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Welcome to the District 84, Division A blog. In order to streamline our communications and provide you with the most accurate up to date information we have established this blog. Blog posts will be made by our Division A Governor Bob Haataia, DTM as well as each of the Area Governors. This will inform you of all the toastmasters activities happening in Division A. Feel free to select "Join this site" in the followers section to show your support. Thank you and we are looking forward to a great toastmasters year!

Saturday, February 6, 2010

Dr. Lorraine Haataia Serves as TLI Chairman

Dr. Lorraine Haataia, Immediate Past President of Baywood Toastmasters, led Toastmasters Leadership Institute (TLI) for Division A & F on Saturday, February 6, 2010. She coordinated the event using Toastmasters Training Club Leaders manual and Toastmasters High Performance Leadership (HPL) manual.

If you're familiar with the HPL project, you know that one of the first requirements is to recruit a guidance committee and to define the project vision, mission and values.

In addition, the project chairman is also responsible for defining her own duties as well as the duties of other leaders who will be involved in the project. Here are the duties that Lorraine outlined for the TLI Chairman:

TLI Chairman

The purpose of this position is to ensure the overall success of Toastmasters Leadership Training. Key responsibilities for the position include:
  • Review and follow guidelines provided in Toastmasters Club Officer Training Program http://www.toastmasters.org/217_training.aspx
  • Recruit a guidance committee consisting of a minimum of three people with prior experience leading a Toastmasters Leadership Institute event.
  • Recruit chairman team to oversee all the major areas of the event.
  • Prepare and distribute a chairman contact sheet including all phone numbers, emails and photos.
  • Work with the guidance committee to develop the vision, mission, values, goals, project plan, and timetables for the event. Share with the chairmen and ask for feedback.
  • Set up and conduct guidance committee meetings in all five stages of the event from planning through presentation of the results.
  • Define the roles & responsibilities of all the chairmen positions and communicate with all chairmen to make adjustments as needed.
  • Hold periodic progress review meetings with chairmen as needed.
  • Handle obstacles, setbacks and problems as they arise.
  • Recognize and thank chairmen and guidance committee at the TLI event.
  • Prepare “lessons learned” from this event to pass on to the next TLI event chairman.
  • Give two presentations to Toastmasters club: the first on the vision during the event planning & preparation stage, and a second to present the results of the event.
  • Share results and documents with next TLI Chairman to ensure continuous improvement of this event.
Following is a list of eight additional chairmen who led this event. Click on any of the titles below for a complete description of position responsibilities:
As Toastmasters, we are committed to seeking feedback so that we can continue to improve our communication skills and grow our leadership skills. From Lorraine's perspective, she believes that TLI had the following positive outcomes:
  • The majority of the area governors voluntarily took on a great deal of responsibility, as chairman and as presenters, to make TLI a successful event for their club leaders.
  • About 132 club officers attended the training and many of them served in some type of volunteer role as well.
  • All of the major activities necessary for pulling off an event this large happened on time and within budget.
And here are a few suggestions from Lorraine to improve future TLI events:
  • The area governors who served as chairman and presenters had too much responsibility for one day. Lorraine recommends that they serve as a chairman or as a presenter, but not both on the same day. This is a great opportunity for area governors to practice delegation by recruiting leaders from their clubs to serve as presenters or chairmen.
  • Only about a third of the participants stayed until the end. Asking people to dedicate five or six hours to this event on a Saturday is too long, especially for the volunteers and for those who have a longer commute. That's probably why so many people cut out early. We started at 8 AM and ended at 12:30 PM. To improve attendance in the future, Lorraine suggests running only two simultaneous training sessions instead of three. That will shorten the event by an hour and still allow plenty of choices for elective sessions.
  • Hold only one officer session for each position so that all the officers in the areas are in the room together and can share all their ideas. Instead of having only one speaker for an entire hour, have a facilitator monitor panel discussions where 3-5 people can give their perspective on the officer positions. The officers can still come prepared to give a brief overview highlighting what they believe are the most important elements of the position.
  • Division A & F each have four area governors, each of which have about 4-5 clubs in their areas, and each club has seven officers. That means that we have about 225+ club officers at any given time in our combined NE Florida divisions. Let's challenge our next TLI chair and division governors to increase our officer attendance from from 60% to closer to 70%!
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