I recently was the leader for a project with a team of fellow Toastmasters. Our project started out as a plan to promote our Toastmasters club to the Chamber of Commerce to make business owners aware of our club. That goal did not succeed and we changed course mid project to plan and run an open house meeting for our club.

There were two things that made this a unique project for me. One thing that made this project unique is that I had to work with a team to choose what our project was going to be and the project was done online without any in person meetings. If fact, I have never met any of my team members in person. All of our interactions were done virtually via the Zoom platform.

Our very first team meeting took place online via Zoom. This was a meeting to decide what our project was going to be. Instead of me dictating to a team what the project was, this was a meeting for us to choose a project as a team.

At this meeting we shared ideas for what sort of project we could conduct for our Toastmasters club. Ideas put forward were connecting with the Chamber of Commerce, having an open house meeting, and doing a series of educational presentations for our club. After careful discussion we decided on connecting with the Chamber of Commerce as our project.

By having a team discussion and gaining consensus for what our project would be, I believe this led my team members to have more of a feeing of ownership for this project. This was not a project I assigned to my team. It was a project we decided on together. This meant everyone had a say in what the focus of our project would be and it was a team decision, not my decision alone.

Right from the start this was an online project. Using Zoom for our team meetings meant we only had to coordinate time, and not location, for our team meetings. This made it much easier to find meeting times that worked for everyone. Without needing to find a venue for our meetings, we could instead meet from the comfort of our own homes.

My project was not just online meetings with my team. I also was able to use Zoom to meet with a member of the Chamber of Commerce. Through this meeting I met a representative from the Chamber of Commerce and I learned that my team’s plan to promote Toastmasters to the members of the Chamber of Commerce was not feasible.

We had planned to do a speech at a Chamber of Commerce meeting, but the Chamber of Commerce does not have meetings for its members like we thought they did. This meant we could not promote our club to chamber members. The chamber also does not promote businesses to its members, so we could not even ask the chamber to talk to their members about our club.

At this point our project had failed. Our goal to promote our club to Chamber of Commerce members was not possible. This was a setback, but it did not stop our project from going forward.

Instead of ending the project, we had another team meeting via Zoom. This time we discussed what our project’s next steps would be. After a team discussion of our options we decided to focus on running an open house meeting for our club.

The Zoom platform provided a venue for our open house meeting. Our club still meets virtually, not in person. This meant we invited our guests to join us online, not in person.

One hiccup in our project was that we had online intruders at our open house meeting. They were foul mouthed and insulting and did everything they could to disrupt the speaker at our open house meeting. Because we were using Zoom, we were able to kick these intruders out of the meeting and we were able to close the meeting to prevent them from rejoining. If this had been an in person meeting, it would have been more difficult to remove the intruders from the meeting, if not impossible. But since this meeting was online we were able to ban the intruders from the meeting and then the meeting resumed without further intrusions.

Conclusion

This was a unique project for me. It was all done online and my team never met in person. We used the Zoom application to run team meetings online and we also used Zoom to provide an entirely online open house meeting.

Our project had some rough patches, including a failure to meet our original goal and intruders at our open house meeting. These two stumbling blocks did not make our project a failure. Instead they were merely obstacles that we overcame during the life of our project and we had a very successful open house meeting that was enjoyed by our guests.

If you find that in this pandemic you cannot meet in person, don’t let this stop you from being a leader. You can use online meeting tools like I did to run a project virtually. And like my team’s project, you can still experience success in your endeavours even if you never meet in person.