Internal Renaissance

Our inaugural meeting last week kick-started with a theme of OPEN i.e. we are now Open on Saturdays but the response to it was only 6 students.  Half were existing club members including me and all of three of us represented existing leadership positions, the other three students were people I had talked to at a club fair that I manned with the President on the Tuesday prior to the meeting. 

Today there 7 students of which four where new and this time two of our Monday meeting students both delivered their speeches and with Joshua and Ivan, and these are also representative of the bright minds we have managed to attract to the club.  In today's meeting there were no additional new guests, and we did not have the benefit of having the club founder Ruben in attendance has he needs more time to focus on his newly appointed role of Associate Dean of the School of Business. 

Nor did we have Daniel or VP of Membership because he had knee surgery yesterday on an ACL injury, an injury caused from playing full intensity basketball.  So I realized that the emphasis on attracting new students over the coming months is going to be highly critical to the success of the Saturday program.

The good news is that Prasha, Holly and Marion are all eager to sign up as new members and the low number of attendance was actually a benefit because the Toastmasters meeting became more intimate and no one could sit on the sidelines which means everyone was very much involved.  For the second week running it was an enjoyable meeting - and that is not because I led it, but because of the people we had in the room.  

At the end of today's meeting I handed out copies of a new guest pass which Holly and Marion took with them.  I told them that we don't want to sell people into coming to the club and that we should seek students who would be a long-term good fit the club. 

So long as we have a healthy Monday night meeting, there is no imperative to increase quantity of membership and a great incentive to increase quality of membership.In the first two Saturday meetings, we had room in the agenda to signal what some of those qualities of person that would suit our weekend program. 

This is what the theme of the meeting was about.  The Renaissance of the club this year to get back to the achievements of the Founding years of the club when membership topped 30+

I began the meeting describing a corporate t-shirt I was wearing that has the words "better world" on the back of it.  I turned my back to the members (which is usually a no-no in Toastmasters practice) but it was so that they could read the slogan on the t-shirt.  Then when I addressed the members, I told them that this message was the traditional meaning of renaissance, simply as an idealism. I had got this t-shirt in a sponsored walk for the United Way.  What I was conveying was that renaissance is from the club's perspective and how that would differentiate us from other Toastmasters clubs, including the other two campus clubs at the Davis and Trafalgar Campus. Each campus has a separately established Toastmasters club.

I described the Davis campus as following the traditional community club model because its faculty advisor was originally from a community club and has used that model for that particular campus (I used to also be a member of that club).  The newest of campus clubs currently is being assisted to bring their overall charter strength to the minimum membership required to charter a club which is 20, and for that club their renaissance I suggested was to recognize their core student body is from technology and from artists - though the leadership of that campus are free to manage their club as they see fit because each club is chartered with a separate private membership body with its own club executive - and so my opinion is my own opinion here - which is also par for course for the way constructive feedback is expressed in all Toastmasters club, including speech evaluation - i.e. it is all opinion.

The key renaissance for the Saturday club at HMC is going to be thinking - for we have two buildings on campus - one largely filled with the Business School (so we have business thinkers) and the other opened this year with designers (so we have design thinkers).  Each of the three campus clubs are therefore shaped by different realities based on the mix of their student membership, the experiences of that membership and so there is no shared renaissance nor a better world - because at the best performing clubs, executives shape practical wisdom rather than idealism.

The approach of clubs that tinker with idealism, reminds me of the beauty contestant who when asked a question about renaissance will say the same answer to the big question where they provide the stereotypical answer "World Peace".  The group understood my point of view and recognized that this is "internal renaissance" as a practice rather than an idealism.  This "internal renaissance begins recognizing the meaning of "education" (to educe or draw out). In Toastmasters not having the pressures of operating in a pass/fail environment is conducive to our club focusing our internal renaissance.  The one thing we do not shape is culture - what emerges as culture will be subject to the way this internal renaissance combines and forms outcomes which are effectively evolve into new realities.

The greatest of those new realities is that it is hard work to ensure that no complacency sets in. 

That is not going to express itself as a problem in our club if we maintain collective focus on quality of club rather than quantity of membership.  Both Joshua and Ivan were terrific as speakers today and the following days we hope to experiment using a private group web application to log our clubs speech and to create a space where evaluations can be provided by club members (that only our registered members will have access to). 

This idea of evaluations engaged in the digital space is something I value because it saves on paper (and Toastmasters meetings can assume huge amounts of paper for organization and  in terms of rewards).  So while I cannot make the next seven Monday meetings because of a new class I am taking at college, our focus now is upon developing the base of 6 to 9 Saturday delegates to a more sturdier base of 20. 

That increase of 13 students for Saturday alone is not something predicated on simply signing members up, but as Holly and Marion particularly agreed should be based far more on personal development and based more on exercising of personal power rather than personal brand.  Sometimes clubs get lost in trying to meet growth numbers. I don't want members to select our Saturday program on the strength of transient reputation or promotional efforts - but to do the more challenging work of exploring the program themselves and recognizing how that benefits them.  The increase in membership is about program quality not a numbers game.

The Toastmasters process is still the heartbeat of the original Competent Communicator and Competent Leadership manuals.  Even in the new Pathways program to be launched inside of another year, the core principles of program delivery essentially remains the same, with the primary change being new technological delivery options and creation of more resources and flexibility of practice options i.e. to make the program fit in with 21st Century delivery.

We did have have some issues with the equipment in the room but that will be solved next week by setting up well in advance of the speeches.  Since we also now have 3 hours of program time compared to the prior 1 hour Monday only meetings - I am going to encourage re-purposing of speeches from Saturday to Monday.  When John MacDonald, a well established Distinguished Toastmaster told me that we can reuse the same speech for different speech objectives that burst through some myths that even long-term Toastmasters believe is the "right way".

At the end of today's meeting, there was a very good satisfaction of a well run meeting with less than 8 members.  Personally I think clubs should not be test of leadership but an exercise of the enjoyment of leadership - I think the mentality of viewing leadership as a test is from the out-dated view of leadership as seen from the eyes of military strategy as it used to be and not how it is today, as General McChrystal describes in his TEDTalk