As the father of an almost 2 year old, I watch more Sesame Street than most people my age. Between the time I watched it as a kid and today, Grover has become a super hero, with the tag line, “He shows up” with the “power of observation”. It is amusing in the commonness of his powers, like putting Notepad skills on a résumé. But what if we showed up? What if we used our powers of observation to look closer, think deeper, and challenge our assumptions? Don’t know what to do next? Try showing up. Just watch out for lampposts.
Obtaining President’s Distinguished status
If you missed the first part of this topic, it is available here.
One advantage to blogging is the ability to add ideas after the fact. My presentation on becoming a Toastmaster’s President’s Distinguished club would not have had enough time for me to cover all that I wanted to, but the blog has no such limitations, so I’m continuing the same topic. Yesterday, the 10 Club Goals and 1 Requirement (have 20 members or net +5 new members) were distilled into 6 objectives and some ideas for obtaining the objectives were presented. Today, I present some more techniques. These techniques should be used by you as president, your officer team, and every member in your club if you wish to reach the club objectives.
1. Prune, rather than Fertilize. It is very easy to set lofty goals when your motivation is high, and your motivation is likely at its highest when you are first elected (or appointed) to your officer position. I was as guilty of this as anyone, looking to make our club more accessible online, add online payment and registration, and a few other quixotic goals that I fortunately can’t remember. However, the reality of club leadership (and some advice from Jack Welsh in his book “Winning”) made it clear. You have to focus on the highest value objectives because your resources are scarce. While some things would be nice, would they get you closer to your goal? Are some of the objectives required for distinguished status out of reach of your club? Even these objectives might need to be pruned so your club can focus on what it can achieve.
2. Share what you will do, not what you ought to do. It is easy to say that I should do something. It is another thing entirely to say I will do something. If you say you will, then not doing it is disingenuous on your part. If you say you ought to do something, then not doing it is perfectly acceptable and produces no disconnect between what you say and what you do. Don’t give yourself this out, refer to your goals as what you will do. Encourage your members to state their personal goals in the same terms.
3. Someone could win with the hand you were dealt. In the same position in the same club, someone out there could make your club outstanding. Make it you.
How to get President’s Distinguished Club Status in Toastmasters
Today I was supposed to present at a Toastmaster’s Leadership Institute (Lite) conference, but the ice storm had better ideas. My topic, Management Skills for the Club President, was to explain actionable steps a club president could take to get their club to President’s Distinguished status. Because this topic is probably interesting to others outside of the invite, please find a synopsis below:
First, decide the objectives. Of the ten goals and one requirement outlined in the official Toastmaster’s guideline, they can be consolidated into 6 objectives:
- Obtain 4 Competent Communicators
- Obtain 2 Advanced Communicators
- Obtain 1 Leadership Award
- Procure 8 new members
- Pay for 20 members
- Submit your list of trained officers
If you reach these 6 objectives, your club will be more than President’s Distinguished, and if you only reach a few of them, your club will either be Distinguished or Select Distinguished. In this instance, you are reaching so high that coming up short is still impressive.
Action Plan:
- Don’t leave empty seats. When a plane takes off, the airline can no longer sell unused seats. In the same way, make sure you make even slight progress towards your objectives every meeting. Even if someone just answers a table topic, encourage them to have someone else evaluate them in their Competent Leader book. Don’t leave empty speaking slots, even if you have to speak yourself!
- Use “If-Then” thinking. When I was a club president, I was a huge fan of Heidi Grant Halvorson http://www.heidigranthalvorson.com/, both in her articles for the Harvard Business review and her book. She advocates maximizing your willpower by using ‘if-then’ planning. For example, if it is Wednesday and a speaking slot is open for Thursday’s meeting, then I will do my next speech.
- Trade your burdens to those who think of them as hobbies, and use your hobbies to take others burdens. I was blessed to have a very strong Vice President of Education and Sergeant at Arms during my tenure as president. They were able to guide the club’s educational objectives (1-3) and recruitment (4) and enjoyed the process. To me, that work would have been difficult, but they not only enjoyed it, they excelled. In the same manner, some officers ended up leaving the club for work or could not dedicate any time to their role, so I had to do more in those areas. Fortunately, they were areas I enjoyed, so I’ll pretend I planned it that way 🙂
- Focus on what remains, not what you have done. “4 speeches to go” is more motivating than “6 speeches done!”
Those were some of the tips and techniques I used to take our Toastmaster’s Club to its first President’s Distinguished status in its accessible history. Aside from my own buy-in of these tips, I also tried to encourage every member to use the same techniques in their own communication development goals. In our club, the president spoke last, so I tried to motivate the members to use one of these things every week. In the end, it worked, as we went from unable to fill out every officer on election day to a President’s distinugished club with 23 members in a year.
PMP Exam Lessons Learned
On January 20, 2015, I finally sat for the Project Management Professional (PMP) exam, passing it with a ‘Proficient’ rating in all 5 knowledge areas. The details of my exam path are below:
From mid April to mid May 2014, I attended the PMP Exam Preparation class, PJM104, at the University of North Carolina, Charlotte.
I participated in a weekly study group with two other students from that class. They were also both working professionals, so we had less frequent, longer sessions to maximize everyone’s time. As for format, we used that time to review one knowledge area with one member as the facilitator of that topic. The facilitator would review it in more depth and put together notes for the others. (Hint #1 – be the facilitator for the areas that are more difficult to you. To teach is to learn twice).
After we went through the PMBOK 5th edition and the associated Rita chapters, we looked more closely at some of the deliverables. For my part, I created a project management plan template that cross referenced with most of the other sections. (Hint #2 – write a project management plan). After that, we concluded the group study and worked on our own.
I planned on taking the exam in December of 2014, but work and life got in the way. I didn’t get serious until I scheduled the exam for February 14, 2015 (“The Saint Valentine’s Day Massacre”). I figured I’d get more out of it if I had it completed before my review at work, so I moved it to January 20th, a work day, to get it done on time.
Having a date made it much more real, and made the self study more effective. For this, I primarily reviewed the process, trying to follow a project from beginning to end through initiating, planning, executing, monitoring and controlling, and closing. Most of my effort was on initiating and planning, as that is where project managers really add value.
After that, it was answering questions, examining what I missed (or got right due to a 50/50 guess) and reviewing that section more. I answered around a thousand practice questions, preferably in groups of 200 at a time, and typically scored around 70-80%. The week before the exam, I spent 2 hours/night, and spent 9 hours on Saturday and 7 hours after church on Sunday studying. I didn’t study on Monday before the test. I prefer to study in 90 minute increments, with some sort of physical activity in between. In my case, the break usually was letting my toddler ride on my back.
From my practice tests, I estimated that I could finish the actual exam in about an hour and a half. In reality, it took me almost 2 hours. During the tutorial (I know how to use a computer) I wrote down my brain dump of every formula, the format of a network diagram box, the type of proposal that matches procurement types, and drew page 67 of the PMBOK. I also wrote the word “ETHICS” on the top of my scrap paper to remind me to watch out for those questions. I took a break after 90 questions to wash my face in the restroom and returned to finish the test. At the end, I reviewed the marked questions, changing about half of the marked ones (it’s amazing what you learn after taking a 200 question exam), then reviewed all 200 questions again to check my work. After all of this, I had about 8 minutes to spare, and hit submit.
I was confident enough in my work that had I failed, I would have left the project management profession entirely rather than retake the exam, as being confident and wrong is a bad sign.
Good luck on your own PMP journey!
Dusting off the old blog
My wife: You should start a blog.
Me: I have one.
Her: Really???
Me: Well, I think so…
This was the conversation that reminded me that I not only started a blog, but put the audacious word ‘daily’ in the title. And yes, I see the disconnect between having a blog and not posting to it. Annual Lee Blog doesn’t have the same ring to it, so I might as well keep this one going. I’m sure all both readers and thousands of spammers missed it.
A few things have changed since I tried the daily experiment, which is going to make the Business Analyst theme obsolete. Since then, I’ve moved on to project management, started a new project, and obtained the PMP credential. I was hardly disciplined enough to keep the topic restricted to business analysis in the first place, so I’m going to drop that pretense altogether.
Investing thought for the day
If you are paid hourly, you are paid by addition – every hour worked adds a set amount to your net worth.
If you invest in the stock market, you get paid by multiplication – every move up is multiplied by your number of shares.
If you invest in yourself, you get paid exponentially.
Thought for the day
“Experience is what you get when you didn’t get what you wanted. And experience is often the most valuable thing you have to offer.” – Randy Pausch
Have a great weekend everybody.
Other benefits of professional leverage
Yesterday and the day before I wrote about using your Toastmaster’s Competent Communicator manual speeches to help you accomplish your professional goals involving exams. Today I would like to focus on some of the ancillary benefits of this approach:
- You have an accountability group. The entire Toastmaster group knows what your goal is, which should give you more motivation to do well.
- You become a better speaker in the process by actually speaking. This is another way of learning as well.
- You can use what you learned in the Leadership Track. For example, if you are studying for the CPA, why not volunteer as treasurer? Sure, a Toastmaster’s group probably doesn’t use depreciation schedules, but you can still incorporate much of what you learned in keeping the books and help the broader organization develop policies and procedures to help others fulfill the role of Treasurer.
- You’ve got more speeches if you need them. Toastmasters doesn’t stop at the CC designation. There are 15 specialized books, each with 5 other speeches to give once you complete the CC speeches.
Combining the CC and the PMP
Yesterday I wrote how you could capitalize on the effort required to present to a group to benefit your career by using it to help you pass a professional exam. Today I will use the PMP as an example as how to use the 10 Toastmasters Competent Communicator (CC) speeches to help you pass your PMP exam.
Toastmaster speech / PMP study area
- The Ice Breaker / Why I chose to be a project manager
- Organize your Speech / Project Integration Management
- Get to the Point / Project Scope Management
- How to Say it / Project Communications Management
- Vocal Variety / Project Quality Management (lack of quality can change anyone’s voice!)
- Research your Topic / Project Procurement Management (or whatever area you are weakest)
- Persuade with Power / Project Human Resource Management
- Get Comfortable with Visual Aids / Project Risk Management
- Persuade with Power / Project Cost Management
- Inspire your Audience / Project Time Management
How to use Toastmasters to pass professional exams
There’s an expression, “Two birds in the hand killed with one stone is better than four in the bush”. I’m paraphrasing – the point of this expression is that leveraging one thing to create two outcomes is a good thing. In this case, I submit how to get two initials behind your name with one effort. Although this effort is larger than it needs to be, it is much smaller than the combined efforts if done separately.
For example, imagine you wished to become a Project Management Professional, or PMP. Aside from some industry qualifications, you will need to take and pass a test based on the Project Management Book of Knowledge. If you were to combine this effort with the effort required to become a Competent Communicator in Toastmasters, you could have the PMP and CC designations through the same effort, with some ancillary benefits that you wouldn’t get by doing the efforts separately.
It is said that to teach is to learn twice. Therefore, you are going to teach your Toastmaster’s group how to become a PMP through 10 prepared speeches. You will have to know the material well enough to not only teach it, but make it easy enough to understand to make an effective speech out of it. If you can’t make the material easy to understand, you don’t understand it.
The PMP is graded, the CC is not. Therefore, make your mistakes in the speeches, get your evaluations, and thank the group for allowing you to experiment on them. In a group such as Toastmasters, finding someone with experience in the area you wish to pursue is not uncommon, so you might even have a PMP do one of your evaluations.
Tomorrow, I will submit a sample outline of how you would do this, speech by speech for the PMP example. However, you can use this for any professional exam. If 10 speeches are not enough for you to cover all of the material, use the speeches on the material that is most difficult for you.
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