Yay, Ted’s home in just a few hours!
I’m never sure if I love this situation or hate it: when your manager is a hardass about something you’ve already been a hardass about. On the one hand, at least you know you’re going in the right direction and now you have backing. On the other, usually at that point you’ve already been arguing and cutting waste in all the ways you can think of, and now you have to do more with no idea where to go. I guess that’s what they have managers for, to be second level hardasses.
In this latest iteration of that problem, it’s about Toastmasters rather than actual work so I’m not breaching any confidentiality if I describe the situation.
We have just started a new Toastmasters chapter – at least at the moment all members are employees and we meet after work in the building. I got pushed into being VP Education, which means I have to set up the schedule for the meetings – each meeting has prepared speeches, impromptu speeches, and speech evaluations. We have ‘sponsors’, experienced Toastmasters from other clubs, to help us get started and to serve as evaluators until we’re ready to do that for ourselves. We had our first meeting last week and I thought it went really well. It was even fun.
Now I’m working on the agenda for the next meeting, two weeks from last Tuesday. All of our paperwork has now gone through, so at this meeting we’ll have our charter ceremony. One of the sponsors sent me an agenda for this – two hours of ceremonial stuff (installation of officers, appreciation awards to sponsors, VIP speeches), and no time left for any actual club members to speak!
I have problems with that on a lot of levels, the most fundamental being I don’t want to sit through two hours of that! Also, the goal is for each member to become a Competent Communicator – they like you to do that within a year. You have to give 10 prepared speeches to qualify. But it’s already not physically possible for us: two meetings per month with 2-4 speeches per and an entire clubful of new members means no way everyone can speak 10 times. Three or four, max. I do not want to further cut into that with empty ceremony!
So I made sure all my fellow officers agreed, cut the ceremony back to one hour, added in two speakers and their evaluators, and sent the revised schedule back to the sponsor. He said “No, please stick to the original agenda, this is important.” So I explained our reasoning. He used words like “great honor” and “a glorious moment” and told me I worried too much (I don’t think he meant to sound that patronizing, but he’s also working in a second language) but allowed as how it was highly unusual but yeah, it might be nice to include a couple of “high quality” speakers from our group.
Then I asked our general manager if he’d say a few words as part of the VIP speeches, and he pretty much blew the same gasket I’d blown when I saw the original ceremony. I told him we’d already been working on that and he said, “Great. You can use me as the bad guy – tell them I insist on not more than a half hour ceremony. This is set up for our people to learn, so lets get them speaking.”
That wasn’t easy, since I’d already cut all the fat I thought I could. Finally I combined a few things, and cut out the officer installation. I’m pretty impervious to the honor and glory part, the other officers seem to be in agreement, and since we all work for the same company everyone knows us anyway. But I did get in one more prepared speaking and a session of impromptu speeches! All while juggling a couple work issues that came up at the same time – I don’t feel bad doing this at work, given the circumstances and the way I got prodded into it. After all, I’m not trying to improve my English – though I certainly can improve my speaking skills, especially in speaking to non-native speakers of English. (Speaking to someone who doesn’t know your language very well is really a tricky skill.) But I can’t let anything else lapse, either.