Community Leadership and Communication
The thing about a community is, it functions best when lots of people are sharing the burden. If you have one strong individual who's doing most of the things for the club, you aren't building a pool of leaders. People may get to work on their speaking skills, but they don't necessarily find themselves involved in leadership.
In my opinion, the strongest scenario for a Toastmasters club is to have leaders who know how to lead by example, to delegate tasks to others, and to communicate. Communication is critical to leadership. It's easy for people who are working on a High Performance Leadership (HPL) project to quietly hand-pick a team, work on the project away from the club, and do only one speech to communicate how the project went. Anyone in the club who didn't happen to be there to catch that speech would have no idea that the HPL project happened.
I'm a proponent of constant communication on these things -- let the club know who's on your team. Give status updates. Send out minutes from the meetings to the entire club. And for heaven's sake, if your club is struggling in any area -- for example, your member numbers are low -- pick an HPL project that helps the club with that area.
The other aspect of a strong and growing community is mentoring. The clubs that have the one person doing all the work often also don't seem to have high participation in the mentor program. The person who is carrying the club may informally mentor new members when they ask for a member. This is a huge loss to the club, in my opinion.
Our club does a good job of assigning mentors, but still, there's lots of room for us to really focus on our mentoring program. My area director's report recommended that the club establish more communication around mentoring as well. Mentors should be talking to each other -- what went well with the mentoring? What did not? What new things did you try?
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| Image by kai kalhh from Pixabay |
In my opinion, the strongest scenario for a Toastmasters club is to have leaders who know how to lead by example, to delegate tasks to others, and to communicate. Communication is critical to leadership. It's easy for people who are working on a High Performance Leadership (HPL) project to quietly hand-pick a team, work on the project away from the club, and do only one speech to communicate how the project went. Anyone in the club who didn't happen to be there to catch that speech would have no idea that the HPL project happened.
I'm a proponent of constant communication on these things -- let the club know who's on your team. Give status updates. Send out minutes from the meetings to the entire club. And for heaven's sake, if your club is struggling in any area -- for example, your member numbers are low -- pick an HPL project that helps the club with that area.
The other aspect of a strong and growing community is mentoring. The clubs that have the one person doing all the work often also don't seem to have high participation in the mentor program. The person who is carrying the club may informally mentor new members when they ask for a member. This is a huge loss to the club, in my opinion.
Our club does a good job of assigning mentors, but still, there's lots of room for us to really focus on our mentoring program. My area director's report recommended that the club establish more communication around mentoring as well. Mentors should be talking to each other -- what went well with the mentoring? What did not? What new things did you try?
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