Executive
Leadership Seminar 2024: Scaling New Heights, Built on More Than a Slogan
Toastmasters
is a programme that boldly states this is where leaders are made. This programme exists to make good on that
promise. Inspirational leadership is a
skill that 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
accumulated 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 toward it. The best leaders develop other leaders,
nurture talent, and inspire them, and the best teams are built from precisely
this kind of leader. To that end, our
group of Toastmasters organised the Executive Leadership Seminar 2024 on the
21st of June 2024, at One Farrer Hotel’s Grand Ballroom.
Why
Leadership Cannot Be Reduced to a Single Style
There
is no one type of leader or leadership style.
What exists are broad, theoretical definitions of leadership, and even
these bear little relation to leadership as it is practised, since they
interpret reality without nuance. Every
person carries their own history, their own talents, their own prejudices. Leadership is developed by finding the common
denominator of humanity underneath all of that and building something new from
what each person already is. Leadership
begins with values, not with a formula.
The
Centre for Creative Leadership’s well-established 70-20-10 model reflects this
same conclusion from a different direction: roughly 70% of leadership
development comes from challenging, real-world experience, 20% from
relationships and mentorship, and only 10% from formal instruction. A single seminar, however well designed, was
never going to hand anyone a finished leadership style. It exists to sharpen the 20% and point people
toward the 70% they still have to earn on their own.
Why
“Scaling New Heights” Was the Right Theme for the Moment
The
theme was “Scaling New Heights,” addressing leadership in a new era:
post-pandemic, having just exited an unprecedentedly high inflationary period,
and grappling with the onset of the climate crisis. Median global inflation rose from 1.9% in the
third quarter of 2020 to 8.7% by the third quarter of 2022, its highest level
since the mid-1990s, a shock that reshaped how every organisation planned its
next five years. A leadership seminar
convened in mid-2024 was not addressing an abstract, hypothetical
disruption. It was addressing a
disruption every participant in the room had already lived through, personally
and professionally, within the preceding two years.
The
Sustainability Thread Running Through Every Session
The
sub-theme of the programme was sustainability, addressed, in part, at every
panel. Four panel sessions ran across
the day, each covering a distinct aspect of leadership congruent with the
programme’s overall title. Each session
ran for sixty minutes, moderated by one facilitator, with up to four speakers
contributing throughout the hour.
Building sustainability into every panel, rather than isolating it as a
single dedicated session, forced every speaker to confront the theme from their
own specific vantage point: leadership under resource constraint, leadership
across generational shift, leadership through economic disruption, rather than
treating it as a subject someone else was responsible for covering.
Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District
80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder,
Awesome Toastmasters
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