Corporate Toastmasters Clubs: Getting Noticed by Your Bosses’ Boss

Joining a corporate Toastmasters club is ultimately about networking, and getting noticed by management, your bosses’ bosses.  This is not just about good speeches, and winning contests.  Outside of Toastmasters, nobody actually cares about contests.  They tend to be an affection to make people feel validated, but unless there is a concrete strategy of translating it into being seen as a benefit to the company, it is a personal accolade, nothing more. 

Upper management in a growing company is always on the lookout for people of potential.  Promotion within is generally seen as better than bringing in someone from outside the company.  The latter is only done when specific skills and networks are needed, or when a board needs to distance itself from the failures of a previous board.  Otherwise, internal promotion is cheaper, and carries less inherent risk.  Thus, one of the goals of joining a Toastmasters club is to be seen as someone with that drive, that potential.  It more than simply being an effective communicator; it is about being a point of influence. 

Being part of a corporate Toastmasters club allows us to demonstrate our commitment to the growth of the company.  We are investing time and effort into skills that can be used to grow the business, specifically communication, analysis, and organisation.  In a Toastmasters club, we speak, and we evaluate speeches.  We have table topics sessions.  It is not enough for a corporate club to have the same programme every other Toastmaster club has. 

When we speak, it helps to use it as a platform to elucidate and outline our ideas on areas such as product placement, marketing strategy, and the wider issues of how we can effect and articulate a better position for the product, the service, and the values of the company.  It demonstrates to management that we have an in depth understanding of the company’s strategy, market positioning, and values. 

Likewise, a good evaluation, with a focus on the technicalities of the message, demonstrates an analytical mind.  This is slightly different from the way many Toastmasters clubs evaluate speeches, with their emphasis on theatrics, such a “using the stage”, or a mindless call for vocal variety or the use of props.  We are demonstrating our ability to evaluate proposals, not entertain the masses. 

A table topics session run at a corporate club should focus on client objection handling, or situational scenarios, which allows participants to demonstrate their knowledge of market, company, and push an agenda.  These are demonstrations of the ability to handle internal and external customers, and convince them of a particular position. 

Being in a corporate Toastmasters club means that the intent of taking up a position beyond the club is to demonstrate these skills acquired and honed at club level, on a higher plane.  We must understand that we are representatives of the company, and use that as a platform to demonstrate suitability for higher management.  These include organisational skills, team building, creating and communicating strategic direction, and the ability to plan.  For corporations, a demonstrated ability to make people around us better enhances our value, since we have created value in human resource. 

Above all, it is also about developing people skills.  Most people imagine that having people skills is about being liked or being popular.  That is not always useful.  It is far more useful to be respected, and to be feared.  Altruism is a fickle mistress.  The language of power and self-interest is far more dependable.  People understand the language of power, and the art of rhetoric is the most efficient means of speaking that language.  Communication is only effective when people are made to understand the rewards of success, and the consequences of failure. 

Whilst all Toastmasters clubs organise contests, corporate clubs should focus on organising workshops, training programmes, and speech incubators.  This allows us to create programmes, and take ownership of them.  It is a demonstration of initiative, commitment, and most of all, responsibility.  It spreads the risk by getting the club involved, and allows us to tap into the wider Toastmasters network.  Great leadership is created through exercises such as these, to build self-awareness. 

Toastmasters programmes have timelines.  Chapter meetings are timed.  It is important to commit to these timelines.  If a programme should be executed in three months, it must be so.  If a meeting takes two hours, then it should be so.  Time is money, and time wasting is a waste of money.  These projects, run well, associate us with efficiency.  It creates a track record that management can reference. 

The syllabus of Toastmasters, when we commit to them, not only helps us develop our communication skills, but our thinking skills, specifically at a strategic level.  As a club president, for example, we are not simply giving a series if disparate addresses.  We are effecting policy, and articulating it.  As such, we should view these addresses as consistent articulations of policy, a vision, and a roadmap to that vision.  As Area Director, Division Director, and beyond, it is an expansion of that theme, creating a track record of strategic thinking. 

One of the limitations of Toastmasters is that because it is a volunteer programme, the standard of office holders, whether club or higher, is not very high.  The bar is set low for people running for office, since they are clocking time for their Distinguished Toastmasters.  The motto, “Where Leaders are Made”, is branding, not reality.  And since people are in office for a term, this is not a system that encourages long-term strategic thinking.  This inadequacy is an opportunity.  When the standard of leadership is generally lacking, it affords us an excellent showcase of what not to do, and then learn from these lessons.  In such an environment, there is little competition when we are trying to gain the notice of management, if orchestrated well. 

Toastmasters is a relatively forgiving environment to try something new, to be innovative, and to challenge conventions.  It is a laboratory to put into place forward thinking and progressive ideas and programmes, which we can then refine, and port back to the company.  This is the place to try, and fail spectacularly. 

One of the less heralded skills we acquire in a Toastmasters programme is the ability to criticise ideas thoughtfully, and to handle criticism in all sorts of scenarios, through the evaluation of project speeches.  This ability to be thoughtful in our interactions, and yet get our point across, is an important foundation for building a team, and addressing our superiors. 

Corporate clubs should actively recruit from people all over the company, especially in management.  This allows us to network with people from different departments, and in management, which his useful for career advancement.  Corporate clubs must actively take part in programmes within the Division and District.  This is, again, an important networking tool, since it allows us to create relationships and bonds that may help us even when we leave the company. 

Ultimately, the Toastmasters programme, within the corporate club structure, understood and utilised well, is an important weapon to have in our arsenal if we have ambitions of climbing the corporate ladder to higher levels of management.  Career advancement does not rest on merely being good at our job, if no one knows how good we are.  It requires access to a network, and a showcase.  This is what a corporate Toastmasters club is about.