Toastmasters Leadership Series: Nine Presenters, One Argument — Leaders are Built, Not Born

Toastmasters is a programme that boldly states that this is where leaders are made.  This was a programme to make good on that promise.  District 80 Division G organised it, in collaboration with Division S and Division E.  The presenters included Eric Tan, DTM, Kin Ng, DTM, Scarlett Zhuo, DTM, and me.

Why Leadership Is a Skill, Not a Personality

Inspirational leadership can be acquired.  Leadership itself is an active, continual process of incremental improvement and striving.  It does not merely happen.  It is a culmination of work and experience, the sum of applied experiential knowledge.  Leadership is the art of providing direction, giving people a vision, and inspiring them to work towards it.  The best leaders develop other leaders, nurture talent, and inspire them.  The best teams are built from exactly this kind of leader.

Contrary to popular belief, there is no single type of leader or leadership style.  Broad definitions exist.  They rarely match what leadership looks like in practice, because these definitions are theoretical interpretations of reality without nuance.  Every person carries their own history, their own talents, their own prejudices.  Leadership develops by finding the common denominator of humanity underneath all that, and building something new from what each person already is.  Leadership begins with values.

To that end, the series ran a set of presentations by established leaders across different fields within the Toastmasters community.  Corporate leadership.  Successful entrepreneurship.  Military command.  Different types of leadership, in different environments.  Every session emphasised practicality, built on case studies drawn from personal experience.

At club and District level, these individuals’ records speak for themselves.  They came from some of Division G’s most accomplished clubs, carrying decades of Presidents Distinguished Club awards, multiple contest wins, and some of the strongest programmes in the District.  The series asked how that accomplishment applies to personal and professional life, and how Toastmasters extends well beyond public speaking.

Below is the synopsis for each session, as sent out in the marketing material at the time, with additional context added.

Session 1: 23^rd October 2021, 1100h to 1300h

The Context for Success —Kin Ng, DTM

Leaders do not simply appear.  There has to be a context, a framework for leadership to function.  Success is contrived, never an accident.  Kin Ng shared his experience building that framework before results follow.  Once a leader can frame his own position clearly in his own mind, he is in a far stronger position to articulate it to others.

Kin Ng, DTM, is a former Commando Officer.  He is also a leadership and presentation skills coach for C-suite professionals and managers.  He served, at the time, as Chief Executive Officer of a technology start-up in the ESG space, managing a team negotiating with investor groups to establish regional electric vehicle manufacturing using graphene battery technology.  Military planning doctrine calls this “commander’s intent,” the discipline of framing an objective clearly enough that subordinates can act correctly even when the original plan breaks down.  That discipline transfers directly into corporate negotiation, where the objective must survive contact with an investor who has not read the same briefing.

Picking the Winning Team — Terence Nunis, DTM

Leaders never work alone.  They have generals.  A good leader chooses his team with care, selecting people who are leaders in their own right.  Leadership is a process, not an event.  This session covered leadership as a team game, and why a leader is only as effective as the team surrounding him.

Terence Nunis, DTM, is a former commissioned officer specialising in threat assessment.  He is Chief Executive Officer of a strategic consultancy whose clients include politicians, governments, and state-owned enterprises across South and Southeast Asia, managing a team spread across the region.  NASA’s own Apollo 13 mission offers the clearest illustration of this principle at its highest stakes.  Flight Director Eugene Francis Kranz did not solve the 1970 oxygen tank explosion alone.  He assembled specialist teams under pressure, each handling a distinct technical problem – power, oxygen, trajectory, and re-entry, and the mission returned its crew safely because Kranz had already built a team capable of functioning without him micromanaging every decision.  A leader who cannot delegate under pressure has not built a team.  He has built an audience.

Session 2: 13^th November 2021, 1400h to 1600h

The Courage to Lead* — Eric Tan, DTM

Leaders are not born.  They are made.  Leadership begins the moment someone realises events need a hand on the wheel, and decides that hand can be theirs.  It takes courage to face the fear of failure, the fear of disappointing others, the fear of making a genuinely difficult call.  No leader has ever tasted greatness without confronting these fears directly.  Eric Tan, DTM, walked the room through his own path to becoming that person.

Eric Tan, DTM, is an IBF Advanced Certified Personal Wealth Manager, specialising in risk management, and led a team assessing political and financial exposure for ultra-high-net-worth families and Family Offices across Singapore and the region.  His team structures complex investment vehicles, including trusts, Variable Capital Companies, and Multi-Family Offices, managing assets under management in the hundreds of millions.

The R.I.S.K.Y. Leader — Dr Tan Kwan Hong, DTM

Leaders take risks.  They never stay on the safe path.  Kwan Hong’s, DTM, framework holds that a good leader must be Resilient, Influential, Strategic in thought, Hungry for Knowledge, and grounded in his own Why.  Taking risks means qualifying them first, through a deliberate thinking process that turns raw appetite for risk into genuine strategic advantage.

Kwan Hong, DTM, ran his strategy consulting business from 2012, scaling multiple businesses from six figures to eight.  As an international speaker engaged almost daily, his live talks and sessions had reached over 1.3 million people across 1,100 organisations in 50 countries.

Session 3: 27^th November 2021, 1400h to 1600h

Managers or Leaders — Gerald Yong, DTM

Leaders always manage.  Managers seldom lead.  A manager supervises the events and resources of the present moment.  A leader weighs the consequences of decisions and plans for them in advance.  Gerald Yong, DTM, walked the room through that distinction and how to cross it.

This distinction has real academic weight behind it.  Warren Bennis, the American scholar regarded as a founding figure of modern leadership studies, put it plainly: managers do things right, leaders do the right things.  The difference is not competence.  It is horizon.  A manager optimises the plan already in motion.  A leader questions whether the plan itself still points in the right direction.

Gerald Yong, DTM, began his career in accounting and audit, spending seven years at a Big Four international audit firm, followed by ten years sharpening his corporate finance skills as Regional Controller across multinational corporations.  He was, at the time, transitioning into the role of Chief Financial Officer at a technology company.

Attributes & Disciplines of Leadership — Robert Ng, DTM

Leaders grow.  They never stay still.  Growing as a leader means acquiring attributes and discipline as an ongoing process.  A leader is only as good as his last success.  Just as still water turns foul, Robert Ng shared his thinking on the attributes a leader must cultivate in himself and in his team.

Robert Ng, DTM, began his career as a systems engineer in the IT industry before moving into shipping.  Unwilling to turn away from challenging opportunities, he had taken on large projects and held multiple regional leadership roles across a career spanning more than 35 years.

Session 4: 18^th December 2021, 1400h to 1600h

Beginning with the End in Mind — Dr Sivanesan Murugayan

Leaders start at the beginning.  They begin planning from the end.  A good leader picks his team, builds their capability, and weighs the consequences of the project before it starts.  He plans for shifts in the market and the environment, rarely caught out by a dynamic situation.  Siva shared how this discipline is built.

Stephen Richards Covey made this habit famous in The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, arguing that every genuine achievement is created twice, first as a mental picture, then as a physical reality.  A leader who has not built the mental picture first is improvising the second creation, and improvisation under pressure rarely produces the outcome a genuine plan would have.

Siva is a management consultant with 20 years of senior executive-level people engagement experience.  He holds an Advanced Certificate in Training and Assessment and works as an executive mentor, alongside a private practice as a life coach.

Building a Legacy — Scarlett Zhuo, DTM

Leaders plan to the end.  They manage only for the moment.  Part of leadership is mentoring the next leader and preserving institutional knowledge.  A good leader builds a system capable of running without him standing over it, trusting the people he has elevated enough to let go.  Scarlett Zhuo, DTM, shared her experience building exactly this kind of mentorship programme.

The counter-example makes the stakes clear.  Michael Dammann Eisner ran The Walt Disney Company for 21 years and grew steadily less willing to build a credible successor, forcing out one potential heir after another.  By 2004, a shareholder revolt led by Roy Edward Disney and Stanley P. Gold forced Eisner out, and Disney’s own board could not find a single external candidate ready to take his place.  A leader unwilling to build a legacy beyond himself eventually leaves an organisation with nobody prepared to run it.  Zhuo Shu Zhen’s own model, built on deliberate mentorship rather than accumulated indispensability, was the direct answer to that failure.

Scarlett Zhuo, DTM, is an expert in group health solutions and a top producer with AIA Singapore, recognised for her ability to train leaders and transfer knowledge.  Her speciality lies in building mentorship programmes and identifying talent before it is obvious to anyone else.

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