuals in an on-line form, enabling them to work on a presentation anywhere.

We could give electronic manuals only to paid members, but you can be sure someone will post them on a web site or blog or file-sharing service — and it only takes one such person to do so, since Google will find everything.

We could use DRM (Digital Rights Management) to encrypt and copy-protect electronic manuals, but there’s no such thing as an unbreakable DRM scheme.  There’s always a way to break it, and it only takes one person to do so and then post the unencrypted manuals for anyone to use.  There’s not much point in bothering with it, and it will just annoy members who want to use the materials on a device that doesn’t support the chosen DRM scheme.

The value in Toastmasters is not in the manuals and education materials, but in the club meeting: the actual presentation of the speech and the evaluations that follow.  Sure, people will download the CC manual and try to learn from it, but they’ll quickly realize they need an audience and an evaluator, and they can find both at a Toastmasters club for very little cost.

I’m not saying just flip the switch and post all the materials at once, and I’m not saying we stop sending printed manuals out to members (it could be a checkbox on the new member application, “no printed manuals needed” along with English, Japanese, etc.).  No, this needs some research and review, a pilot program, and if everything looks good, a gradual rollout.  WHQ recently published a number of education pamphlets (Effective Evaluation, Gestures: Your Body Speaks and Your Speaking Voice booklets), and Moments of Truth has been out there for a couple of years.  Continue by adding the rest of the Successful Club Series (mostly useful only within Toastmasters anyway) and contest forms, then maybe an advanced manual or two, or the Leadership Excellence Series.

Doing so will vastly increase the on-line visibility of Toastmasters.  People will find these materials and become interested in joining Toastmasters.  It could spark significant membership growth, while at the same time, improving service to our members (instant delivery), lowering costs (no shipping) and going green!

What do you think?  Are there significant drawbacks I’ve missed?  Add your thoughts in the comments!

The MAX Plan from District 72

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Looking for ways to help small clubs, but can’t find coaches to help them?  D72 (New Zealand) has developed a very interesting group/virtual coaching approach, the MAX Plan, based on the Rising Star Program from D10/D28/D61.

They’ve developed a 40-page document that explains just how to go about it, and they’ve had some very strong success.  The prime target is small clubs (12 or less members without a coach), and secondarily, medium-size clubs that may have stagnated (13-18 members).  Often, distance is a problem, some clubs may be hours distant or hundreds of miles away from other clubs.

The goals are to help the club become distinguished (like a club coach), but also to be positioned for long-term growth, through educating officers and improving awareness of the Toastmasters program potential.

It starts with a half-day foundation workshop (usually done at the division level), followed up by virtual coaching, and 4-8 months later, a follow-up session.  A full set of handouts and an outline of the presentation material is included, with some great resources.

With the permission of the author, Murray Coutts (District 72 Lt. Gov’r of Marketing), I’m posting the document (also on the Resources page on my web site), in hopes that others will benefit from this unique approach to helping small clubs improve.  Take a few minutes to download it and skim it over, talk about it with your fellow Toastmasters leaders.  If it seems like it might work, give it a try!

In the comments here, I’d love to hear what you think are the biggest challenges to finding club coaches, and whether this virtual team approach might help.

Anyone can do a corporate visit!

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How many district leaders have been involved in a corporate visit with an International Director (ID) or International Officer (like the International President)?  As a past ID, I made quite a few visits during my two years in office, and always enjoyed expounding on the value of Toastmasters to a new audience.

Sometimes I had as many as six visits in a day, and quite a few new clubs arose from those efforts.  But what concerned me is that on occasion, these visits apparently were planned months in advance!  In general, when a new club opportunity arises, you want to keep it moving as quickly as the organizational sponsors are comfortable with.

If it’s December and someone expresses an interest in building a new club at their company, you don’t want to tell them “Sure, we’ll have our local ID pop by and chat with you about it in April”!  Yet I heard that sort of approach more than once.

By months later, they’ll have forgotten all about this, moved on to other projects, or filled their need (however incompletely) some other way.  Don’t make them wait any more than a week or two, a month at the very most, for a meeting.

You don’t need an ID or the International President to do this!  Any district leader should be comfortable with doing this, but most especially the district new club chair, the Lt. Gov’r of Marketing, and the District Governor.  Since some districts are geographically large, Division and even Area Governors should be prepared to do this too.

With a goal of building lots of new clubs, you can’t be dependent on that once-or-twice-a-year visit by a dignitary.  Sure, the ID may be a great salesman and able to close the sale, but he or she won’t be able to get personally involved with all that club-building.  Remember, building a new club is a goal for every Area Governor (necessary to be a President’s Distinguished area).

What to focus on when telling a potential corporate sponsor about Toastmasters?  Remember WIIFM — What’s In It For ME!  (This means the sponsor, not you!)  There’s a great article on the TI web site focusing specifically on building a corporate club, but the most important part is the Features, Benefits, and Values chart.  You don’t necessarily want to just print this out and hand it to the prospect, but you should be familiar with what’s in it, and structure the critical part of your talk around it.

Be sure to research the company before you visit — understand their business and values, their strengths and weaknesses.  Are they more of an hourly assembly line shop, are they a professional services company, are they financial in nature? If it’s a large multi-location company, what kind of employees are at the location where the club will be located?

What are their corporate values, is education and employee training important to them?  Tie Toastmasters into those values.  Hopefully you can talk to someone who is an employee before the visit and get some inside background on the culture, too (maybe someone who is already in Toastmasters!).

Keep the discussion interactive, not a sales presentation.  Encourage the prospect to ask questions, stop and listen to them carefully, clarify if necessary, and then answer.  If you don’t know the answer, tell them honestly you don’t know, but you’ll find out and get back to them quickly (and then do so).

Conclude with a strong finish, be clear on what the next steps are.  If they’re expressing an interest, talk about scheduling a demo meeting.  If they need to talk to someone else, give them time to do so, it may require another meeting.  And maybe it’s just not a fit for this company at this time.  Keep in touch, they may change their mind later.

Yes, you too can do a corporate visit, and do so effectively, creating a desire to join thousands of other companies world-wide that already know about the value of Toastmasters.

Two easy steps to building membership

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  1. Public relations, get the guest in.
  2. A good show, let them see what they’re getting.

Now perhaps I over-simplify a bit, but if you get these two things right, your club will be overflowing with eager guests and members.  I can hear you now, “But how do we create good PR?”

In my experience, guests show up at a meeting mostly through one of two ways:

  1. Word of mouth, a personal invitation from someone they know
  2. Via the Toastmasters International “find a club” page and (if it exists) the club web site

So this tells us that we need to get our members to invite their friends, family, co-workers, barista, bus driver, and nanny.  At the next club meeting, hand out a blank sheet of paper and without telling them why, ask each person to write down the  names of ten people they know.

After they do so, ask them to pick five of them to invite to the next meeting (this lets them leave out some people they might think wouldn’t be such a good membership candidate).  Follow up and keep score on who brings guests, split into several teams and recognize achievement.

At the same time, make sure your club details on the TI “find a club” page are accurate (like meeting days and address!), that the phone number and e-mail address go to someone who is ready to return messages promptly and sell the guest on coming to the meeting.  Be sure the club web site is attractive and up-to-date, and includes some recent pictures of the meetings and membership.  Include something unique about your club, especially if you’re near other clubs.  (Club web sites could be the topic of a whole article itself, and probably will be.)

Now, we’ve got lots of guests coming to the meeting, what’s next?  Put on a good show!  Let them see what the Toastmasters program is all about.  Be sure every meeting is demo quality, as you never know who might show up.  Manual speeches with constructive positive evaluations are the key, and then table topics to get everyone else involved and practicing off-the-cuff speaking too.

Have a guest welcome packet that includes:

  • a welcome letter from the club president
  • a brief outline of the Toastmasters program and the benefits members derive from it; remember “what’s in it for me”!
  • important contacts (president, VP-Education VP-Membership, and treasurer, at a minimum) with e-mail and phone
  • the exact amount of the dues for each of the 12 months of the year (don’t make them do the math), who to make the check out to, who to give it to
  • a membership application with the essentials already filled in (club name and number, district, etc.)

Be sure to conclude the meeting with asking guests what they thought about it, and invite them to fill out a membership application.

Yes, your club can grow, you can draw more guests and sign them up — every club can and should be at 20+ members and distinguished!

New clubs need mentors!

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Every new club should be assigned a mentor on the charter paperwork.  Yet I see a lot of new clubs never get a mentor!  And far too often, I see those mentor-less clubs close up a year or two later.

Clubs that lack mentors (there can be up to two) usually miss out on critical details of the Toastmasters program.  They’re floundering in the dark.  They don’t know about advanced manuals, they don’t use the leadership manual, they don’t understand the value of officer training, or the networking at district conferences.

Worst of all, they are probably viewing Toastmasters as work instead of fun!

Sure, a good Area Governor may be able to help out with some of these issues, and if the club is lucky enough to have some experienced Toastmasters as members, they may get by.  But this seems to be rare.  Many new clubs have all new members, and the Area Governor has several other clubs to support as well, they can’t be attending most meetings of the new club like a mentor should.

In a few cases, there might be no one near the new club to serve as a mentor, but that also is rare.  In my home district, which is a dense urban area (Chicagoland), distance is no excuse, since any club has another within a few miles.  If the new club is hundreds of miles away, perhaps a mentor can serve from a distance, by conference calls and frequent contact.

Perhaps the club charter paperwork should require naming a club mentor.  To allow for those rare circumstances when it simply is not possible, a brief statement from the District Governor explaining the omission might be allowed in lieu.

Mentors are crucial to the long-term success of a new club.  Make sure every new club has that experienced resource so they get everything they can out of the Toastmasters program!

Leave your comments!

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District conference flashback

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My home district (D30, Chicagoland) had their conference this last weekend, and it was deja vu all over again for me.  The first district conference I ever attended had been at the same location, a suburban Holiday Inn, in 2002.

Not only was it my first district conference, but I had been cajoled into doing an education session on club newsletters!  I had started up a club newsletter (which was back before club web sites were really big), and the conference education chair happened to be the president of my club.  She was looking for people to do presentations, and talked me into it.

Now, I hadn’t even completed my CTM (the old CC) at the time she asked, but I rushed to complete that before the conference so I would have a badge.  I had been in Toastmasters for a year and a half, and was barely halfway through my first term of being a club officer, VP-PR, so I was pretty new at this, but felt confident, since this was a topic I knew a lot about.

Finally, it was time for my presentation, and there were maybe five people in the audience, most of whom were from my own club.  Why not more?  A well-known and very popular Toastmaster was giving a presentation at the same time in the next room over.  He had a room twice the size, and a standing-room-only crowd.

I think the presentation went well, but it’s been a long ways from that first district conference presentation, to my Living DCP presentation.

I learned a few lessons about conference planning from that …

  1. When planning parallel conference or TLI education sessions, be mindful of how popular the speakers and topics are likely to be.  Match up speakers to rooms based on that.
  2. If you have a terribly popular speaker, put him or her in a general session, don’t put starter speakers up against a star.

For anyone interested, here’s the PowerPoint presentation I gave — it’s pretty much still accurate, though club newsletters don’t get the same attention that they used to.

ClubNewsletters

Tiebreaking judge

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Challenged by trying to keep the tiebreaker judge a secret?  Does the tiebreaker judge need to be briefed too?  Try this idea, which I think is mostly within the rules, but no promises.

Put all your judging ballots, including the tiebreaker ballot, into envelopes (one each) and mix them up.  Recruit one extra judge — if you need nine, recruit ten.  Brief them all together.  Hand out the envelopes randomly, instructing the judges to put the completed ballot in the envelope for pickup.

After the contest, the ballot counters collect all the ballots together and take them for counting.  When the tiebreaker envelope is opened, it’s immediately handed to the chief judge, for use as necessary.

If you felt that not even a ballot counter should have a chance of seeing the tiebreaker ballot, you could discreetly mark that envelope in the corner before handing them out, and then look for it before they’re opened.

Advantages:

  • No one knows who the tiebreaker judge is until the ballots are being counted.
  • The tiebreaker judge gets briefed like the other judges.
  • No one in the audience observing the proceedings can possibly know who the tiebreaker judge is (out of the other judges).
  • The tiebreaker judge is randomly selected.

What are your thoughts?

Districts with NO club loss?

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It is easier to give birth than raise the dead. — Unknown

Every year, in the Hall of Fame at the August international convention, we recognize districts that have built the most clubs (“President’s Extension Award”) and the highest percentage of clubs at 20+ members (“President’s 20+ Award”).  Many people have no idea what these awards are.  I suspect few districts set them as a goal, and may even sometimes be surprised to hear they ranked well for these.

You can see the full list of the 2009-10 scoring for these two awards here:

http://reports2.toastmasters.org/Ext20.html

A net growth of 63 clubs in one year is a truly awesome event, one quite worthy of recognition, as D82 (India and Sri Lanka) did last year (they built 74 new clubs and lost 11).  That’s almost two thousand charter members discovering Toastmasters in one district alone!  Since this metric is based on club counts, not a percentage, large districts have a large advantage.  A district with hundreds of clubs has far more resources to build clubs than a district with 60 clubs.

Maintaining clubs at 20+ members is also important.  Clubs with less members often have poorer meetings due to members serving in multiple roles simultaneously, and generally are not providing as good an educational experience as they might.  Keeping clubs at charter strength ensures guests see the Toastmasters program at its best.  As of June 30, 2010, D71 (Britain and Ireland) had over 87% of their clubs at 20+ members, which is amazing.  (By comparison, the median percentage of clubs at 20+ members in the districts is about 52%, and it goes as low as 22%.)

But here’s another important measure: How many clubs did a district lose? Not total paid clubs (where you can make up for a lost club by building a new club), but based on individual clubs — did any district manage to keep every club that they started the year with?  For 2009-10, by my math, it turns out exactly one district did that.

D33 (central California and southern Nevada) lost zero clubs in 2009-10. Every single one of 171 clubs renewed!  And they built 12 new clubs and were distinguished!  Three other districts lost just one club each (D12, D24, D64).

This is a metric that smaller districts can do better at, since they have less clubs to try to maintain.  And one equally worthy of recognition at the Hall of Fame.  It’s also non-competitive — we could have many districts earning this award, just like in the new Distinguished District Program (DDP).

Club rebuilding is just as important as club building. The club coach program is a key tool that few districts use effectively (more on this in a future post).  While it may be easier to build new ones, most sick and struggling clubs don’t require a miracle to be saved, just a coach (or two) who is passionate about bringing Toastmasters to more people.  Plus, any guests who visit a struggling club are likely to get a poor impression of Toastmasters.  Sure, sometimes you run into a club that just can’t be saved (such as loss of company support or loss of meeting location with no alternatives), but those are rare.

Help your district save every club possible, make sure even small clubs present Toastmasters in the best possible light to guests, build their membership and bring the club to distinguished, and you’ll be part of a team recognized for your efforts at the district and international level!

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