High Performance Leadership

There is a crown-jewel within the Toastmasters education program that remains the best kept secret has the greatest scope to underscore the Toastmasters slogan "Where Leaders Are Made" - albeit I am no fan of slogans but of pragmatic but passionate purpose.

Around the world I will find evidence of a person who has understood the power of the high performance leadership project.  First it is important to set the context for it and Tamala Takahashi who operates from a club in the United States in Southern California has provided a basic account of it here.
Other people have produced video's that account for their practice and here I found Olivia Podabea who is a member of a club in Brosav, Romania which is a corporate club for employees of Siemens.  Corporate clubs like college toastmasters clubs usually have a restricted membership to their own particular institution.

The value of focusing on high performance leadership for me is to first create a club system that is organized as a high performance leadership network.  This combines both the essential component of central leadership with none-central or self-organizing leadership.  This at present is at an idea stage and whether it evolves through my present club or evolves through another means is not yet determined.  What is important that this idea first and foremost is a part and parcel of my own learning journey and that it is not viewed as a product but a discovery.  In that context I am fleshing out thoughts here about a leadership hive.  Those thoughts have been further expanded by the formulation of what I call "The High Performance Leadership Network" - presently as I envisage it, this is how it would look like at my own club level.  That does not means that this is what the club will actually use, this is for my own learning purposes and highly explorative at this stage:

The seven hexagons at the centre represent the existing authority as it pertains to the Toastmasters charter and here the processes remain the same.  It is what is now connected to that executive and the shape of that process which matters and how that adapts to existing leadership project frameworks, which include competent leader programs and the crown-jewel which is the high performance leadership program.  I am also connecting this to the college's learning eco-system and the charter we have registered under the student clubs charter.

Other institutions have their own kind or type of high performance leadership program which is not connected at all with the Toastmasters program, but there are qualities in those programs which are transferable to a high performance leadership program of the type I envisage at the campus college club level.  One such program is run by Oxford University.  In this video the university talks to benefits of the program.  These benefits are immediately transferable to the design of our own program and in that there is commonality between two very different types of high performance leadership models.

One never knows with any kind of innovative idea what unexpected push backs will be but I am sure that we can adapt to them and use the very concerns to our advantage.  Ultimately I am looking at this from a global college club level and not an individual college club level.  I see no reason why the students in my college do not get every bit of the quality of program that Oxford University promotes to its cohorts.  Indeed Oxford University can charter a college toastmasters club the same way we have.  Oxford does have a speakers club but I do not know if it is affiliated with the university.  What matters is the exploration here and whether my own learning journey can make a difference to the learning I explore offline at my campus club.

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