Toastmasters International’s Leadership Has a Credibility Problem, and the Numbers Prove It

Toastmasters International’s August 2026 CEO report is a public relations exercise dressed up as governance.  It is full of manufactured optimism while the underlying data tells a considerably harsher story.  If this were a listed company reporting these numbers, someone would already have lost their job.

The Membership Collapse They Ignore

From 2021 to 2025, Toastmasters International lost 34,945 members, an 11.6% decline.  At its 2020 peak, the organisation counted 364,212 members.  By 2025, that figure had fallen to 265,261.  Club numbers dropped from 15,875 in 2021 to 13,833 in 2025, a loss of over 2,000 clubs.  Global average club size has fallen to 16.38 members, down from a historical average that hovered around 20 for decades.  When we consider unique membership numbers, disregarding people with multiple club ownerships, those numbers are undoubtedly worse.

The August 2025 CEO report highlighted a 3.5% increase in average club size compared to 2023/2024, calling it the largest average club size since before the pandemic, and noted that 37 Districts achieved Distinguished status, a 12.1% year-on-year increase.  This was presented as progress.  It is not progress.  It is arithmetic performed on a shrinking base.  Lose enough clubs and members, and the survivors look healthier by comparison alone.  That is survivorship bias, not recovery.  It is consolidation, dressed up as success.

The organisation’s structural response, introduced in the August 2024 report, was the Club Excellence Initiative: a webinar, a set of resources, and a rebranded checklist called “Moments of Truth.”  The organisation has been losing clubs and members since 2019, accelerated through the pandemic, and the systemic response to a six-year decline was a webinar.

Why the Dues Increase Deserves Scrutiny

Club dues rose from US$45 in 2022 to US$60 in July 2023 to US$72 from August 2026, a 60% increase in four years.  Standard Pathways fees rose 75%, from US$20 to US$35.  Vintage path fees now sit at US$60, introduced in 2025 with no prior comparison point.  New member fees rose 25%, from US$20 to US$25.  Members are paying more across every category; now the organisation has returned to a financial surplus.

Deficits of US$6.02 million in 2023 and US$2.80 million in 2024 gave way to a US$0.57 million surplus in 2025, with net assets holding at US$42.51 million.  That improvement makes the dues increase harder to justify, not easier.  An organisation already back in the black, sitting on tens of millions in cash and investments, does not have an obvious emergency requiring a 20% dues hike on top of the 60% increase already absorbed since 2022.

The Executive Compensation Numbers

Between 2023 and 2024, staff numbers fell from 164 to 160.  Other salaries and wages fell 4.5%, from US$10.77 million to US$10.29 million.  Executive compensation rose 46.3% over the same period, from US$2.05 million to US$3.00 million, according to the organisation’s own IRS Form 990 filings.  Total payroll costs rose only 1.3%.  Staff and general salaries fell.  Executive pay rose by nearly half.  A member paying 60% more in dues since 2022 has directly subsidised a compensation increase that did not extend to the people running the meetings, filing the paperwork, or answering the emails.

District expenses rose 28.9% between 2023 and 2025, the largest increase in the entire expense breakdown.  The organisation’s own stated District Alignment initiative did not take effect until 1^st July 2026 and cannot explain an increase that had already happened before it began.  Information technology spending fell 28.8% over the same period, despite the Board explicitly citing “rising technology and cybersecurity costs” as one justification for the dues increase.  Educational materials spending fell 26.2%.  Marketing spending stayed above US$6 million every single year.  Every one of the Board’s stated justifications for the increase – reduced operating costs, streamlined staffing, rising technology costs, greater regulatory obligations, District Alignment strengthening financial viability – is either unsupported by the published evidence or directly contradicted by it.

Problem One: Pathways is a Bureaucratic Obstacle Dressed as an Education Programme

Pathways replaced the Competent Communicator and Competent Leader manuals, imperfect but immediately comprehensible, with Base Camp, a branching digital architecture of paths, levels, and elective projects, carrying an administrative overhead that disproportionately burdens the members least equipped to manage it: new joiners.

District 25 formed an entire team of “Pathways Guides” specifically to help members navigate the system, because members were experiencing what the organisation itself called “growing pains,” requiring one-on-one coaching, club presentations, and direct intervention from a dedicated support infrastructure.  An education programme requiring a support team to help people use it has a design problem, not a communication problem.

Toastmasters International itself acknowledged the system’s inadequacy by announcing a migration to a new learning management system in 2024, promising mobile support, easier path navigation, and automatic recognition submission, features that should have existed on day one of the Pathways launch in 2018.  October 2025 enhancements added mandatory meeting roles at every level, adding further administrative complexity with no corresponding benefit to a member’s actual speaking development.  The CEO reports describe Pathways as a strength.  For many members, it is the primary reason they disengage.

Problem Two: The Meeting Format Has Not Evolved in a Generation

Toastmasters meetings were designed for a world in which structured, in-person verbal practice was rare, access to a speaking audience required institutional membership, and the overhead of a weekly commitment was justified by the absence of alternatives.  None of those conditions still apply.  A person seeking speaking feedback can post a video and receive detailed critique within hours.  A person seeking practice at improvised speaking has improv classes, debate societies, and online communities offering more immediate, more specific feedback than a Toastmasters meeting structure.  A person seeking leadership development has formal corporate training, executive coaching, and MBA curricula carrying considerably more external credibility than a Toastmasters officer title.

The organisation’s response has been to celebrate Distinguished Club Programme metrics, run more contests, and issue guidance on making guests feel welcome.  None of this addresses the actual question: why would a young professional in 2026 spend two hours on a Tuesday evening at a Toastmasters meeting rather than any of the alternatives now available?  The CEO reports do not ask this question, because they do not like the answer.

Problem Three: Club Quality Variance is Catastrophic and Unaddressed

Toastmasters International’s brand promise is a consistent, high-quality learning experience.  The reality is variance so extreme that two clubs in the same city can deliver experiences that appear to belong to entirely different organisations.  One club runs a tight, intellectually stimulating programme with prepared members and rigorous evaluations.  Another meets with six members, three of them officers, an unprepared evaluator, and a Table Topics session consuming 40 minutes because nobody manages the time.

The Distinguished Club Programme measures ten administrative and numerical goals, dues paid on time, officer lists submitted, member counts above a threshold, and produces clubs that pass every administrative requirement while delivering a programme that would not retain a motivated new member for six months.  The CEO reports celebrate DCP achievement rates.  They say nothing about programme quality beneath the administrative surface.

Problem Four: The Volunteer Leadership Model is Failing under Its Own Weight

Every club runs on volunteer officers serving one-year terms, receiving limited training, then handing the club over with inadequate knowledge transfer, minimal institutional memory, and no accountability for what they leave behind.  Club Officer Training, run twice a year, remains the organisation’s primary investment in officer quality, and it is, in the assessment of most experienced Toastmasters, insufficient for the task.

The March 2025 CEO report itself described clubs whose members were “feeling burned out,” clubs where guests did not return despite members genuinely wanting them to join.  Member burnout in a volunteer organisation is not an individual failing.  It is a systemic signal that the demands placed on volunteers, officer roles, contest organisation, recruitment drives, and administrative compliance have exceeded what the volunteer model can sustain without adequate structural support.  The report identifies the burnout.  It does not address the structural cause.

Problem Five: The Organisation is Managed for World Headquarters, Not for Members

Toastmasters International generated revenue of US$38,571,257 in 2024.  The primary revenue model is membership dues, meaning financial health depends entirely on membership numbers, and those numbers have declined for five consecutive years, with only one brief, subsequently reversed, uptick.  An organisation under this financial pressure has every incentive to report progress rather than diagnose failure, celebrating whichever metrics are improving while quietly contextualising the ones that are not.

The CEO reports are addressed to the organisation’s leadership community: District Directors, Region Advisors, club officers.  They are not addressed to the member who joined six months ago, attended eight meetings, found Pathways confusing, received a generic evaluation on their last speech, and is now deciding whether to renew.  That member’s experience is the organisation’s actual product.  The CEO reports say very little about it.

In Summary

Toastmasters International is not in decline because of the pandemic, though the pandemic accelerated it.  It is not in decline because of competition, though competition has intensified.  It is in decline because the product itself, the meeting experience, the educational curriculum, the volunteer support infrastructure, has not kept pace with the expectations of the audience it is trying to attract and retain.

The organisation knows this.  Its own reports acknowledge average club size has fallen from a historical 20 to 16.38, and call on clubs to “do everything we can” to return to that figure.  They do not explain why the number fell.  They do not detail what programme changes are required to recover it.  They do not explain how an organisation that lost nearly 35,000 members in four years intends to reverse a structural trend through better guest follow-up and a rebranded initiative, while simultaneously raising executive compensation 46.3% and dues 60% in the same window.

The data is there.  The diagnosis is absent.  A CEO report structured this way is not a management document.  It is a morale document, written for people who need to believe things are improving, rather than for people who need to understand why they are not.  Daniel Rex, Chief Executive Officer of Toastmasters International since 2015, and the organisation’s Board of Directors, owe members considerably more than that.  The clubs doing the actual work, building real programmes, developing real leaders, producing real results, deserve leadership willing to tell them the truth, not a Board that raises its own compensation by nearly half while asking the membership to pay for it twice over.

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

Toastmasters Speech Evaluations: Dissecting the Message

George Bernard Shaw, the Irish playwright and social activist, allegedly observed that the United States and Great Britain are two countries separated by a common language.  The same trap awaits any Toastmasters programme that skips its own vocabulary.  An evaluation is a judgement, an assessment.  In this context, it concerns a speech delivered.  The word itself traces to the mid-nineteenth century, from the French “évaluer”, a portmanteau built from the Latin “ex-”, meaning “out,” and the Old French “value”.  It means, quite literally, to draw the value out of something.  That etymology is not decoration.  It is the entire job description.

The Purpose of Evaluation

Project evaluation serves two functions, and most people only remember the first.  The obvious one is technical: assessing a speech’s structure, its points of acclamation, its points for improvement.  The second function is the actual reason Toastmasters exists in the first place.  The evaluator must ensure there is a next speech, and another after that.  He must encourage, educate, and inspire the speaker.  An evaluation that fails to accomplish this has failed, regardless of how technically accurate its criticism was.

What an Evaluator Does Not Do

Evaluators overstep their role constantly, and the mistakes are not confined to beginners.  Senior Toastmasters, ironically, commit several of these errors more often than newcomers, having grown comfortable enough to forget the boundaries of the job.

Recounting the speech is the first and most obvious error.  The audience already heard it.  Re-enacting or repeating the project speech entertains nobody and helps the speaker even less.

Duplicating the roles of the language evaluator and the ah counter is the second.  The language evaluator addresses grammar, morphology, and rhetorical devices, not the structure of the speech itself.  The ah counter tracks pauses and filler words, and a competent one explains where and why they occurred so the speaker can correct them.  Neither role belongs to the project evaluator, and folding their work into his own is redundant, not thorough.

Becoming personally involved in the speech is the third, and it afflicts senior Toastmasters and Distinguished Toastmasters with particular regularity.  The audience exists to be moved emotionally by the speaker.  The evaluator exists to notice that movement without being consumed by it.  Just as the speaker adopts a speaker persona, the evaluator must adopt an evaluator persona, remaining neutral, above the emotional current of the room.  An evaluator swayed by pathos cannot honestly assess whether the pathos actually worked.

Making the evaluation about oneself is the fourth, and perhaps the most self-indulgent.  Bringing knowledge to an evaluation is necessary.  Bringing the baggage of personal experience is not.  Even where the evaluator has walked the same road, eaten the same food, met the same people described in the speech, the story belongs to the speaker.  It is his hero’s journey, not an invitation for the evaluator to reminisce about his own.

The Structure of an Effective Speech

Evaluating a speech properly requires understanding what a good speech actually is.  A good speech is a complete journey.  It opens with a statement, sometimes framed as a rhetorical question.  It expands on that statement, carries the audience through development, and argues a cogent, coherent position designed to sway them toward it.  It then returns home, circling back to the opening statement, now transformed into a call to action, propelling the audience to continue the hero’s journey on their own terms.

Depending on the audience and material, the speech must balance logos, pathos, and ethos.  The speaker wears the mantle of the speaker persona, and his task is convincing the audience that he channels their own thoughts, hopes, and fears back at them.  That is what the evaluator is listening for.

Coherency

The first thing to assess is the logic of the argument, its coherency.  An incoherent speech loses the audience, and the spell breaks.  The evaluator’s job is identifying exactly where that incoherency occurred and addressing it directly.  Where the speech is cogent and contextual, the evaluator must say so, and explain why, because good work can always become better work, and both directions deserve equal attention.

Values

Next comes the ethical dimension of the hero’s journey: whether the speaker’s actions align with the story and the character he has presented.  A disconnect between stated belief and demonstrated action is the evaluator’s responsibility to flag.  Alignment deserves the same attention, highlighted specifically to reinforce what the speaker is already doing correctly.  There is always a reason people do what they do, and become who they become.  The evaluator’s task is understanding that reason well enough to name it.

The Emotional Rollercoaster

People are, ultimately, creatures of feeling, prisoners of their own history, their fears, their melancholy, their hatreds, their loves, their hopes.  Every listener searches for themselves inside every story told.  The evaluator’s job is noticing where the delivery and the story align, and where they diverge, and naming both honestly.

“Vocal Variety”

Few phrases in Toastmasters have been reduced to meaningless filler as thoroughly as “vocal variety.”  What does it actually mean?  How does it affect the speech in question?  Which direction, specifically, should the speaker move toward?  A speech is not a play.  It is not a re-enactment of a life event staged for dramatic effect.  It is a recounting of an event, carrying a message and an intent.  Nobody is performing Shakespeare in the Park.  Any recommendation involving vocal variety must be quantifiable and measurable, or it collapses into cliché, offering the speaker nothing he can actually act on.

“Use the Stage”

The instruction to “use the stage” suffers the identical fate.  Not every speech requires movement, and treating stage movement as a universal virtue ignores context entirely.  A speaker delivering remarks in the capacity of a public officeholder or policymaker should not be wandering the stage.  He is the focal point of the room, and his task is capturing that attention and holding it without dilution.  Movement, in that context, breaks the gravitas the moment demands.  At its worst, it signals indecision, incredulity, even a lack of credibility, precisely the opposite of what the speaker is trying to project.

Three Points, or You Are Nagging

The evaluation itself begins by addressing the speaker directly.  For the duration of that evaluation, he is the centre of the room, and the evaluator’s own presence becomes secondary to his hero’s journey.  My own preference runs to three points of acclamation and three points for improvement, no more.  There is frequently more worth saying, and resisting the urge to say all of it is the entire discipline.  Detailed analysis belongs to a mentor, working privately and at length.  The evaluator’s role is highlighting the good and the bad clearly enough for the whole room to learn from it, not producing an exhaustive breakdown nobody in the audience has the capacity to absorb in one sitting.  Exceed three points, and the lesson goes over everyone’s head, or worse, demoralises the speaker entirely.

What to Avoid

Newer evaluators frequently apologise for their own feedback.  This is a mistake.  Apologising for an honest assessment diminishes both the evaluator’s credibility and his own confidence, and the words a person hears himself say shape him as much as they shape his audience.

No evaluator should ever claim a speech was perfect.  That is a lie, and everyone in the room knows it.  No such speech exists.  However strong a speech is, another point of improvement is always available.

Some evaluators swing to the opposite extreme, denigrating the speaker outright.  This is equally wrong.  Nobody begins as a finished speaker.  That is the entire reason project speeches and evaluations exist in the first place.  Being trusted to evaluate someone’s hero’s journey is a privilege, not a licence to tear it down.

Summarising

Every evaluation must close with a statement of broad intent, one that inspires the speaker toward the next speech rather than away from public speaking altogether.  Watch for breadth versus depth, the credibility of the story, the veracity of sources and quotations, and the transition between points.  A credible speech rests on verified facts and properly attributed quotes.  I am particular, deliberately so, about quotation attribution and scientific accuracy.  Far too many speeches lean on cliché built from misconception, outright fabrication, or superstition.  A good speech educates.  It does not spread misinformation dressed up as inspiration.

Beating the Clock

Time management follows its own discipline.  A speech evaluation runs roughly three minutes for a reason.  Psychologically, tolerance for sustained criticism is limited, which makes diplomacy in delivery an art in itself, one that must still elevate and inspire the speaker rather than simply cushion the blow.  By the green light, the evaluator should have covered every point of acclamation and begun the recommendations.  By the yellow light, he should be transitioning toward the summary.  By the red light, that summary should already be underway.  Thirty seconds remains more than sufficient to close.

In Closing

Speech evaluations form one half of the Toastmasters journey, and a genuinely capable Toastmaster is proficient in both halves of effective communication: the ability to speak, honed through project speeches, and the ability to understand, honed through project evaluations.  Neglect either half, and the whole discipline remains unfinished.

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

Nobody Elected You to Try Your Best

 Most new Toastmasters club officers will fail.  This is not because they lack goodwill or enthusiasm.  They will fail because they mistake the title for the job.  Seventy per cent of Toastmasters clubs miss Distinguished Club Programme status every single year.  Roughly forty per cent of clubs that lapse do so within three years of charter.  The cause, in the overwhelming majority of cases, is not member apathy.  It is officer failure.  It is not the members who let the club down.  It is the people who put “President” or “Vice-President” on their LinkedIn profile and then discovered that a title is not a competency.

The structural problems of a Toastmasters Executive Committee are the structural problems of every organisation.  Leadership does not change character because the stakes are smaller.  It changes scale.  The failure modes stay the same.

The Illusion of Competence

Dr. David Alan Dunning and Dr. Justin Kruger published their landmark study in 1999.  The finding still embarrasses people twenty-five years later.  Incompetent individuals overestimate their own competence, precisely because they lack the metacognitive machinery to see the gap.  In a Toastmasters club, this shows up as the member who attended meetings for two years and concludes they understand how the club runs.  They do not.  Watching a meeting and running one occupy entirely different cognitive territory.  The member discovers this the moment they take office.  By then, the damage has usually started.

Aristotle made a related point in the Nicomachean Ethics, two thousand four hundred years before Dunning and Kruger got their names on a bias.  A person is not virtuous because they once acted virtuously.  Virtue is a disposition, sustained across time and pressure. Leadership works the same way.  You are not a leader because you hold a title.  You are a leader when you exercise leadership consistently, particularly on the days you would rather not.

Niccolò di Bernardo dei Machiavelli offered a diagnostic tool for spotting this early. “The first method for estimating the intelligence of a ruler is to look at the men he has around him,” he wrote in The Prince.  Apply that to a club.  The first method for judging a Toastmasters club is to look at who stood for office and who the membership elected.  A club that routinely elects the unprepared has a culture problem.  Training will not fix a culture problem.  Only the membership can.

Three Tiers, Constantly Confused

Every officer operates at one of three levels — strategic, tactical, or operational.  Confusing them is expensive.  The President sets direction, owns the relationship with the sponsoring organisation, and builds the succession pipeline from day one.  The Vice-Presidents translate that direction into term plans, recruitment pipelines, and educational programmes.  The Secretary, Treasurer, and Sergeant-at-Arms keep the machine running week to week — records, funds, the room.

Plato drew this same tripartite structure in the Republic two millennia before anyone wrote an organisational chart.  Philosopher-kings direct.  Auxiliaries execute.  Craftsmen sustain.  Break any one layer and the whole structure collapses.  A President who personally sets up chairs has not demonstrated humility.  He has demonstrated that nobody trained the Sergeant-at-Arms, and that he does not trust anyone else to do it properly.  That is not devotion.  That is a governance failure wearing a modest smile.

Xenophon’s Cyropaedia makes the same point through Cyrus the Great, who delegated deliberately and held each tier accountable for outcomes, not effort.  Cyrus did not run the Persian imperial administration personally.  He built a structure where each level was resourced and accountable, then left it alone to function.  A President who is everywhere has not built a team. He has built a dependency, and dependencies collapse the moment he takes a fortnight off.

Role ambiguity is not a soft, forgivable failing either.  Dr. Susan E. Jackson’s and Dr. Randall S. Schuler’s 1985 meta-analysis, covering thirty-five years of role stress research, found that ambiguity about what a position actually requires directly impairs performance, raises anxiety, and reduces commitment.  In a volunteer organisation, where the rewards are intrinsic and patience for frustration is thin, ambiguity is corrosive faster than in any paid workplace.  This is why the training session exists.  It is not a courtesy.  It is damage control performed in advance.

The President: On the Spot, Not in the Room

Arthur Wellesley, 1^st Duke of Wellington, did not win at Waterloo through inspirational speeches.  He won because, in the weeks before June 1815, he personally reviewed supply lines and officer dispositions with an obsessiveness his peers found excessive.  “I was always on the spot,” he said afterwards, without a trace of false modesty.  The Toastmasters President who delegates everything and then vanishes until the annual awards night is not exercising trust.  He is discovering that the position he assumed he held has quietly eroded while he was not looking.

Contrast that with Charles-Maurice de Talleyrand-Périgord, who served under six French regimes — the Ancien Régime, the Revolution, the Directory, Napoleon, the Restoration, and the July Monarchy — and outlasted every one of them.  He did not survive through ideological flexibility alone.  He survived because he was genuinely, reliably good at his job.  Competence, not charm, is the only form of job security that no regime change can take away from you.  Officers who chase popularity over competence should remember that popularity has never once paid Toastmasters International's dues on time.

Talleyrand also understood restraint.  “Too much zeal offends where indirection works,” he warned.  Apply that to the micromanaging President who corrects every Vice-President’s every decision.  Constant intervention does not signal high standards.  It signals distrust, and it destroys the initiative of the very officers you are supposedly developing.  If you appointed the wrong people, that is your failure at selection.  If you appointed the right people and still cannot let them work, that is a different failure, and it is entirely yours as well.

Vice-President, Education: Building Habits, Not Counting Speeches

Aristotle’s concept of telos — the natural end towards which an activity is directed — cuts straight through the most common failure of this role.  The purpose of the educational programme is not speeches delivered.  It is members developed.  A Vice-President, Education, who fills the schedule without asking whether each speech advances a member’s actual goals, has confused busyness with effectiveness.  “We are what we repeatedly do.  Excellence, then, is not an act, but a habit,” Aristotle wrote, and the educational programme is, at bottom, a habit-formation system — for prepared delivery, for constructive evaluation, for listening.

Dr. Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s 1990 work on flow states adds the calibration mechanism.  Human beings perform best at the boundary between current capability and the next level up.  Too easy, and boredom sets in.  Too difficult, and anxiety takes over.  A new member thrown into an advanced Pathways project will panic and quietly disappear.  A veteran member handed nothing, but Ice Breaker-level roles will get bored and drift.  The Vice-President, Education, who does not know exactly where each member sits in their journey, cannot calibrate anything.  They are guessing, and guessing is not a programme.

The Prussian General Staff, refined under Field Marshal Helmuth Karl Bernhard Graf von Moltke, ran on a principle called Auftragstaktik — mission-based tactics.  Commanders issued clear intent, the what and the why, and left the how to subordinates trusted to exercise judgement.  The Vice-President, Education, should run the same model.  Communicate the goal — the Pathways target, the DCP contribution — clearly.  Then collaborate on the how, rather than dictating it.  A member who understands why they are doing a project prepares for it properly.  A member who has simply been handed a slot does not.

Vice-President, Membership: Guarding the Ones You Already Have

Plato’s guardians in the Republic were charged with preserving the existing community, not merely acquiring new territory.  Apply that to membership.  A club known for the quality of its member experience recruits based on reputation.  A club known for losing people recruits against its own reputation, and no amount of enthusiastic prospecting fixes that . The member who attended three months ago and quietly stopped deserves as much attention as the prospect who might attend next month.

Prof. Abraham Harold Maslow’s hierarchy places belongingness above physiological and safety needs, and below esteem and self-actualisation.  Members join Toastmasters for belonging as much as for skill.  They leave when belonging disappears, quietly, without drama, and usually without telling anyone why.  Dr. Teresa M. Amabile’s and Dr. Steven J. Kramer’s 2011 research, The Progress Principle, found that the single strongest driver of workplace motivation is visible progress on meaningful work.  It translates directly here.  Members who see themselves completing Pathways levels and taking on new roles do not need retention campaigns.  They stay because the experience itself rewards them.  Which means the Vice-President, Membership, and Vice-President, Education, are not separate departments.  They are the same retention mechanism, wearing two different hats.

The Athenian expedition to Sicily in 415 BC, recorded by Thucydides, remains the definitive case study in acquisition without consolidation.  Athens poured enormous resources into conquering new territory while neglecting the political cohesion and logistics needed to sustain the campaign.  The result was total destruction — not because recruitment of soldiers failed, but because nothing existed to sustain them once they arrived.  A Vice-President, Membership, who recruits aggressively while ignoring onboarding and mentorship is running the same experiment, with a marginally lower body count.

Vice-President, Public Relations: Reputation Is Not Decoration

Talleyrand again, this time at the Congress of Vienna, 1814–1815, representing a defeated France and somehow restoring its standing as a major European power — not through military recovery, but through the deliberate management of perception.  Perception is not a substitute for substance.  It is the vehicle that carries the substance to people who have never experienced it directly.

Asch's 1946 experiments on impression formation showed that information received first carries disproportionate weight in the final judgement — the primacy effect.  Dr. Edward Lee Thorndike’s Halo Effect, documented in 1920, showed that a positive impression in one domain bleeds into unrelated domains. A club whose first external touchpoint — a LinkedIn post, a web page — is polished and specific benefits from that halo.  Prospects assume the meetings themselves are equally professional.  A shoddy first touchpoint produces the identical effect in reverse, and no amount of quality inside the room will undo the damage of a bad first impression outside it.

The British SAS maintains a formal policy of never confirming or denying specific operations, and its global reputation remains unchallenged regardless, built on a small number of precisely chosen disclosures rather than volume.  Data from 2024 confirms the same principle at the Toastmasters scale.  LinkedIn posts featuring genuine member spotlights generate three times the engagement of generic club announcements.  A Vice-President, Public Relations, who posts once a month and calls it done has not done the job.  Specificity is the currency.  Noise is not a substitute for it.

Club Secretary: The Custodian Nobody Thanks

Roman administrators called this function the custos — the keeper. Rome’s extraordinary administrative durability across centuries rested on accurate, accessible records.  The Toastmasters Secretary occupies the same function on a smaller stage.  The charter, the Constitution, the minutes, the correspondence with World Headquarters — these are not bureaucratic trivia.  They are the documentary foundation of the club’s legal standing and institutional memory.

Napoleon Bonaparte dictated to multiple secretaries simultaneously and left behind over 22,000 letters and dispatches, preserved in the 32-volume Correspondance de Napoléon Ier.  He understood that an order unwritten is an order unverifiable, and an unverifiable order invites misunderstanding and evasion.  A motion passed in an Executive Committee meeting and never recorded in the minutes has the same practical effect as a motion never passed.  It cannot be enforced.  It cannot be appealed.  It cannot be built upon.

Dr. Murray R. Barrick’s and Dr. Michael K. Mount’s 1991 meta-analysis of over one hundred studies identified Conscientiousness as the single strongest personality predictor of job performance across nearly every occupational category.  The Secretary role demands it above every other trait.  A candidate who tends toward disorganisation and procrastination will fail in this role regardless of intelligence, charm, or enthusiasm.  Clubs that lose their charter rarely cite Secretary failure as the headline cause.  Check the timeline anyway.  The collapse almost always started there.

Club Treasurer: The Barings Problem in Miniature

In February 1995, a single trader in Singapore brought down Barings Bank — Britain’s oldest merchant bank, in business since 1762.  Nicholas William Leeson accumulated losses of £827 million because he controlled both the trading desk and the back-office settlement function simultaneously.  Nobody was watching the watcher.

The constitutional rule barring a Toastmasters Treasurer from serving two successive terms is not bureaucratic pedantry.  It is a direct, unsentimental response to exactly this failure pattern.  Long incumbency breeds comfort.  Comfort breeds informal shortcuts. Informal shortcuts, left unchecked long enough, breed catastrophe.  John Emerich Edward Dalberg-Acton, 1^st Baron Acton, put the underlying principle more elegantly than I ever could in his 1887 letter to Bishop Mandell Creighton: “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.”  A club that lets one person control the books indefinitely, without independent review by the Club Auditors, is not showing loyalty.  It is running the Barings experiment on a smaller, marginally less expensive scale.

Sergeant-at-Arms: The Environment Is the Message

The Broken Windows theory, proposed by criminologists Dr. James Quin Wilson and Dr. George L. Kelling in a 1982 Atlantic Monthly article, argued that visible disorder — broken windows, graffiti — signals the absence of social control and invites more of it.  A meeting room with a crooked banner, scattered chairs, and no one at the door sends the identical signal, and prospective members read it instantly, without needing to hear a single speech.

Xenophon’s Anabasis records his leadership of ten thousand Greek mercenaries retreating through hostile Persian territory in 401 BC after their generals were murdered. Strategic brilliance would have meant nothing if the army had starved on the march.  Survival depended entirely on operational execution — food, discipline, logistics.  The Sergeant-at-Arms is the club’s Xenophon.  Nobody applauds a straight banner.  Everybody notices, instantly and unforgivingly, when the room is a shambles.

The British Household Division inspects ceremonial uniforms to the nearest millimetre and rehearses drill movements thousands of times before a single public performance.  The purpose is not aesthetic vanity.  It is reputational signalling — every correct detail communicates that the institution takes itself seriously.  A Sergeant-at-Arms who sets the room to that same standard, thirty minutes before the meeting, rather than at the same time as it, is performing the identical function on a smaller stage.

How the Roles Interlock, and Why Systems Thinking Beats Talent

Dr. Donella Hager Meadows, in Thinking in Systems (2008), described the characteristic failure of any system run by people who understand their individual components but not the feedback loops connecting them.  Each officer optimises their own patch rationally, while the combined effect quietly degrades the whole.  A Vice-President, Membership, who recruits aggressively to hit a personal target, without checking programme capacity with Vice-President, Education, is creating a systemic problem while hitting an individual one.

The 1986 Challenger disaster remains the definitive case study.  The immediate cause was an O-ring failure.  The real cause was a communication breakdown between engineers who knew about the O-ring’s cold-weather limitations and a launch decision made without that knowledge crossing the organisational boundary in time.  The knowledge existed.  The mechanism to transmit it did not. Every Executive Committee runs the identical risk, on a mercifully lower-stakes stage, whenever officers stop talking to each other between meetings.

Attribution theory, developed by Dr. Fritz Heider and extended by Dr. Harold Harding Kelley and Dr. Bernard Weiner, shows that people systematically credit outcomes either to internal factors — their own effort and competence — or external ones, circumstances and bad luck.  Underperforming officers reliably reach for the external explanation.  “The members did not engage enough.”  “The timing was difficult.”  Distinguished Club Programme goals are specific, internal, and entirely within an officer's control.  They do not respond to market conditions.  An officer who misses a goal and blames the weather has learned nothing, and has simply protected their own ego at the club’s expense.

The Standard Has Not Changed, and It Isn't Going To

Plato’s ship of state offers the closing image.  A ship navigated by someone who does not understand celestial navigation will founder, regardless of how hard the navigator tries. Passengers do not care about effort.  They care about arriving.  An officer who tries hard and still misses the outcome has, from the members’ perspective, delivered the same result as an officer who never tried at all.  That is an uncomfortable sentence.  It is meant to be.

You were not elected to try your best.  You were elected to deliver a specific, measurable outcome.  Generalmajor Carl Philipp Gottfried von Clausewitz called the discipline required to see that through Entschlussigkeit — resoluteness of character, the courage to act decisively through friction and the thousand small difficulties that erode weaker commanders before the first real test arrives.  Resolution on the first day of term is easy.  Resolution sustained through the eleventh month, when nobody is watching, and the energy has drained out of the room, is the only version that counts.

The seven officer roles are not seven equal contributions to be graded on a curve.  They are seven necessary functions.  Remove one, and the whole degrades visibly and immediately, in front of the very members you were elected to serve.  An officer who does not understand their role has not merely failed themselves.  They have failed everyone who trusted them with it.

Aristotle’s eudaimonia — flourishing, not mere happiness — describes what's actually on offer here, if you take the role seriously.  The officer who publishes the programme on time, tracks the DCP goals, retains members, manages the accounts with precision, and sets the room before anyone else arrives is not simply doing a job competently.  They are exercising their full capacities in service of something worthwhile, which is as close to a definition of flourishing as Aristotle ever gave us.  The alternative — holding a title and exercising none of its responsibilities — is not a lesser version of the same thing.  It is a different thing entirely, and a considerably poorer one.

Know your role.  Own your role.  Execute your role.  There genuinely is no fourth option, however much certain officers wish there were.

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

Samples for the Profane Lexicon: A Dictionary for the Linguistically Liberated

The next time I am the Language Evaluator, we may have a different type of Word of the Day.  The following is my contribution to The Profane Lexicon: A Dictionary for the Linguistically Liberated.  This is compiled for those who find the Oxford English Dictionary insufficiently honest about the human condition.  I am committed to expanding your vocabulary, the first step toward accurately describing your life.

Bitchcraft (n.)

The dark art of passive aggression, weaponised eyerolling, and strategically timed silence.  Practitioners require no cauldron — only a group chat and unresolved grievances.  Not to be confused with witchcraft, which at least has the decency to be straightforward about its intentions.

Clitastrophe (n.)

Any situation so spectacularly mishandled that it could only have been caused by someone who has never found a clitoris, and believes it to be a myth.  Commonly observed in boardrooms, government policy, and first dates.

Clusterfuck (n.)

A bureaucratic masterpiece.  The natural endpoint of any project involving committees, insufficient budget, and too many people with opinions.  Recognised by its three defining features: nobody is in charge, everyone is to blame, and the deadline was yesterday.

Craptacular (adj.)

Achieving a level of mediocrity so consistently, it is almost impressive.  Reserved for performances, presentations, and airline meals that somehow manage to disappoint even after expectations have been set at zero.

Crapulence (n.)

The studied display of wealth, influence, or taste by someone who has absolutely none of the above.  Closely related to opulence, except the marble is vinyl, the watch is duty-free, and the accent is borrowed.

Dickopotamus (n.)

A large, territorial individual who occupies disproportionate space — physically, conversationally, or professionally — and becomes aggressive when anyone attempts to enter their domain.  Flourishes in open-plan offices and family WhatsApp groups.

Dicksplash (n.)

The minor but deeply irritating consequence of someone else’s poor judgement landing directly on you.  You were standing nearby, minding your own business, and now you are involved.  See also: colleague, relative, any idiot who cc-ed you unnecessarily.

Fantesticle (adj.)

Describing an outcome so unexpectedly excellent that one suspects either cheating or divine intervention.  Used sparingly, because the universe tends to course-correct swiftly after anything this good happens.

Pisswizard (n.)

One who possesses an uncanny ability to conjure problems from nothing, transform simple situations into emergencies, and disappear entirely when the consequences arrive.  Found in senior management and on project steering committees.  Also, found in many a Toastmaster project.

Shitgibbon (n.)

An individual of notable agility in avoiding responsibility, swinging effortlessly from one excuse to the next while producing a trail of disorder.  Highly vocal, rarely useful, and surprisingly difficult to remove from any organisation.  Their natural habitat is the unnecessary meeting.

Thundercunt (n.)

Not merely unpleasant — magnificently, operatically unpleasant.  The “thunder” is essential: this is not petty or incidental antagonism.  This is someone who has committed to the role with their whole chest and a complete absence of self-awareness.

Vagician (n.)

One who makes things disappear — deadlines, budgets, accountability, your will to continue — through means that remain technically inexplicable.  The vagician leaves no evidence, accepts no credit, and is somehow always on annual leave when the audit begins.

Terence Nunis | Division Advisor, Division M | Club Advisor | Vice-President, Education, Awesome Toastmasters

Quora Answer: Can Toastmasters Make Me Outgoing?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Can Toastmasters make me outgoing?” 

Toastmasters, by itself, is not going to change your underlying characteristics.  Joining Toastmasters, and actually taking advantage of the programme, will make you more confident when it comes to speaking, and interacting with others.  It will not make you speak more, or be more gregarious.  That requires changes in your psychology.

Quora Answer: Does Toastmasters Help with Public Speaking?

The following is my answer to a Quora question: “Does Toastmasters help with public speaking?” 

The Toastmasters programme is geared towards helping people become better public speakers, as an aspect of leadership.  Joining a good club, getting a competent mentor, and taking up appointment roles in meetings guarantees that by the end of the completion of one Pathway programme, you will be a competent, confident speaker.