The Competent Leader 2016-17
While personal events prevented me to take up my duties with the club over the last week, I return on Monday as the Club's new VP of Education. This position requires the most contribution from a club member and depending on the level of commitment, the actions taken from this role directly affect the club culture and how the VP of Membership will develop their own responsibilities dealing with member experience. A big part of that member experience is the way education is felt. A Toastmasters program is not just public speaking objectives, it also has a leadership component called The Competent Leader Manual (The CL Manual).The leader aspect is critical to the smooth running of a club because Toastmasters works exactly the same way a shared economy system works. Every member contributes to the running of the club, but it is up-to the executive to decide what that level of contribution will be and how dynamic that contribution will evolve. High touch contributions are possible but the best course of action is encouraging shared responsibility. This is where the CL Manual comes into play and in many clubs it is one of the most underutilized and most misunderstood resource. If I engage only at the level of what my role objectives are then the CL manual usually becomes a checking the boxes exercise, as if it is only a way to encourage members to take active roles - and at that level of engagement, the value of the CL is greatly mitigated.
At the back of end of the manual are the 10 projects and sign off pages. I have taken that page and converted that into an Excel document and that was the easy step. The chief difference is that I have colour coded the document and I am able to copy select parts of the template to whatever bitmap I choose - and it is this opportunity to zero in to these screenshots that will serve as the basis of member communication. This is where I need to tie in with the VP of Membership so that I am acknowledging their role in creating the member experience, as well as members updating their Excel CL and creating a system of updates that begin from their computer rather than mine. I could put this on the cloud but I want to evoke the idea of personal touch and not simply turn this into cloud based application. When members send me their updates, I can compare with my existing records, which ensures integrity of the system.The hard step is now making that document a standard work document, where the reporting system cannot become a one-man show - my role is VP of Education and not Club Administrator - and my objectives must not end up being self-driven and solely hanging on my shoulders. In other words if I try to mother members by taking on responsibility for their programs, I do not help their engagement and I create a huge undertaking and burden of my own time. That is not a win-win situation. A win-win situation is when members recognize the elements of the program and their contribution to it - and this serves also as a pseudo-mentoring conversation.
The good thing is that I am extremely adaptive and so long as I don't confuse members with constant changes, what I do on my own end still has plenty of room to evolve. If over-time it proves more sensible to have this to be cloud-based then I will move that way. By 2020 a whole new program will evolve, which will make the CL manual a part of the old system, so this practice is good for the next 5 years. There is no firm evidence that Toastmasters has firmly hitched its wagon to the new system called the Revitalized Education Program. They are still moving towards beta testing and even when the roll out occurs, there maybe system changes due to ever-developing technologies and platforms. Whether this arrives in 2020 is not my immediate concern, the CL manual definitely is, and that latest 2016-17 journey begins in earnest for me starting with our early Monday evening meeting.
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Comments
CityVP Manjit
7 years ago #2
Founder value is the non-negotiable part of my own personal participation. For sure user-feedback is a part of the evolution and even organizations have had to pivot when Bill Gates realized he made a huge strategic blunder - but that pivot still got him back to founder values. If I try to be all things to all people then I am nothing. There is a great article about "skin in the game" http://www.deliberatelyconsidered.com/2011/06/skin-in-the-game/ which ends with the best definer of "skin in the game" a.k.a. shared sacrifice and personal investment. I get that but that is not my overriding motivation. Eventually the most powerful of force that will make BeBee a phenomena is not what it is we do each day, but how it takes on a life of its own that is born from founder values and how the founders are then mythologized. Javier C\u00e1mara Rica may resist the mythologies but that is actual spirit of success - the same as Steve Jobs recounted when he started to connect the dots backwards.
CityVP Manjit
7 years ago #1
Congratulations John on becoming a beBee ambassador. You are blessed to lead a platform which I find phenomenal and everyone who uses it has to experience it for themselves for their affinity and expression. I will check out the Twitter pages in due course, which is ironic because Twitter used to be the primary platform I was on, and then LinkedIn. I am not one of the disaffected LinkedIn users who was looking for an alternative, indeed I continue to have an absolute high regard for its founder Reid Hoffman - his track record as a venture capitalist has been incredible and he has an amazing soul. So the challenge for me is to be always rising in my learning because I see no value in despising. The traditional marketing meme has been to expand the circle, but I am a circle i.e. I am whole as a human being. That is a blessing I focus on and my hope is that each person find their own wholeness. BeBee is the best platform I have been on for this learning journey of mine. Being whole is the only genuine freedom we get, otherwise freedom as a conception is very elusive, even temporal. All I can say is that both of us are blessed to be here at BeBee and may those blessings get better and better but most of all enjoy this. Tom Hanks at the end of the movie Saving Private Ryan says to Matt Damon, "earn this', but I say lower the bar of ultimate sacrifice and enjoy this, because when we do that we find our wholeness by being present to the moment - and in that presence past and future is.