Growing Together

 Last weekend, District 24 Toastmasters held our annual conference, and I was the chair of the event!  The theme was "Growing Together."  I had helped plan conferences for Toastmasters before, but this was my first time as the "chair", the person who was in charge overall.  It required a lot of delegation and a team of 14 to pull it off, but it was great.  Here are some things I learned/re-learned in the process:

  • Delegate to others clearly.  Assign one person to be primarily responsible for a task (even if they draw on the help of others) and set expectations for when the task will be completed.  I occasionally got nervous about things not happening as quickly as I wanted, and realized it was because I a) tried to assign more than one person to the same task, causing confusion, b) did not share my expectations of a deadline, or c) both!
  • Show gratitude.  I sent both digital and physical thank you notes to my team.  I tried to show appreciate in my emails throughout the planning process.  I'm sure I could have done even more.
  • Get feedback from the team.  I will be sending out a feedback survey to members of my team on how well I did as a leader.  I look forward to seeing and learning from the results.  I asked for feedback throughout the process as well, and found I got the best responses from people when I had a specific question (eg "Should I do X or Y?").  I will be interested to see how the overall feedback at the end of the event goes.  Will I be surprised by anything?  Makes me wonder if I should have gotten more formal but general feedback part way through instead of just at the end.  We'll see...
As the above items indicate, I did not do everything perfectly and am still learning, but overall, I feel really good about how the planning process and the conference itself went.  I feel so thankful to my team and to all those who attended the conference.  We are all "Growing Together!"

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