There's a little-known truth in Toastmasters (TM) about leadership. It's a secret.
As an organization, Toastmasters gives you the opportunity to practice leadership, but it does not help you transition into it. Do you know what is leadership?
If you don't have any experience whatsoever, it may seem like anyone can simply and magically become a leader just by taking an officer's position and doing what's described in the TM literature for the "leadership" position.
Truth is, there's a huge gap — a transition that's required to go from follower to leader.
The crucial gap or step is mastering management.
This is the secret. There could be other ways of describing it, but without acknowledging this, many officers mess up or get burned out. It's sadly unmentioned in many clubs, so it's indeed a secret that few people in TM know about.
In most organizations (outside of TM), people are never elevated from follower directly to leader just for the asking. Instead, they're first promoted to management. The titles could be something like Job Captain, Supervisor, even Team Leader with the catchy but misleading word "leader" right in the title. Some titles may seem powerful and sound wonderful. But it's still only management.
Management is work. Management is the processes, tasks, and activities required to reach a team goal. Management involves planning, organizing, and coordinating with others and with available resources. Management involves administrative functions and tasks.
Management is also communication. Savvy communication is not just vocal, not just writing, but all the nuances and etiquette that humans require to understand an idea. It's about how to share and how to work together as a team. You have to convey your thoughts clearly, concisely, and quickly.
Sure, management involves some form of leading, but the focus is different.
Leadership, in comparison, is about inspiring, guiding, and influencing others. It's not just making decisions. It's team building, conflict resolution, motivation. The best leaders create energy, recognize energy, and maintain energy. And it's also very much about effective communication, perhaps more so than in management.
Effective leadership requires having excellent management skills. One builds on the other.
This is why most organizations fill their executive vacancies only with people that have the strongest management skills and a lot of experience. They never just pluck a member to insert into a role to lead the entire organization.
Without managerial or administrative skills (management skills), anyone trying to lead a group becomes a blind authoritarian, unaware and unaffected by others. It's just not rational. The better you are in basic management, the better you are a basic leader.
Then you build from there.
Do you have enough managerial skills to become a good leader?
Are you willing to learn, to practice managing, and to actually help do the work of running a club?
These questions are never asked in Toastmasters. TM only promotes leadership, but it's really management that's critically missing as a stepping stone to leadership.
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