Skip to main content

Planning for 10 Months Ahead (CL Series)


The CL Series is a series of blog posts about my journey to attain the Competent Leader award in Toastmasters. Visit http://startupkenya.blogspot.com/2014/08/becoming-competent-leader.html to learn more about why I started this journey.

Management consultants love using tools and techniques in undertaking assignments. A well outlined and well thought out "Approach and Methodology" section can give you the edge you need when your proposal is being compared to the next guy. I trained to become a management consultant, and I thought that while desire and commitment in achieving my Competent Leader (CL) goals were admirable; a good plan with milestones and resources needed were essential to ensure that I pulled it off.

The Toastmaster year run from July 1 to June 30. If I was to get the CL award (and contribute towards my club's success plan), I wanted to do it before June 30, 2015. Luckily there were 10 projects in the CL manual, so I could easily plan for 1 project a month for the next 10 months (August to May) and have one month cover in case my project ran past its schedule as projects invariably do.

First thing I did was to assign one project per month in the order they appear in the manual. Now while it is not necessary for one to undertake the 10 projects in the order they appear - after some carefully study I noticed that the projects were ordered in increasing complexity. Here are the 10 projects I set out to do for the next 10 months:

August
Listening
September
Critical Thinking
October
Giving Feedback
November
Time Management
December
Planning & Implementation
January
Organization & Delegation
February
Facilitation
March
Motivation
April
Mentoring
May
Team Building

Each project also required me to undertake an average of two roles at two separate meetings, so I chose roles I felt I could improve on or that I had never attempted before. The CL manual gives you some limited discretion on which roles to undertake per project, the roles I chose came to a total of 21.

Project
CL Roles
Listening
Speech Evaluator

Ah-Counter

Grammarian
Critical Thinking
Speech Evaluator

General Evaluator
Giving Feedback
Speech Evaluator

Grammarian

General Evaluator
Time Management
Timer

Topicmaster
Planning & Implementation
Speaker

General Evaluator

Toastmaster
Organization & Delegation
Help Organize a Club Speech Contest
Facilitation
Topicmaster

Befriend a guest
Motivation
Toastmaster

General Evaluator

Chair of Membership Contest
Mentoring
Guidance Committee of High Performance Leadership
Team Building
Chair a Club Special Event

Some of the roles I chose would require that I work with others to accomplish them, thankfully I had some time before undertaking them.

Help Organize a Club Speech Contest
Chair of Membership Contest
Guidance Committee of High Performance Leadership
Chair a Club Special Event

I also had to pursue my communication track (currently undertaking Advanced Communicator Bronze with 8 speech projects remaining) and drive Early Birds towards chartering and achieving its club success plan. I went back to my plan and put in provisions for undertaking the 8 speeches within the next 10 months.

So there was my 10 month plan all laid out in front of me. Time to get down to work.

Labels:

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Differences between a Business Name (Sole-Proprietorship / Partnership) and a Limited Liability Company

While consulting for our online company registration service, Incorporator I find myself answering the question "What is the difference between a sole-proprietorship and a company?" Anybody who is considering starting a business must consider what type of business structure is needed for his or her particular situation. In Kenya there are three types of structures that one can use to start their business. 1. An LLC, or Limited Liability Company 2. A sole proprietorship 3. A Partnership A Sole-proprietorship and a Partnership are registered through the same manner (Form BN/2) with the exception that a partnership has more than one owner and although not necessary, entrepreneurs are advised to register a partnership deed as well. In this article all references to sole-proprietorship also include partnership. Understanding the advantages and disadvantages of each structure is important when deciding which one you want to use for your company.
15 comments
Read more

Cyber Cafe with an EDGE

Followed up from Laying the Groundwork for a rural cyber I've finally got around to writing this. Thanks for you all who patiently waited. Although I approached the project as an "internet consultant", I soon realised I would need to implement the whole spectrum of tasks required to get the cyber running. I spent almost a week laying the structured cabling, installing the software, and configuring the network. Most of the work I was doing for the first time (e.g. drilling holes in concrete to fix the trunking screws) and most of it was hard, but all of it was enjoyable. I needed to prove the project was implementable with minimal human resources (if it was going to work elsewhere). With an eye on both troubleshooting by the owner and future projects I prepared detailed How To manuals for most of the tasks. So the day finally arrived, November 17th I connected all the PCs to the internet. The results were incredible, the speeds were nearly as good as my 256K broadband conn
36 comments
Read more

Selling stuff online to Kenyans

You might not know this but my love of entrepreneurship is fuelled majorly by my love of computer programming. My first exposure to computers was in 1988 when I played shuffleboard on an Atari. Having been raised in the boondocks I was utterly spellbound with the concept of a video game. In 'shags' we hardly ever got toys from the shops; instead we would create our own toys using locally available material. For toy cars we twisted and shaped wire coat hangers and cut out rubber tires from old (and sometimes mom's new) bathroom slippers. For planes, we stuck a stalk of grass through a dried maize leaf and made our 'propellers' rotate by holding them out in front and running into the wind (incidentally this was my all-time favourite). For marbles we hunted for used and discarded bottle-tops (beer bottle-tops were coveted). In fact we had so many toys that our game time never felt inadequate. That was until I discovered video games. Hard as I thought I didn't see
21 comments
Read more