"Tapping People on the Shoulder"

SPEAKER_03 0:00

And so I'm going to be the person who is tapping people on the shoulder and saying, Oh, I see something in you that you don't see.

SPEAKER_00 0:07

I don't see that's true.

SPEAKER_03 0:09

And so I if I haven't developed a relationship with people, I can't really ask that question or or say that to them and plant those seeds with them. But also I need to have seen their progress and see what they do and how they behave. And that's something you can only do from one-on-one style of relationships.

G'day + Welcome to Toastmasters World Tour

SPEAKER_01 0:45

Welcome to my Toastmasters World Tour podcast. Please join me as I travel virtually around the world and chat to Toastmasters from different countries and all walks of life. Let's explore. Today, being the 30th of June, is the very last day of the Toastmasters year. So a very apt time to welcome our next guest, Nikki Jerd, the outgoing District 69 District Director. Fast approaching on her feather duster like Harry Potter on his Nimbus 2000 playing Quidditch. Welcome to the show, Nikki. I'm so happy to have you on.

Nicky Jurd: Outgoing District 69 Director

SPEAKER_03 2:11

Oh, thank you, Brendan. It's a very auspicious day for me. I'm mourning the end of my Toastmasters year. It's been a great year.

SPEAKER_01 2:18

I can imagine. Yes, you've been the district director for the last year. Was that something you'd always aspired to be?

SPEAKER_03 2:26

No,

I Never Wanted to Be District Director

SPEAKER_03 2:27

the opposite, actually. The very first time I was an area director, we had hmm, what could be politely called as a leadership spill in our district. And I was still very young and impressionable. And I thought, oh, that's never going to be for me. I never want to do that thing. I never want to be involved in that. That's horrible. And so I actively tried not to be part of a district trio for a really long time. Definitely not something I aspired to do from childhood.

SPEAKER_01 2:59

So how did you come about being district director then?

SPEAKER_03 3:03

Well,

The 3-Year Job: Club Growth to DD

SPEAKER_03 3:04

district director in our district is a three-year job. So you start as a club growth director, then you do program quality director, and then you do district director. And I think about half the districts in the world work in that way that you run for election as club growth, and then you're a shoe-in for the other two. Nobody stands against you. And about the other half has contested elections at each level. So in our district, once you run for club growth director, you know you've got a three-year job. And so that's how I did it. I went through a period in my own club post-COVID where I was one of only three members that remained. And I had this inkling to myself, if I can rebuild our club, then I could run for club growth. And I I just sort of felt like maybe I'd matured and I was ready. I was ready to take on the kinds of problems that I had seen previously in district trios. So that's yeah, it was a sort of a seed I'd planted in my own mind, and I grew off back to charter strength. And then I thought, okay, I'm ready. I can do this.

SPEAKER_01 4:09

Awesome. And you're glad that you took the plunge and did

The Best Trio: Alex, Shubi & Nicky

SPEAKER_01 4:12

that?

SPEAKER_03 4:12

Oh, so glad. It's been the best three years ever. I've had three wonderful trios that I've been part of. This year's definitely been the best. I've worked with two other amazing people. So Alex Smith, our program quality director, and Shubi Chatterjee, our club growth director. Shubi has a bundle of energy and is just an absolute pleasure to be around. She challenges ideas. She's got a very youthful vibe as well. So she thinks quite differently to many of us. And Alex and I have developed a really beautiful brotherly like relationship. And um, we're we're really fond of each other. In fact, um, last year when uh Lou Savetto was the district director, Alex and I called him dad. So yeah, and and Lou would say to me, Oh, do you know what your brother's been up to? So it it really is a very warm, family-friendly kind of a relationship. And yeah, I'm definitely going to miss working with both of them.

SPEAKER_01 5:10

So it sounds like the relationships have been the greatest part of the job.

SPEAKER_03 5:13

By a

Relationships Are the Best Part

SPEAKER_03 5:14

very long way. The relationships are the best part of the job. And I think perhaps it's easy for district trios to really get into the admin side of the role. It is a very admin and time-intensive role from that perspective, but getting out there among your district and and meeting everyday members is the joy of the role. And as I move into immediate past district director, those relationships become even more important because my job for the next 12 months is on the leadership succession of our district. And so I'm going to be the person who is tapping people on the shoulder and saying, Oh, I see something in you that you don't see.

SPEAKER_00 5:53

I don't think that's true.

SPEAKER_03 5:55

And

Calling 3 Toastmasters a Day

SPEAKER_03 5:56

so I if I haven't developed a relationship with people, I can't really ask that question or or say that to them and plant those seeds with them. But also I need to have seen their progress and see what they do and how they behave. And that's something you can only do from one-on-one style of relationships. I had a personal goal at the beginning of this year to ring three Toastmasters a day, every day. And I have massively exceeded that.

SPEAKER_02 6:22

Really?

SPEAKER_03 6:23

Massively. Today I've run seven.

SPEAKER_02 6:26

Wow. Quite the networker.

SPEAKER_03 6:29

I guess you're number eight.

SPEAKER_02 6:33

Yeah, that's amazing.

SPEAKER_03 6:34

And sometimes I'm ringing just to congratulate them on something, sometimes I'm ringing to thank them. Um, so often I've used it as an avenue for recognition that's not a contrived kind of recognition. And um sometimes it's just to say, hey, you've put 14 members on in your club this year. How did you do that? That's great.

SPEAKER_01 6:54

Yeah, yeah, yeah. That's amazing. What have been the greatest challenges?

SPEAKER_03 7:00

Um,

Biggest Challenge: Board Interaction

SPEAKER_03 7:01

we've only really had one big challenge that the three years have been relatively cruisy, I've got to say, from a challenge perspective. Either that or maybe I'm just good at handling challenges now and they didn't really phase me. We only really had one, and that is um earlier on this year, we had an interaction with um the a couple of members of the board of the Toastmasters, and it was a very negative interaction. And um it really put for a couple of months, it really put a a dancer on all three of our jobs, so both Shubi Alex and I, we we really felt quite demotivated by that interaction, and we had to reconcile that we were here for our members in our district, we're not here for those people. We're here to show up and to advocate for our members and to remind ourselves that they are just people like we are and they make mistakes too. And yeah, that was the biggest challenge, I think, is is that interaction without getting into the weeds and the dirty laundry of it. It's um I feel like sometimes people who are in positions above us, we really look up to those people for leadership guidance. And we we probably have this idea that maybe they know how to do things and they know everything, but they're just as fallible as you and I, and they are volunteers like you and I. So so yeah, reminding ourselves of those things was really important.

SPEAKER_01 8:28

Sure. I guess it'd be naive to not expect somewhere along the way that it's inevitable that, you know, the more human interactions you have, there's going to be disagreements or not seeing eye to eye with some people.

SPEAKER_03 8:40

I think

The Division Realignment: Being Switzerland

SPEAKER_03 8:41

so. Yeah. We did also have a challenging situation in our district in that we went through a fairly significant realignment this year. So we reduced the number of divisions in our own district from eight to seven. And that was a very emotional thing for a lot of people. And I'm arm's length from the committee that decides that, and reminding myself that I'm neutral in this, and it's my job to listen to both sides and advise both sides as neutral as I can while still trying to get the best decision for our district. Um that that was hard. There were some days where, you know, I one day I took 30 calls and all of them were negative. And I remember sitting down at the end going, you just have to be Switzerland, keep keep the line, keep listening to people, and yeah, keep keep advising them of you know answers to their questions. That that was a that was a tricky couple of months uh navigating that that realignment. You know, realignment all over the world always is very emotional, doesn't matter where it is.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Yes. I wasn't part of any of that except for sitting in on the final decisive meeting as a witness more than anything. And Switzerland is the word I was so impressed with how you remained calm amongst a lot of emotion that was involved, which is you know understandable, but I thought you were incredibly professional. Was super impressed, and it was a real model for people on how to handle those situations. So well done for that.

SPEAKER_03 10:11

Thank you. That's very kind of you to say that I had thought through that meeting of how it might go in a couple of different ways, and so I had prepared for uh lots of different scenarios, including what happens if somebody votes me out of the chair, what is the procedure, what do we do in that situation? Um, if they didn't like my decision. So yeah, it was um I was pleased with how that meeting went. People were very respectful in their dialogue, and yeah, I think that's testament to um the shape that our district is in, is we do have good relationships with each other and we good we do have very long-term members. Our district has good retention across the world, and yeah, people don't like to step on each other, they're gonna see them again soon.

SPEAKER_01 10:59

Face them again. Is there anything else that was unexpected about the role other than the challenges you've already mentioned?

The Surprise: Dealing with Toastmasters HQ

SPEAKER_03 11:07

Um, look, over the past three years, I would say something that has surprised me the most is that as a trio, we interface a lot with the corporation of Toastmasters International. So they have I think about 120 staff in Denver and Colorado. And we do interface with them a lot. For maybe most of the last three years, I would say that I would have sent them a daily email about something. And sometimes that's member advocacy, sometimes it's um bugs or problems with their system, sometimes they haven't processed stuff. And what we have found as three different trios is that they are not a particularly innovative corporation, so we still do a lot of things with paper. We work in US dollars, so here in Australia, we're not US dollar people, we're Australian dollar people, and they are slow, very slow, and part of that slowness I think is just their lack of innovation. We have a little saying, um, Toastmasters doesn't like our money because it's hard to pay them. And so the challenges of dealing with a slow-moving legacy corporation is something that's omnipresent in our leadership journey. It really has been something that we talk about a lot and it frustrates us a lot as well. Often the answer to something is no, not yet, never. We're probably never going to change this. And some of the challenges we've experienced in my three years is we had a major membership increase. Uh so we went from I think $45 to $60 US ground membership. And another one is they made some major changes to pathways, which makes it more challenging to finish a path where you're in a charter strength club. There's restrictions now on those levels. And these have had quite a lot of membership opposition. So not just those two things, but a thousand other small things as well. And that interfacing with the um the international organization, that's been the surprising challenge. But also now we're we're sort of at the point where like this isn't a surprise. Look, they've done this inefficient thing. Yeah.

Why Is Toastmasters Resisting Tech?

SPEAKER_01 13:32

Nikki, in two of my previous podcasts, I've had Toastmasters members from around the world uh express a very similar sentiment that there's a lot of resistance to taking on tech and to evolving and changing. Do you have any ideas on why you think there's such resistance to change?

SPEAKER_03 13:51

I don't think it's resistance, honestly, Brendan. I think it's that they are a large organization with legacy systems, and those legacy systems have a lot of time to change them and a lot of cost to change them. And right now the organization is in uh membership freefall. We've been losing members dramatically since COVID. Uh last time I checked the figures that they're losing about three million a year, and there's about 17 million in cash reserves. So we we can't continue along that trend as an organization, but my guess is they really don't have the cash to fix a problem that we have right now, and they're in a bit of a holding pattern until the membership improves. Whether or not it will improve, I'm not really sure. We look like we're going to be down about 600 clubs across the world this year, so it's still a pretty dramatic shortfall on the previous year.

SPEAKER_01 14:51

So

Membership Decline Post-COVID

SPEAKER_01 14:52

my limited understanding is that two things kind of impacted membership in the past, and some of this was before I was around. One was there was a bit of resistance when the paper-based pathway system changed to digital. I think some of the particularly more senior members weren't so fond of that. But then, of course, COVID was a major impact when people couldn't do face-to-face and some clubs only survived because they went online. Now that we've moved past COVID, is there anything impacting why the memberships continue to decline, in your view?

The Word-of-Mouth Virus Isn't Catchy

SPEAKER_03 15:29

I think it's a little bit complicated, but the way I see it is that once upon a time we brought our friends to Toastmasters with a lot of enthusiasm, and our longer-term members don't do that as much as they used to. And partly I think that's because they are quite frustrated with the system. I don't think many long-term members get much out of pathways. It's really our beginners' platform. It's not for our long-term advanced OTAs. And if you're not seeing benefit yourself, you're sort of going through the motions as an obligation, you're less likely to rave about it to someone else. I think COVID really disrupted our lifestyle. We're not the only membership-based organization that's had a big free fall. Rotary also has had the same kind of issue. And um while I think it's complicated, just about all of our members find out about Toastmasters from another member. We are a word-of-mouth virus that isn't as catchy as it once was. Yes. So, yes, the impetus for me to tell another person about Toastmasters depends on my happiness, my level of joy, my um genuineness around I want to share this with other people. This has been a great benefit to me, and I want other people to experience it. And you see that vibrance in new members and new clubs, but you don't tend to see it from people who've been with us for a long time. And I think that's because once I've been here for a bit, they start to hit those brick walls of frustration.

SPEAKER_01 17:05

You get jaded, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:07

They do, yeah. You probably felt this a little bit among the membership, particularly the long-term membership.

SPEAKER_01 17:12

I have noticed some of that, yeah.

SPEAKER_03 17:14

And now you're probably someone we would call a long-term Toastmaster brand. And I wonder what's your opinion of pathways. Are you still getting stuff out of it like you once did?

SPEAKER_01 17:25

Uh I must say, as much as I do think changes can be a great thing, not all change is great. And I haven't found the new system as intuitive to navigate. And also, yeah, I totally resonate with what you were saying before. When I first started, those initial levels one, two, and three were super beneficial. You know, they would talk about vocal variety, all those sort of things. And once I got into the higher levels of the pathways, I found it being a doctor and not in the corporate world, not doing sales meetings, a lot of those projects I'd go through one after the other and see it was very prescriptive and it was hard to find things that were relevant to my life. So yeah, I found that quite difficult.

SPEAKER_03 18:13

And

Pathways Aren't Mobile Friendly

SPEAKER_03 18:14

probably like me, you I'm I'm going to guess and go out on a limb a bit here. You still feel a lot of energy at your own club. As in, that's where the magic is, where the enjoyment is, being face to face, delivering in front of your people with your people. I still love that part as well.

SPEAKER_01 18:32

But that's definitely not anything to do with pathways. Yeah, exactly. So pathways was great, level one, two, three. Then you take on another part. So the higher levels are found too prescriptive, uh, very difficult, eventually found ways to do it. But there's many projects that just are not relevant to me at all. So then you take a second path and suddenly you're doing those paths one, two, and three again. I guess repetition is a good thing, practice is a good thing, but it does become a bit rinse and repeat. So yeah, I found definitely what you're saying is correct. I've got a lot less out of it. I keep thinking I should go back and do more. But but and I've got sidetracked into this podcasting now, and that's taking up a lot of my time and energy. But yeah, it's the relationships with people that really bring you back and just the interactions and hearing each other's speeches that are fun rather than having to tick all these boxes. I don't know. I I don't get as much out of that as I used to, I guess.

SPEAKER_03 19:24

I will say one of the frustrations I've raised with the corporation is around the new paths that they put online recently. So one of them was the Ralph Smedley original manual, the basic training to Toastmasters, but also this same concept has been a problem in other paths as well. And that is that they are not mobile friendly, as in they're not built for the mobile experience.

SPEAKER_02 19:48

Right.

SPEAKER_03 19:48

They're sort of mobile compatible at best, but they're they're not very usable on a mobile. And in our district, we have a sizable division in Papua New Guinea. So we have it's a it's our biggest division, we have about 200 members in Papua New Guinea. And in Papua New Guinea, 4% of people own a desktop computer. And so that means the mobile version is imperative for them. But that's not just a stat that's here in Papua New Guinea, that's a developing country set across the world. In most developing nations, it's less than 10% that have a desktop computer. And so I feel like as an accessibility thing, that's really important to our future growth. It's certainly our district's biggest growth area. And we know that in India in particular is a high growth space for toast boxes, and it's a similar statistic over there with a lower rate of desktop computers and a higher rate of mobile phones. So I feel like this is sort of a basic accessibility technology that I've hit a brick wall on trying to advocate in that space.

SPEAKER_01 20:53

Sounds like a sort of a self-fulfilling prophecy, almost like if you don't have the funds to get with the tech and get with the times, then maybe you're losing more people because you're not embracing that.

SPEAKER_03 21:05

Yeah. Our CEO has been in place for a long time too. I think this might be his 25th or 26th year. And I would say he's probably close to retirement. A new CEO likely would make fairly dramatic changes across that space. And so I think coming soon, we're probably going to see our organization change shape as a new CEO comes on board.

SPEAKER_01 21:32

Thanks

Final Thanks + Evaluation Call to Action

SPEAKER_01 21:33

for listening to today's show. One of the key elements of Toastmasters is evaluation. This is how we grow and improve, both by encouraging comments for things we've got right and points for improvement. We all learn and benefit from these evaluations, not just the person being evaluated. So any feedback in the comments is greatly appreciated. If you have a Toastmasters story you'd like to share, or would like to be on the show, I'd love to hear from you. You can reach me at Toastbustersworld Shop at gmail.com. Thanks for listening.