[008] Learn to Delegate

July 18th is a good day. Around 5 pm, while I was in the quarantine hotel room in Shanghai, a short video message arrived from New Zealand. It’s a screen recording of a zoom meeting, from my wife. In the 10 second video, around 15 people are waving hands and shouting out loud,

“Congratulations Sherman!”

They are members of Toastmasters at Kristin club, where I am the founding President. They have just finished a meeting, and one guest decided to join the club on the spot. This would qualify the club to be the President Distinguished club, the highest honor of a Toastmasters club. A new club like ours can be exempt from participate in the program because normally the first year is on a learning curve.

I'm excited. Several weeks ago, we were four members short and it seemed impossible to be President Distinguished, the stretch goal we set for ourselves. And now, it has come true while I’m travelling overseas.

When the club was built initially, for quite a period of time I was the hands-on type of expert. I joined Toastmasters in 2010, I have taken club officers, area officer and division officer roles. I participated in many different levels of speech competition so I know about the operation of Toastmasters. However, most of the other club members in this new club are new to Toastmasters. Although there were several club officers, they were too new I did not have time to mentor them do things so I did a lot of jobs by myself.

To name a few, I applied the domain, built the website, arranged meeting roles, tracked the progress of the members, liaison with the school cafe to be used for the club meetings. I also kept collecting the contact information of the potential guests, sending them meeting notes and promoting the club in the community.

But soon I realized I would be exhausted. When club officers and members gradually get familiar, I started to shift into the real leadership role.

Being a “ leader” is not new to me. Many years ago I became a manager of a service Center for an American company in China managing the service team and a small bonded warehouse in Beijing. Later on, I gradually developed and eventually became a service director for whole China for an American communications enterprises managed team around 100 people and cover all the business for services in China.

But I think being a leader in Toastmasters is more difficult than in enterprises. If you are a leader in an enterprise, you have more leverage to motivate the people. For example, you have a say on the employees' salary increase, how much to increase. But in Toastmasters, nobody works for anybody, and there is not too much overlap in life, so even you have a title called the president, you actually have no leverage can motivate people. That is why the environment of Toastmasters is a very good environment to practice leadership, real leadership does not rely on the position or title.

Looking back of the first year after the club charted, the most learning for me is to practice deliberately on delegation.

Delegation is an important part of leadership skills. If a leader does not know how to delegate, it will not be effective. The leader could work to death, but the result will still not be good. The following is some reflection from my year of being the found club president, on delegations.

1. Cut into small pieces. If you realize it's hard to delegate, provided that you already realized the importance of delegation, the reason might be that the task you delegate is too big. But if you can cut the big task into small pieces and clarify the expectation for each, then it’s easier to delegate them.

2. Know who to delegate. Consider the ability of the members who you want to delegate to. If they are officers, consider that officer role, their willingness, and motivation. It’s nice to know if the person has some proven track record of achieving a similar task, or, have good judgement.

3. Control the tendency to micromanage. Once delegation is made, you need to control yourself not to be too pushy, for example checking the progress too often. Trusting the person was delegated and not judge the result using your personal preference. A good way is to support from the side so that the person who was delegated feel safe. After several times they are more confident and ready to get new challenges.

The delegation is much like parenting.

Parents all know how to delegate, at least when their kid is young so that their child can learn life skills. Take the walking skill as an example. A parent holds the baby in their arms helping them to move from here to there because babies were not ready to practice walking. When the baby turns to toddler, parents hold their hands to practice walking, step by step. When the kids progressed, they can walk alone. They started by just a few steps, gradually become able to walk for a longer distance.

I am happy that I deliberately practiced my delegation skills in the first year being the founding president. I believe the new officers will also practice their delegation skills and bringing the club operation to a new level.