Visit to ACCA Toastmasters: On Sugar, Emotional Intelligence, & the Hazards of Timing

On the 20^th August 2019 — the 51^st day of the Toastmasters year — I made my 38^th club visit of the season to ACCA Toastmasters Club, serving as project evaluator.

The Meeting Structure

Jerry Lim served as Toastmaster of the Day — managing the meeting’s flow and transitions.  Ricky Peh handled timing.  Jannie Gong counted the ahs — a role that invariably produces useful data and occasionally produces existential anxiety in the speakers being counted.  Andrew Gunawan presided over table topics.

The evaluators were Penny Anne Radcliffe, Shirley Lee, Miranda Zhang, and me.

The Speeches

Ishita Banerjee spoke on emotional intelligence — specifically its necessity for effective management in the contemporary workplace, as opposed to the authoritarian models that characterised earlier management culture.  She addressed the psychological effects of leaders failing to connect with their teams and the direct impact of that failure on productivity.

The subject matter is well supported by the research.  Dr. Daniel Jay Goleman’s work on emotional intelligence — particularly his 1995 book Emotional Intelligence and his subsequent Harvard Business Review article What Makes a Leader, published in 1998 — established that emotional intelligence accounts for approximately 90% of what distinguishes high performers from average performers in senior leadership roles, across a range of industries and organisations.  The Centre for Creative Leadership has documented that the primary causes of executive derailment include difficulty managing relationships, difficulty leading teams, and difficulty adapting to change — all of which are emotional intelligence failures rather than technical competence failures.

The authoritarian model she contrasted this with is not merely outdated stylistically. It is demonstrably counterproductive.  Research from Gallup consistently shows that approximately 70% of the variance in employee engagement is attributable to the manager.  A manager who leads through fear, compliance, and hierarchical authority rather than trust, connection, and genuine engagement produces the disengagement that Gallup documents — and disengagement costs the global economy an estimated US$8.8 trillion annually, or approximately 9% of global GDP.

Ishita’s speech addressed a real and quantifiable problem.  The quality of the address was appropriate to the subject’s seriousness.

Jane Yeo presented a personal narrative about her interests — the kind of speech that develops the foundational skill of making the personal universally accessible.  The narrative speech is among the most demanding in the Toastmasters curriculum precisely because it requires the speaker to trust that their specific experience contains something the audience can recognise in their own lives.  When it works, it is the most powerful category of speech.  When it does not, it is an account of someone else’s holiday that the audience has been too polite to escape.

Jiang Xiao Ying completed another advanced manual project — this one focused on getting to the point.  The specific irony of a speech about concision being delivered in an advanced manual context — where the expectations of depth and development are higher than in the standard curriculum — was presumably not lost on the speaker.  Executing a speech that demonstrates the virtue of brevity while meeting the requirements of an advanced project requires a specific kind of discipline.  The discipline of knowing what to leave out is always harder than the discipline of putting things in.

The Best Speech: Leo Zhang Li on Sugar

Leo Zhang Li delivered what the room judged the best speech of the evening — a comprehensive examination of sugar’s effects on human health and its prevalence across processed and organic food categories.  He won Best Speaker.  He also, in doing so, ruined the break.

The timing of this speech — delivered immediately before the interval, when the meeting’s refreshments were presumably waiting — was either accidental or a work of dark comic genius.  Every item on the refreshment table was subsequently eyed with the specific suspicion that detailed nutritional knowledge produces.  The audience had arrived at the break with appetites.  They arrived with information instead.

The World Health Organisation recommends limiting free sugar intake to less than 10% of total daily energy intake — and notes that a reduction to below 5% would provide additional health benefits.  The average Singaporean consumes approximately 60 grams of free sugar daily — more than double the WHO recommendation.  The connections between excess sugar consumption and obesity, type 2 diabetes, cardiovascular disease, and dental caries are documented across decades of epidemiological research.  Leo’s speech communicated this effectively. The refreshments communicated the problem immediately afterwards.

Best Evaluator: Penny Anne Radcliffe

Penny Anne Radcliffe took Best Evaluator — a deserved recognition.  Evaluation is the most technically demanding role in a Toastmasters meeting.  It requires the evaluator to observe the speech in real time, identify specific strengths and specific development areas with concrete examples, frame the feedback constructively without either excessive praise or unnecessary harshness, and deliver it within a two to three-minute window in front of an audience.  The evaluator who does this well demonstrates more of the Toastmasters skill set in three minutes than most speakers demonstrate in seven.

Best Table Topics: Guest

For the second time in recent visits, the Best Table Topics Speaker award went to a guest — an outcome that is simultaneously encouraging and instructive.  Encouraging, because it means the club is attracting guests of sufficient quality and comfort to participate and perform well in an impromptu speaking format, which they have not specifically trained for.  Instructive, because it means the members who have been training for exactly this format are being outperformed by someone walking in without preparation.  The correct response to this outcome is not to begrudge the guest their award. It is to practise table topics with sufficient regularity that the next visit produces a different result.

The Assessment

ACCA Toastmasters ran a well-structured meeting with substantive content across the speech programme.  The emotional intelligence speech addressed a real professional need with appropriate depth.  The sugar speech informed and disturbed in equal measure, which is what a well-researched informative speech should do.

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Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters