Changing Toastmasters Culture is Not a Mandate; It is a Movement.

As I reflect on my time as Division Director for Toastmasters District 80’s Division G, one lesson learned in the face of a pandemic is that we need a new direction.  It is past the time when we do things as they were and pretend we can go back to how it was once this pandemic passed.  The world has changed, and people have changed with it.  It is time to be ahead of that curve, not playing catch-up.

One thing that needs changing, and this remains a constant work in progress, is culture, at club level, at Division level, and at District level.  My first thought was that such a change would require a top-down approach.  That was the basis for putting a team in place to run for the top three positions over five years, involving two years of picking talent and one term of training them within that window.  A three-year succession plan was drawn up, and bargains struck with other Divisions.  The same rules used to wage war are the ones used in large organisations.

One term as Division Director was enough to reveal a harder truth: the District Director is powerless without acclaim or genuine support.  As is the nature of such organisations, the most inoffensive tend to rise to the top, typically older men of modest professional accomplishment, most importantly posing little threat to established power bases.  A successive line of Directors, each holding real influence in only one or two Divisions but no broader mandate, produces a state of near-permanent ossification in leadership.  Volunteer systems reward mediocrity, because failure carries little consequence, while offending carries more.  This would fail instantly in the corporate sphere, where it would show up directly in profit and market share.  It would fail in government, where it would show up in lost elections.

Culture as an Invisible Ocean

In hierarchical volunteer organisations with no command structure, change comes from acclaim, wide adoption, and an evangelical movement, not from an imaginary mandate secured in a disinterested election.  Delegates who take votes seriously vote out of self-interest, and that self-interest tends to favour the status quo.  It is human nature, both a hindrance and a flaw worth exploiting deliberately.  Changing culture requires a movement, not a mandate.  Mandates carry strings attached.

Experiencing culture is like being immersed in an invisible ocean.  We feel the current, the shifts in temperature and pressure.  We do not see the ocean itself, though we know it is there.  Fish do not see the sea unless removed from it.  We do not see the air around us until we leave the atmosphere.  Culture, as a living movement of values and thought, is better understood by those not fully immersed in it, those able to step outside the ocean and observe it.  When the current runs with us, the journey is easier, and approval follows.  When it runs against us, everything, from policy implementation to new programmes, meets resistance.

The Microsoft Case Study

Satya Narayana Nadella took over as Microsoft’s third CEO in 2014, inheriting a company Wall Street and Silicon Valley regarded as fading toward irrelevance, hamstrung by a competitive, hierarchical culture that stifled collaboration.  Nadella did not issue a memo declaring Microsoft’s culture changed.  He introduced a cultural lever, the “growth mindset,” drawn from psychologist Dr. Carol Susa Dweck’s research, and worked with Kathleen Hogan, his Chief People Officer, to embed it across more than 130,000 employees, reframing the company’s identity from a “know-it-all” culture to a “learn-it-all” one.  This took years, not a single directive, and it required Nadella himself to model the behaviour, listening, asking questions, and openly acknowledging what Microsoft needed to unlearn, rather than simply commanding subordinates to change.  The results speak for themselves: Microsoft’s market value rose from US$300 billion in 2014 to over US$2.5 trillion by 2023, and revenue more than tripled to US$281.7 billion by fiscal year 2025.  A culture shift, nurtured rather than mandated, produced measurable, compounding results over a decade.  Toastmasters District 80 is a smaller organisation, but the underlying mechanism does not change with scale.

Why 70% of Change Initiatives Fail Anyway

McKinsey’s own research, echoing a figure originally attributed to change theorist Dr. John Paul Kotter, has long suggested 70% of organisational change initiatives fail to achieve their goals.  The empirical origin of that number has been contested by researchers who note it has been repeated for decades without a single, clean study behind it, though McKinsey’s own 2021 report, “Losing from Day One,” independently found fewer than a third of transformations succeed at both improving performance and sustaining that improvement over time.  Gartner found that only 38% of employees were willing to support organisational change in 2022, down sharply from 74% in 2016, a collapse in appetite for top-down mandate this analysis warns against.  The pattern generalises directly to Toastmasters.  Culture change is often the most challenging part of any transformation, and Toastmasters is no different.  Innovation demands a new paradigm and new behaviour from leaders and ordinary members alike, behaviour frequently antithetical to the norms District 80 has developed over decades.  That change cannot be achieved through top-down mandate, even under effective leadership, and it becomes more implausible under mediocre leadership.  A new culture must be nurtured from within the collective habits and shared perceptions of members themselves.  People must be guided toward a new direction, not issued one.

At its core, Toastmasters applies the art of rhetoric at a practical, individual level, taking the ordinary person and pushing him toward the heights of public speaking, so he can give voice to others like him.  It is about making people heard and validated, and about keeping the conversation alive so that disparate groups, across culture, class, nationality, ethnicity, and language, feel connected to a shared ocean of humanity.

The challenge is that people remain invested in the belief that meaningful interaction only happens physically.  Much communication does run through body language, yet modern technology has brought intimacy to a new level entirely.  That is the paradox of video meetings.  While we reach a wider audience globally, we sit closer to them in intimacy, because the camera focuses directly on us.  This is the difference between stage acting and screen acting.  On stage, distance from the audience demands big, recognisable movement.  On screen, the camera sits in your face, and movement must be subtle, deliberate, and intimate.

Building the Movement, Step by Step

We must invest in members and prospective members alike, since video calls are here to stay.  They will not replace physical meetings, but they carry value professionally and personally.  Just as Toastmasters invests in effective communication in physical settings, it should invest equally in effective communication across video.  That is the holistic approach.  Until members see equal value in online meetings, attrition and declining attendance will continue.

We also need to convince members that online meetings extend reach beyond a single club, and reach creates opportunities worth exploiting.  Interaction and learning flow both ways, and online meetings offer a unique, recurring opportunity for cross-cultural dialogue, an impetus to move beyond comfort zones.  This requires concrete steps.

The first step is identifying stakeholders at the most basic level, the club, meaning committee members who already share these values or can be persuaded to.  A seasoned Toastmaster who cannot convince the people nearest to him of a shared vision has failed and should return to basics.  Everything begins with what is in it for each person.  People move on self-interest.

The club then galvanises its own membership, beginning with a strong club, since strong clubs carry the weight to pull an entire Area, and then a Division, in a new direction.  The Toastmasters system is a pyramid resting on strong clubs.  This can leave a strong club president wielding more real influence than a District Director, particularly when that club’s own members also sit in District positions, from Area Directors upward.

Once disseminated and adopted within a club, the vision becomes part of its culture, reinforced through internal mentorship.  In a corporate club, this requires top management’s support, which is precisely why corporate clubs should maintain a deliberate policy of recruiting management members all the way to the C-suite.  Toastmaster values then operate through the lens of the company’s own culture.  When members feel personally aligned and invested, that becomes the foundation of a genuinely new club culture, leadership vision made manifest.

The next step is not the Area but the Division.  Strong clubs dominate their Division and supply much of its leadership.  Given the District’s structure, a strong Division Director controls more votes at District Council than most District Directors, unless those Directors already have Divisional support.  Area Councils exist to empower Area Directors to spread the Division Council’s vision and shape the Division’s direction.  This typically requires more than a single term, meaning any genuine strategic plan needs multi-term planning, with strong emphasis on succession to ensure the vision survives a change in leadership.

The Mechanics of Building an Evangelical Movement

Turning a vision into an executive direction backed by a movement resembles running an evangelical programme.  People must be converted through engagement, empowerment, and a system of reward and consequence.  Obstacles and threats, frequently leftover leadership invested in the status quo, the actual drivers of organisational ossification, must be identified and addressed, sometimes ruthlessly.

The mechanics themselves run in five parts.  First, investment of time and articulation of vision by the team, until each person buys in and becomes an active stakeholder.  Second, leadership must never translate vision into the social power dynamic too simplistically or too hastily.  Conversion takes sustained communication, time, and effort, and followers need to understand their own benefit before they believe.  Third, issues must be reframed in terms people can relate to and adopt, applying pathos and ethos before logos, since larger crowds respond less to logic and more to emotion, rationalised only after the fact.  Fourth, people need urgency, created by identifying a defining event and framing adoption in terms of stark success or failure, survival or extinction, us versus them, contrasting who we are against an opposing idea inimical to it.  People need a named enemy to organise against, even where that enemy is merely an idea.  Fifth, orchestrate quick wins and small victories, celebrated publicly, which is the purpose events such as Achievers’ Day and Members’ Night serve: elevating paragons of the vision, diminishing threats to it, and steering the movement’s direction.

Why Leadership Must Never Declare the Shift

To succeed, leadership should never declare the cultural shift it seeks, since that reads as an imposed initiative and breeds resistance, given that people are inherently sentimental and seek comfort in the familiar.  They will rationalise their own misery and failure rather than confront it directly.  It makes more sense to highlight paragons and let people emulate the local heroes the movement creates, nurturing and steering direction organically rather than by decree.

At every stage, the work continues: ensuring people become active stakeholders who recognise their own gain, through continuous engagement, coalitions of self-interest, and co-opting existing networks.  People move on self-interest before altruism, always.  This means identifying leaders at every level and granting them recognition, so they become invested in the movement.  Engaged people automatically generate their own reasons to advance it, rationalising their own support, which is how innovation gets adopted expeditiously rather than imposed and resisted.

As network leaders grow more involved, they become icons, symbols people rally around, reinforcing the “us versus them” dynamic that cements loyalty and makes the movement genuinely evangelical within the organisation.  Change leaders themselves become symbols of the movement.  Their formal mandate of office is, by comparison, secondary.

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