Club Officer Training II Workshop: Leadership & Succession Planning in Toastmasters

The following are background notes for a presentation delivered at District 80 Division G’s Club Officer Training II, held on 8^th January 2022.

Before anything else, understand what we are discussing.  Parties frequently use the same words while meaning different things.  Leadership is not management.  Management is a part of leadership, but not all of it.  It is possible to be an effective manager without being a leader.  It is impossible to be an effective leader without managing.

Consider your own leadership journey, because it evolves.  Reflect on different periods of life, gaining experience, competence, and authority, and how style changes with each.  Style is also shaped by circumstance and context.  No single leadership style exists, and a leader who moves an organisation only one way will eventually fail.

Consider, too, whom you take as role models, because that choice defines how you understand leadership itself.  True leadership is not known by flash.  A great leader is often only appreciated after he steps down, since while he holds the role, he is meant to be an unobtrusive presence, a source of wisdom and institutional knowledge rather than a spectacle.

My own role models include Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli, Count Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, Major General Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz, Fleet Admiral Chester William Nimitz, and Chanakya Kautilya.  Few people recognise these names outside serious students of history.  Every one of them shaped the great leaders who came after.  I prefer ruthless efficiency to good public relations.  These are people of substance, not flash.

John Davison Rockefeller Sr. said, “Good leadership consists of showing average people how to do the work of superior people.”

Aspects of Leadership

There are many aspects of leadership.  This session covers three, and the differences between them.  We had already run the Executive Leadership Incubator across four sessions, with Toastmasters International President Margaret Page joining for the fifth and final session’s dialogue.

To paraphrase Sun Tzu, if we know our enemies and know our friends, victory is certain.  If we know Heaven and know Earth, victory is complete.  A complete victory means never having to fight the same battle with the same people again.

Personal leadership is what we exercise in our own lives.  We cannot lead others if we cannot lead ourselves, governing our lower appetites, our tongue, our thoughts, long before they harden into words and actions.  A man who cannot control his own appetites has no business leading anyone else.  That is the foundation of our values.

Executive leadership sits closest to management.  Management controls and deploys resources, including people, for maximum effect.  Executive leadership is the management of leaders.  It is not micromanagement.  Micromanagement is what happens when a leader distrusts himself or his team and feels compelled to intervene in the minutiae.  Executive leadership sets a direction for a defined term, meeting immediate goals, whether a quarter, a fiscal year, or a Toastmasters term.

Strategic leadership belongs to senior management, setting goals and articulating a vision that extends beyond the current horizon, planning for a time when the people currently involved are no longer around.  Just as we plan for our presence, we must plan for our absence.  That is what empowerment means.

Personal Leadership

Leadership works by example, because a leader who does not lead by example loses moral authority, and losing moral authority is fatal.  Machiavelli wrote, “So much depends on reputation.  Guard it with your life.  Reputation is the cornerstone of power.”  Leadership is the exercise of power.  That is the sacred trust behind it.  If you lead, you are a leader whether you hold a title.  A title conveys authority.  Leadership is you.

Reflect on your own personal values.  Every officer cadet programme, every management programme, every serious system teaches this on its first day.  It carries many historical names, chivalry, futuwwa, and others, and it determines how you treat people and face adversity.  These personal values must align with the organisation’s collective values.  In Toastmasters, we stand for education, nurturing, and mentorship.  Nobody has arrived, because the perfect rhetorician does not exist.  We are all working toward the next horizon.

Personal leadership, then, is about legacy.  It is never a public relations exercise.  There will always be people you disagree with, rivals, contenders, or a clash of interests.  We represent our clubs, our Division, our District, and contending differences are inevitable.  Do an excellent job, remain sincere in praise and criticism, stay firm in your values, and even your detractors will grant you some respect.

Oscar Fingal O’Flahertie Wills Wilde said, “Every effect that one produces gives one an enemy.  To be popular, one must be mediocre.”  Anyone who wants to be good at something must accept enemies as the price of it.

Executive Leadership, and Why It Depends Entirely on the Bench Beneath You

Leadership is a team game.  You are not a leader alone.  You are a leader among leaders.  A leader of mere followers is nothing more than a mob boss.  Effective leaders surround themselves with leaders.  One quality I look for when assembling an Executive Committee as club president, a Council as Division Director, or a board as Chief Executive Officer, is competent aggression: people who will challenge me, tell me when I have overstepped, and force me to reconsider a decision.  Every knife must stay sharp.

Look at the Division Council I ran as Division Director.  Half a dozen people could step into my role tomorrow, and the system would run without me.  Look at AIA Toastmasters, and a dozen members could take the presidency at a moment’s notice.  That is the system worth building.

Michael Dammann Eisner’s tenure at The Walt Disney Company offers the clearest warning of what happens when a leader builds nothing of the kind.  Eisner ran Disney for 21 years, transforming it from a struggling studio into a media giant, and grew increasingly resistant to cultivating any credible successor along the way.  He forced out studio chief Jeffrey Katzenberg, who left to co-found DreamWorks and later sued Disney for US$250 million.  He installed his friend Michael Steven Ovitz as president in 1995, a relationship that collapsed within fourteen months, with Ovitz departing holding a US$130 million severance package.  By 2004, Roy Edward Disney and Stanley P. Gold led a shareholder revolt that forced Eisner from the chairmanship and, soon after, from the CEO role itself.  The board, after months of searching, failed to find a single credible external candidate and handed the job to Eisner’s own deputy, Robert Allen Iger, by default.  A leader who spends two decades removing every plausible successor leaves his own board with no choice when the moment finally arrives.

For this system to work, there must be a written plan.  One of the first actions I took as Division Director was drafting a Division Strategic Plan in writing: a handover procedure for Area Directors, workshop management, leadership training, and a chain of command for every event should the primary organiser be unavailable.  As President of AIA Toastmasters, I wrote a three-year strategic plan for the club.  We conduct after-action reviews of every programme, document the feedback, and write down the procedure for everything.  Both Division G and AIA Toastmasters plan the entire year in advance, completed in May and endorsed by June.  Should the entire leadership team vanish overnight, enough paperwork exists for a new team to step straight in.

This documentation must carry both the mission, the plan for the current year, and the vision, the overarching plan spanning multiple terms, continuously adjusted as circumstances change.

Benjamin Franklin said, “By failing to prepare, you are preparing to fail,” a well-constructed chiasmus that has outlived every other line for which he is remembered.

Strategic Leadership

Where is Toastmasters now?  Where is your club now?  Where are you personally?  We faced a global pandemic and an economic contraction, the largest since the Great Depression, something none of us had prepared for.  Has this affected club attendance?  Genuinely.  Is that a problem?

I contend it is an opportunity.  A club’s strength is not its numbers.  It is commitment to the programme, and securing that commitment requires giving members something to believe in.  That is why we plan, and why we articulate the plan clearly, or else much gets said and little gets done.  We begin with the end in mind.  Nobody builds a company without an exit strategy for its investors.  Our members have invested time and effort in our clubs and this programme.  We owe them a return on that investment, an exit strategy of their own.

To deliver that, we must see beyond the current term.  Not every goal fits inside a single term, and a club that never plans beyond its term always starts back at zero, term after term, which becomes exhausting for everyone involved.  People want to be inspired.  They need to feel part of something larger than the current committee.  Where do you see yourself, and your club, beyond this term?

Stephen Richards Covey said, “Management is efficiency in climbing the ladder of success; leadership determines whether the ladder is leaning against the right wall.”  An Executive Committee is meant to be a team of leaders, not a team of managers.

Succession Planning

Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill said, paradoxically, “Plans are of little importance, but planning is essential.”

Margaret Edith Weis wrote, “Plans are figures drawn in the sand; easily changed when the wind blows.”

No matter how carefully we plan succession, circumstances change.  We do not see the future, and we barely control the present.  We must still plan.  Succession planning is the process of identifying and developing future leaders capable of stepping into vacant roles when they arise.

Planning starts the moment you take on any leadership role.  You are planning for your own obsolescence, your own redundancy.  Grooming successors resembles gardening, except the plants keep moving around the garden and need to be herded back into position.  A succession plan is a guideline, held with enough flexibility to adjust as circumstances shift.  Toastmasters calls this mentorship, though it is far more.

Three considerations matter most.  Commitment first, since a highly capable person without commitment offers nothing.  Potential second, distinct from current ability, since potential is where a person can grow and where you can grow alongside them.  Values third, because someone pleasant to you but rude to a waiter has no business in leadership, and will bleed members from your organisation the moment they hold real authority.

How far ahead should you plan?  A first-time officer should plan for the next term.  Once that habit is set, plan for three years, long enough to give a club a larger plan without drifting into fantasy.

Leaders: Found, or Created?

Every person carries some leadership potential, though the degree varies.  President Dwight David “Ike” Eisenhower said, “Leadership is the art of getting someone else to do something you want done because he wants to do it.”  People follow great leaders and, in following them, become leaders themselves.  That is why this session began with personal leadership and values.  Personal leadership is integrity and responsibility.  We want people with beliefs, willing to stand up for them.  A person who tries to please everyone becomes a leader who pleases nobody, lacking the integrity anyone can trust.  Leadership is never a popularity contest.

Watch how a person treats those who offer no immediate benefit, and are unlikely ever to.  That behaviour predicts how they will act once they hold real power.  Beware of anyone indiscreet, or worse, anyone who speaks about others behind their backs.  Put such a person into authority, and the divisions that follow take years to heal.

A leadership succession system needs core values the next generation must uphold, and anyone who fails that standard should be set aside.  Fixing the consequences of bad leadership costs far more effort than being selective in recruitment and promotion from the start.  Brian Tracy said, “Become the kind of leader that people would follow voluntarily, even if you had no title or position.”

When we eventually step down, however well we performed, we will be judged by what we leave behind, and much of that judgement rests on the leadership structure we built to succeed us.  Field Marshal Bernard Law Montgomery said, “My own definition of leadership is this: the capacity and the will to rally men and women to a common purpose and the character which inspires confidence.”

We begin with the end in mind.  We secure our legacy by leaving what we built in better hands.

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