If you attended last month’s DECM, you caught our Leadership Legacy themed meeting, as well as Tyree Johnson’s Moments of Truth primer. I also caught a little bit of inspiration.
The best form of leadership is the one where you volunteer to do something specific.
If there’s already someone in charge, you step up to support them. It may not seem like leadership up front, but whenever you get assigned something to do, you become the lead person on that task. It’s why we have (quasi-uncredited) Chairs for various things, officers, and the like – responsibility is leadership.
We don’t know what people are good at unless we’ve already seen you do it. Sometimes we wind up giving people roles that they’ve never done before, too – and the Toastmasters leadership model is often about figuring things out while you’re doing it. Ideally, you have a mentor who has done it before that can help you, but that’s not always the case.
The best form of leadership is the one where you show up.
Showing up without a plan or a direction is still volunteering. Evaluations are about reviews and comments and extra viewpoints; and many things in Toastmasters are group and team activities, so the more people that show up, the better.
If you’re underqualified, shadowing someone who is qualified gets you to where you could be qualified next time. We’ve all started from a place with zero experience, and in Toastmasters, showing up is sometimes the hard part – or we’d have all clubs with 20 or more members.
I maintain that today’s people who show up are tomorrow’s leaders – and sometimes even today’s leaders. We can’t train people who don’t show up.
The best form of leadership is the one where you work with your team.
As a Service-oriented leader, I like to find people who want to do cool things. I love inspiring people to be more than where they started, and helping them explore the potential that they have yet to discover. I also like connecting people’s strengths with opportunities to shine, and their weaknesses with partners who can help them grow. There’s something magical about building a well-functioning team, and something satisfying about making a dysfunctional team work together. I hold a belief that I can work with anyone, and I am rarely wrong in that belief. I’ve been working to improve my delegation skills, too, but at the end of the day, what’s most important is that the team succeeds together, or not at all.
The best form of leadership is the one where you promote doing the best job you can.
Sometimes, when we sign up for something, there’s stuff we weren’t told about the responsibilities, role, or hidden difficulties involved. It’s easy to say “I didn’t sign up for this” and run away, quiet quit, or feel like you were bamboozled, and we might even poison the well for others who come after us. But when we embrace adversity and rise to a challenge, and look for help – never be afraid to ask for help, by the way – we’ll get the job done together.
This is Toastmasters leadership to me. We are the Trio. We are the PRM team. We are the committees and District Directors and Area Directors that make up the District Executive Committee. We have been and are the Presidents and VPEs that make up the District Council. You’ve been in situations where decisions need to be made and problems solved, and you’ve almost never had to do it on your own.
That is leadership at its core. I’d like to finish by quoting Curt Hayashida, the D12 Area Director. “People don’t show up to Toastmasters meetings to just sit there and have a free cookie. They’re there to participate, to listen, and to learn.”
When you come prepared to lead, you bring the best form of leadership. Yourself.
Jeffrey Young, DD
