China Advanced Toastmasters » leadership

November 11th Meeting with Leadership TMC

Emily Minor, CAT VPE — Fri, 06 Nov 2009 07:55:33 +0000

CAT will have a joint meeting on Wednesday, November 11th with the Leadership Toastmasters Club. We’ll be meeting at their venue, located in meeting room 3F, North Building of Yunfeng Hotel, No.1700 Beijing Xi Road,
close to Wanhangdu Road. The meeting starts at 7:00 PM sharp! Click here for directions in Chinese and a map.

Leading the meeting will be TME Carlo Wolff, ACB & ALB, past president of Leadership and current president of CAT.

Susan Zhou, DTM will present the Summiting Session on “Resolving Club Conflicts.”
Native English speaker Emily Minor, CC & ALS, will be looking for excellent and improper word usage in the Grammarian role.
Individual Evaluators are Joyce Hu, CC & CL, and Jenny Ni, CC & CL, along with two members of Leadership.

Insights from an Area Training

Dan Smith, DTM — Sun, 11 Jan 2009 13:30:30 +0000

This afternoon, I attended an Area training conducted by CAT’s Secretary, Wendy Wang ACB ALB. Aside from having the privilege of watching another person (Wendy) deliver the Successful Club program, Moments of Truth, I made the following observations:

We all have challenges. As an officer, we have an array of experiences that give us the opportunity to learn and grow. Sometimes these experiences are painful and frustrating. Sometimes they are scary but wonderful. But they are always there. By accepting where we are now and embracing those opportunities to learn and grow, we are able to expand and move forward.
Those around us are inspiring. From the VPE who is single-handedly driving her club forward to the inexperienced Secretary looking to help make a successful club even better, we can find people in Toastmasters who can inspire us with their determination, their courage and their tenacity.
Make it meaningful – to you. While we might start talking about how we are performing our duty for our club, because we agreed to do it, or because we “have to”, we can also focus on how taking on such roles and responsibilities can help us. Tackling great challenges can help us grow, expand and become more. Look for how you can use one of the best training and development systems – and one of the best development-focused peer groups – in the world to help your own development.

There were many great lessons for me this afternoon aside from these, and I appreciated the opportunity to share some time with Area 41…

Designing Your Club Climate

Dan Smith, DTM — Wed, 03 Sep 2008 23:22:39 +0000

Every club has a different atmosphere. Some clubs are serious and strict while others are fun and informal. Some clubs have a ‘tardiness penalty’ or a ‘late fine’ while others hardly ever even start on time. But, along with key members and access to resources, the culture and climate of a club is one of the pillars that define the meeting experience.

Where are you now?
What is it like to attend be involved?
How does it feel to be part of your meetings?

The concept of culture comes from anthropologists who look at culture as including the symbolism, myths, stories and rituals. Someone like Chris Argyris would phrase organisational culture as something like this:

The formal organisation policies and employee needs, values and personalities that operate in a self-perpetuating system of living complexity.

Typically, organisations continue to evolve and improve on the basis of how well they do three things:

Continually improve
Innovate
Deeply understand stakeholder preferences and needs

Being warm and welcoming doesn’t just make visitors and guests feel ‘good’ but it also gives you the opportunity to understand them better so that you can genuinely meet their needs.

Looking for ‘cool ideas’ that you can introduce – like our own Peer Mentoring System and DTM Track, or Leadership Club’s CL evaluation segment – not only evokes interest, but also enables you to deliver creative improvements that deliver a significantly superior user experience.

When you are always looking for how you can do things better, not only do you tend to enjoy your meetings more by removing the barriers and refining the ways you do things, but you are also building a culture that can help you continue to attract members in the years ahead.

To design your way into the future demands that you suspend your critical thinking for a time. Not forever – but at least for a while. It would be great if you could create a vision for how you would love your club to be and then set in place the symbols, stories and rituals – the attributes – that can support your vision. But if that is a little too removed for you, perhaps you might just start with asking yourself,

How would I love things to be?

To me, leaders do just three things: Create value, Execute strategy and Develop people. As a member of any organisation, you are a leader to the extent that you take personal responsibility for making these three things happen.

The rest is up to you.

Daniel Smith, DTM (VPE)