What I learned from Thermo Fisher Toastmasters International Speakers Club

Problems
I spent a lot of time organising which club to visit on the day. I was invited to be the General Evaluator of the club on the day of the meeting.

I shall deal with:
Finding the meeting day;
changing roles at meetings;
photo directions from station to venue; food; General Evaluator evaluating evaluators.

 Time Spent Choosing Which Club to Visit
I had spent a lot of time calling other clubs such as a management university club which was supposed to have a meeting according the to national club directory and the Toastmasters International site. I wish that the site ran an update on which clubs are meeting today, like Meetup. An easily updated site.

 I have found that it's no use relying on being told about a meeting a week or even a day in advance. You arrive at a huge building, the concierge knows nothing about the group. Or five different Toastmasters clubs meet there on different days. The contest moves to another day or building because two key speakers are away that day or the room is too large, too small, or booked by another group.

On the day you find that the air conditioning does not work (this happened at Senja Cashew) so they have moved rooms. You need the name of somebody who will be at the meeting, and is travelling towards it or already in it, to direct you to the right location.

 The more meetings you go to, the easier it gets to find the location. You spot another member who is going there twenty minutes early in the street in front of the building, the downstairs corridor, near the lift, walking the other way upstairs looking for the room. If you don't recognise them, sometimes they recognise you. Especially after you stop them to ask the way, they look at you close-up, you look at them close-up, you recognise each other.

 Phoning For Information
I phoned about six people whose numbers weren't answering. I have learned not to pick and chose. I had tried ringing only people whose names I could pronounce, simple familiar names, John Smith as opposed to four syllable Indian first names and surnames and three syllable Chinese names.

 I also learned to start with the words 'Toastmasters Club' instead of 'calling about today's meeting'. If I tried to ring a President at the top of the list, then go to the bottom of the list the VPE (education and paperwork organiser), or SAA (room set up, key and chair organiser), half an hour later I had lost track of who I had phoned.

So now my method is to phone down the list until I get an answer. At least three of the six people did not know and said they would call somebody else. They probably had the same problem as me - the person they rang did not answer, and as they were at work or engaged in other tasks they had no time to follow it up, just left a message and hoped somebody would call them back.

 Eventually I found that a club I had noted in my diary as having a contest was not having a contest and was not even having a club meeting. The university and management training clubs often do not meet in their holidays, only in term time, and not before exams and mock exams.

 Answers Regarding Meeting Venues
I received a message asking me to be Project Evaluator. However, after a couple of hours, when I eventually went through the searching for the organiser process, I started hunting for the directions. But the mailing address is not necessarily the meeting address. The meeting address could be different from last year when the directory was printed.

 Photo Directions
The committee member helpfully sent both the agenda, with my name added as General Evaluator, plus a series of photos of the directions from the station to the building. She had photographed a bicycle rack.

Unfortunately, exit B and so on are not clearly marked at the station. At Woodlands, you come to a T junction with a shopping mall or main roads in both directions. Eventually I spotted the bicycle rack.

However, by now I had walked all around the building. When I asked at the ticket office they told me to catch a bus. (The ticket office job is to direct enquiries to catch the correct bus, not to give directions to walkers.)

I kept walking from the MRT station down a path across a lawned park. I was now lost, approaching the venue from the wrong direction. The club was meeting somewhere inside a huge building in a complex of two or three blocks, with multiple entrances. So I phoned again.

Luckily my contact came downstairs, promising to meet me on the first floor. I puzzled over whether she meant ground floor, or one up.  I knew this was American and meant what we in Britain call Ground Floor.

Woodlands
The best part was that the walk from the Woodlands MRT (mass transit railway) through an avenue of palm trees as the sun sinks was a beautiful photo opportunity. The palm trees were uplifting spiritually, a reward. Woodlands is the name of the area. It is more like a garden city. Skyscrapers but surrounded by parks of palm trees.

 Everything is high security. You have to pass the downstairs guards. You need passes to operate the lift and enter the floor of the office. You also need a pass to get out to the Ladies toilet and back again.

The Club Meeting
 Everybody smiled and waved as I walked in, rose and came over smiling to shake my hand. In my evaluation I said that their was such a party atmosphere, yet not a drink (alcohol) in sight. (Heckler - we drank earlier!) Continuous giggles and banter from the audience sitting in a horse shoe chair plan.

The members are a team from one department. I discovered this when one person kindly gave me a lift home by car. They have as many as about 46 members, whose fees are paid by the company.

Company Club Attendance
You would think that attendance would be high, since the venue is no distance. However, the committee worry that outside their department, members are 'too busy' to attend meetings or plan speeches, and attend only when their boss calls at the meeting, twice a year.

GE's Ideas
As GE I started with praise. The Toastmaster of the evening was very jolly and smiling.

Then I moved on to helpful suggestions to make the club even more welcoming to outsiders. My suggestions were that newcomers would be reminded to switch off phones and be told the location and procedure for finding toilets.

 The food was excellent, a mixture of sweet and savoury, egg sandwiches, small pieces of oval chicken on the bone in BBQ sauce, fish balls which I did not dare eat because I have an allergy to shellfish, and small portions of blueberry cheesecake, plus assorted drinks. We began with the food, and finished it off at break time.

 Topics
The topics session was most amusing. The Topics master correctly explained and adhered to the system of using topics to allow a chance to speak impromptu to visitors who were not speaking not he rest of the programme. 

The table topics speakers were asked to sell the objects pulled from a bog. The appointment holders had desktop markers for President, Evaluator, timer and so on. I suggested that everybody should be given name tags. This would help visitors to recognise the regulars, and help the regulars to address the visitors by name.

 I loved the little pictures of the faces of the appointment holders down the side of the programme. I suggested that the pictures could be made bigger.

 Listing Evaluation of Meeting Set-Up
I knew that I would easily remember to speak about the three main points, the pre-meeting preparation (photos of directions) the programme sheet (photos of committee).

I did not mention timer - I should have said she can have a slot describing the importance of time.

A Speech About Time, East and West style
At this in-house club their office day starts at 8 am. (One of the speeches was about how the first of the speaker's two bosses had expected her to arrive by 8 am. The second boss was Western and interested in the quality of the work, not the time. However, the Asian boss stood at the door welcoming everybody on arrival and if they were even three minutes late he was on the phone to them asking where they were and what was the problem.)

 A second speech was about how the speaker's grandfather had been a scholar but their small village in China had no use for a scholar and valued practical work. Her parents were illiterate. However, they made sure she went to one of the best schools in Singapore. She struggled with maths and was told to change to art. After six months, the art teacher said that art required talent, and she should switch back to maths. (I'm sure this can be adapted by the speaker to an entirely humorous speech. The meeting room was the central refreshment area of an upstairs open plan office.

I have fond memories of the meeting. If you are in Singapore, allow extra time and visit this club.
It is a corporate club, so you need to phone first to check when they are meeting and ensure that you will be welcome and expected so you can be on the list and get past security.

Author
Angela Lansbury, CL , ACG, member of two clubs in London: Harrovians and HOD; member of one club in Singapore, Braddell Heights Advanced.