Posted by A Toastmasters club is run by a team of club officers. These officers serve their club as volunteers and they work to organize club meetings as well as supporting their fellow club members. Another thing the club officer team is responsible for is promoting their club to the public so they can bring in guests and recruit new members.
If you are a member of Toastmasters, have you ever considered being a club officer? It may seem intimidating at first, but you are not alone when you become a club officer. You have a team of fellow club officers to work with. There is also a district leadership team that provides support to club officers.
One way that the district supports club officers is via club officer training events. These are events attended twice a year by club officers where they attend training sessions designed to teach them how to be successful in their club officer positions.
I value these club officer training events and I have a vision for how we can make these events more successful. My vision is that Toastmasters districts actively work to build up their members from speakers into trainers. In other words, I think a district should work to encourage all Toastmasters members in the district to be trainers at club officer training events. By actively working to increase the number of Toastmasters who are capable of running a training event for our district we will be developing new leaders in our district and those new leaders will gain skills and experience that they can apply outside of Toastmasters.
Building a Pool of Trainers
When it comes time to organize a club officer training event, you need to find volunteers to be the presenters for the training sessions at your event. These volunteers will be active Toastmasters from within your own district and ideally they will be experienced members who have served in club officer positions before and that have experience they can share during the training session they are assigned. You also want to find volunteers who are comfortable leading a training session for their fellow club members.
This leads us to the question: how did these members gain the necessary experience to be available as trainers for a Toastmaster event? The answer is, they learned by doing! They have served as club officers and they have experience as speakers. Some may also have served as district officers, such as area director or division director. The experience they gained while serving in these roles makes them candidates for training other officers.
In Toastmasters, many of us start with no speaking experience. We then learn by doing and develop speaking skills by giving speeches at club meetings. Over time we become confident and may even enjoy giving speeches at club meetings. Some of us may even go on to give speeches outside of Toastmasters, maybe at work or at family or community events. Why not use a similar approach and learn by doing as a presenter for training events?
What does this mean for a Toastmasters district? It means that a district should create opportunities for its more experienced members to be trainers for club officer training events. It also means our district leaders should reach out to the clubs in the district to encourage experienced club members to step out of their comfort zones. Club officers can also help the district by identifying members within their own clubs who have the potential to be trainers or who need to be challenged to move to the next level in their communication and leadership journeys.
Training the Trainer
Once we have identified a pool of experienced Toastmasters who have served as club and/or district officers, we now have an opportunity to recruit new trainers to our pool of active Toastmasters who can teach other members how to serve in their roles as club officers. Many of these potential trainers will have experience doing speeches at club meetings, but they may not have experience running a training session. We can change this by giving them opportunities to run a training session at a club officer training event.
We can do more than just assign them to a training session. We can be proactive and train the trainer. This means running training sessions to teach potential trainers how to run a training session. We can also point them to the facilitator guides provided by Toastmasters International that they can use as the basis for their training sessions.
Something else we can do is to give our potential trainers opportunities to practice in front of a live audience. This can be done by having a practice run where potential trainers give their training session to an audience of district leaders and other Toastmasters willing to attend a practice event. This will give the new presenters the opportunity to practice presenting their training session and to get feedback on how to improve.
The most important thing to remember is that experienced trainers gained their experience by actually running training sessions. To create more trainers, you need to train the trainers and give them opportunities to develop their training skills.
Conclusion
The most important thing we can do as leaders in the Toastmasters world is to develop other leaders. If we actively recruit and train new presenters for our club officer training events we will be developing our fellow club members into better versions of themselves. They will gain new experience, new confidence, and new skills as they transition from being speakers to trainers.
My vision is that our Toastmasters districts actively work on developing new trainers from within the district’s membership. This means encouraging our fellow club members to challenge themselves by moving beyond the club and running a training session at a club officer training event.
The district will benefit by having a growing pool of trainers to call on when it needs to provide a training event. Club members serving as trainers will benefit by gaining experience and confidence running training sessions for their fellow club members.
By actively growing their pool of trainers, districts will become stronger and club members will have more opportunities to build their communication and leadership skills.