Situational Leadership & a Slight Wobble in Shanghai

Early in August 2022 I presented to Shanghai Leadership Toastmasters Club (SLTMC).  It’s a large Toastmasters group with almost 50 members.  The club is full of young, ambitious achievers and virtually all reside in the amazing city of Shanghai, China, although these days with online meetings and hybrid meetings, it’s easy for people to join or participate from anywhere in the world. Coincidentally, on my first visit to China in 2008 I visited this club in person. At that time there were 60 clubs in all of China, and 14 years later there are ten times that number.

I was invited to speak on the always relevant topics of communication and leadership skills, and my experiences. Here is a link to a 45-minute cut out from the full meeting https://youtu.be/wea6ua3LaK8

There are some interesting elements here;

1.     Hybrid Meetings We all need to learn effective methods to lead hybrid meetings based on technical talent, available equipment, room setup, mix of attendees, wi-fi capacity and more.  SLTMC has access to tremendous resources including a massive screen, multiple cameras and tremendous technical talent.  This meeting went well, although those online, including me, lost communication with the room at one point late in the meeting.  That’s not on the video unfortunately, but understandably, however the in-room team managed the temporary outage well.  They needed to ask in-room attendees to limit their wi-fi consumption in order to reconnect and provide a good experience for all. Although it wasn’t obvious until a group photo was taken at the end of the proceedings, there were about 50 people in the room and more than 30 people online.

2.     Screen-in-screen There’s quite a mesmerizing screen-in-screen video effect at the 5:20 mark as the image on screen projects an in-room speaker. Notice the time delay in the multiple images projected.

3.     Opportunity To Connect I typically help audiences realize that leadership, and public speaking, are skills and skills require some knowledge, some feedback, and I believe most importantly practice. To illustrate this, I usually reference talented athletes who practice basic skills, much like we need to practice basic speaking and leadership skills. Considering this audience in Shanghai, I recognized the opportunity to show respect and connect well by referencing retired Chinese basketball star Yao Ming, who was born in Shanghai and played for the Houston Rockets, the Shanghai Sharks, and the Chinese national team.  By the way, his autobiography A Life In Two Worlds is a great read about the sport and cultural differences as he describes his experiences in China and in Houston.  

4.     Slight Wobble For this presentation I worked almost entirely without slides although I had a few ready. I had prepared my presentation to deliver some core material and then leave a couple of options to address if there was time, and based on any other discussion that took place prior to my presentation or during my presentation. In this case I decided to share my favorite leadership model, Situational Leadership from Hersey-Blanchard, with the Shanghai Leadership Toastmasters club, and this portion of my speech was a little wobbly. It starts around the 27:00 minute mark.   I share this because, while I know this material well and speak about the model often, I wasn’t as prepared and organized on the topic as I could have been for this presentation. I believe the message landed adequately, but I could have presented this much more clearly if I had committed to present this material beforehand instead of leaving it as an option.

5.     Q&A Management There is a Q&A session at the end of the video hosted by the Toastmaster of the day Rob Sherman.  Rob lives in Shanghai, and is originally from Boston where he was vacationing at the time of this presentation. Rob does a very good job managing the audience for the Q&A, including the last participant who struggled to concisely state his question. Rob provides a good example here of managing a Q&A session.

As Toastmasters nears our 100^th year as a not-for-profit organization, I’m proud of our presence in 144 countries around the world. As a comparison, the entire United Nations is comprised of 193 countries. 

This recording of my presentation to the Shanghai Leadership Toastmasters Club enables me to see what went well and where I can continue to improve. I appreciated the opportunity to connect again with the group.