by Viranga Ratnaike

AgendaOverApplication

“Please join Toastmasters but not this club.”

– this VPE’s unvoiced thought while chatting with visitors several months ago.

With every new member the time slice available to each existing member becomes thinner. This is true if the amount of time available remains fixed. With extra meetings and concurrent sessions time can be grown. The latter technique is untested, but its conception provides hope for a VPE seemingly beset by conflicts of interest.

The VPE is responsible for the speaking opportunities of both existing and future members. You cannot in good conscience actively persuade visitors to join the club, if you don’t think there are speaking opportunities for them. You cannot in good conscience actively dissuade visitors from joining the club simply because you currently see no solution. My personal approach is to neither persuade nor dissuade. I try to be informative in conversation and inventive in planning.

Another personal choice is idealistically deciding to be unrealistic. I try to schedule people equally, without simply asking for volunteers. This is more a self-inflicted dilemma than a conflict of interest, but is based on a real problem. A VPE should treat members with respect while also encouraging the shy and nervous to speak. The resulting long term scheduling is still skewed towards the keen but not as much as it might have been skewed. I am idealistic while being fully aware of Ernesto Sirolli’s excellent TED Talk titled “Want to help someone? Shut up and listen!” I sometimes feel like a well-intentioned but naïve aid worker, throwing speaking opportunities at people when what they want or need is more complex.

In an effort not to be self-biased, I throw very few speaking opportunities in my own direction. I do most of my speaking at other clubs, sometimes while travelling in other districts.

The long term scheduling is also slightly skewed towards the Distinguished Clubs Program (DCP) but not as much as it could have been. I remember saying

“I would sacrifice the club’s DCP performance in exchange for a better member experience if ‘the chips [were] down’.”

Sometimes ensuring the success of both club and members seems like something out of Yes Minister. Jim Hacker MP wants to know where his Principal Private Secretary’s loyalties lie if ‘the chips are down’. Bernard Woolley’s response is “Minister, it’s my job to see the chips stay up.” At times this seems the role of the VPE.

The DCP is a tool that can be used. DCP points constitute a quantitative guess as regards the health of a club. The danger lies in overfitting to the test in an attempt to get a better score. The tool is not specific to the needs of individual members.

It doesn’t seem fair to give some people more than one speech per quarter, in a club with 23 speaking slots and 34 members. It seems impossible to reach DCP goals while equitably distributing precious speaking resources along a finite timeline and also maintaining a programme more imaginative than frequent speechathons.

Scheduling Saturday and Fifth Thursday meetings at members’ homes has led to lovely club experiences, but sometimes seems a workaround rather than a solution.

The workarounds are what help the club function well. Several members help out just because they care for others in the club including the VPE. Many club members rally to help the club do well.

Another person’s self-sacrificing good nature is not a tool you can use in planning. You plan in private and succeed in community.

One of the trickiest things for a VPE to do is simply care and hope.