Have you ever managed a project? If so, who came up with the idea for the project. Was it your idea?

What about managing a project that is not your own idea? Did you have a hard time feeling inspired to manage the project? Was your team more passionate about the project than you were?

Do you have to make an idea your own to support it? Wouldn’t it be better to support an idea without having to take ownership of it?

A good friend told me that one of my strengths as a leader is that I don’t have to make an idea my own. I enjoy helping others and I like supporting other people’s ideas. He told me the world needs more leaders like this. Leaders who value people and who support other people’s ideas.

For my Toastmasters High Performance Leadership project (HPL for short), I originally intended to create a speakers bureau for District 99 Toastmasters. I thought that by creating a speakers bureau I could create speaking opportunities for myself. This was more of a project to benefit myself as opposed to a project to benefit other people. I started out with this as the idea for my HPL project, but fortunately for me I later changed my project when I discovered an idea worth pursuing that would benefit other people.

I was speaking with Dave Rodwell at a Toastmasters club officer training event, and he shared with me an idea. His idea was that we should train community volunteers in how to effectively operate trade booths to promote their organizations. He had witnessed many times that people don’t know how to properly run a trade booth. He found this disappointing because a well run trade booth can promote a organization to the community and can make its presence known, while a poorly run trade booth does little to promote an organization and can even give a bad first impression to those that visit the trade booth.

Dave’s idea was that someone should train community organizations in how to operate a trade both effectively. If such a training program was created, then Dave and other Toastmasters could provide this training program for the benefit of community organizations. The community organizations would learn how to run trade booths more effectively and a side benefit for the Toastmasters running the trade booth training program would be to make the community organizations aware of Toastmasters.

I thought this was a great idea and I changed my HPL project to have this focus. My High Performance Leadership project was now a project to create a trade booth training program that we would present to community organizations.

As part of my HPL project, I recruited an action team. Each of my action team members believed in the value of creating a trade booth training program for community organizations and they had a lot of passion for this project. Including myself, all of my action team members were Toastmasters.

In the early meetings for my HPL project I didn’t feel like I had control over my own project. Certain members of my action team seemed to dominate the conversation during team meetings, and this made me uncomfortable. I thought I should have had more control over my team meetings, and this bothered me quite a bit. It was my team members’ passion for the project driving them to dominate the conversation and my lack of experience at leading a team of passionate people was keeping me from being an effective leader to my team.

Over time I started getting better at controlling my team meetings. I also learned that having passionate team members is not a problem. I did not have to own the idea myself. I could let my team members own the idea and share their passion. I did have to reign in the enthusiasm of my team members at times to get everyone contributing to the discussion, and I learned how to support a team of passionate people who were brimming with excellent ideas.

Part of creating this training program was creating the content for our training manual. This is the manual that a facilitator would use to conduct the training program. I found that I was able to allow my team members to share their ideas through brainstorming. One of my team members, Marc Haine, had mind mapping software on his laptop. In one of our team meetings I had Marc lead a brainstorming session where all of my team members (including myself) shared our ideas. Marc’s job was to lead the brainstorming session and to capture all of our ideas in a mind map on his computer. With Marc leading the discussion we had a very productive brainstorming session. My key take away from this session is that everyone on the team was contributing their ideas and there was no one dominating the conversation.

My primary contribution to the team was providing direction. I would schedule the team meetings and I would run the team meetings. I would also end the team meetings by giving assignments to my team members. For example, at the end of one meeting I divided up the writing assignments for creating the training manual and each team member was assigned a specific section of the training manual to write. Another task I delegated during the life of my project was the creation of the Power Point slides to be used for the training presentation.

One thing I learned to do while working on this HPL project was to sometimes let one of my team members make the lead, such as when I let Marc lead the brainstorming session. Another time was when I let one of my team member’s take the lead in being the presenter for our training program. For example, our training program became one of the educational sessions at the District 99 Toastmasters Spring Convention in May 2018. I could have been the presenter for this session, but I chose instead to let one of my team members, Joe Khoury, be the presenter. I let Joe take the lead and he did the presentation on the day of the convention. Joe did a great job as the presenter and I believe that the audience enjoyed the training session. Joe got the recognition for being the presenter of the training program and I did not have to get any recognition for myself.

Conclusion

My biggest take away for this HPL project was that I did not have to make the idea of creating the trade booth training program my own idea. I did not attempt to gain any personal glory for having this idea and I did not attempt to sell this idea as my own idea. Instead, my focus was on supporting my team to bring this idea to fruition. Creating this training program was Dave Rodwell’s idea and my job was to support Dave and the rest of my team in creating this training project.

I initially had trouble leading a team of passionate people, but I later learned that having passionate team members is a good thing. I learned to allow my team members to share their ideas without having one person dominate the conversation. I also learned to allow my team members to sometimes take the lead, like when I let Marc lead a brainstorming session and when I let Joe be the presenter at the District convention.

What I have learned is that I don’t have to make an idea my own. I enjoy helping others and I like supporting other people’s ideas. The world needs more leaders like this. Leaders who value people and who support other people’s ideas.