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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.

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