HPL

The HPL is perhaps the most unique yet most potentially rewarding project you complete on the road to DTM. HPL stands for High Performance Leadership. You will be challenged by your project, a team, and your past self to become better. 

Demo-meetings – special meetings that aim to present toastmasters spirit to new people. They can be taken in a new city or company. 

Hello, Damira. You had an interesting project. Can you explain what is it for?

Hello, Aizhan. Sure, HPL stands for the high-performance leadership project. HPL is a five-stage program that helps toastmasters to become better leaders by guiding us through a project.

Well, it sounds good. Can you describe your project and the results you’ve achieved?

With pleasure. I wanted to expand the experience of Toastmasters community to Astana dwellers and decided that the best way to reach all the people is to go to offices. That’s how the idea of demo-meetings emerged. I’m proud to see that our team achieved our goals to conduct 5 demo meetings in thecorporate organizations of Astana city. These companies are National Space Center, IBM, BI Group, Schlumberger, and ERG.

What role did you perform before and during the meeting? 

Before the meetings I coordinated all the meeting venues and communicated closely with the representative of the company who also performed a role of a toastmaster.

During the meeting I performed different roles as a general evaluator, a grammarian and other roles. Also, I took a video of the meeting to later upload it to ATC social platforms.

You chose 5 huge companies. Please, describe the most difficult demo-meeting and the most open-minded one. Did the first meeting differ in the level of organization than the last one?

I am thankful for all the support of ATC members who helped make good meetings. I noticed that demo meetings were treated very seriously, and role takers performed their roles in a more professional way than during regular meetings. 

I wouldn’t say that the level of preparation of each meeting differed because each had a separate toastmaster and an action team.

Did you achieve all your expectations from the project?

Yes, we had 5 demo meetings as it was declared in the beginning of the project.

Who helped you with the organization?

Kanat, past-immediate president of ATC, guided me during this project, as HPL guidance committee.

I also recruited action team: Saltanat, Aiganym, Akbota, Arsen, Assel, Rafael, Kamila, Alisher, Indira, Zhanna. It is a great team for action. They helped me arrange the meeting date and venue, they also created a survey to analyze the feedback of the audience.

One of the challenges was a willingness of new members to be a toastmaster. Can you share Arsen’s story?

Sure. Arsen was a new member of Astana Toastmasters Club who helped to arrange a demo meeting at BI Group. He also wanted to perform a role of a toastmaster on that meeting. Since he hasn’t performed this role before and the demo meeting should be performed in the best way, I asked Zhanna who signed up to perform a toastmaster role for the regular meeting to give this role to Arsen. She kindly agreed and Arsen was able to test his skills before the demo meeting. 

Some of the companies were very open-minded about toastmaster’s community. For example, BI group. Will you do a second meeting if they decide to open a corporate club?

Sure, we are always open to new meetings.

Please, share with us interesting facts about all 5 meetings.

It was interesting to see how decision-making process works in each company when I looked at the process of arranging the meeting. Some companies needed an official letter sent to the president of the company, some of them needed an approval of a director. All this reflected in the offices where we held our demo meetings. It was a valuable insight to learn how each organization is structured, and in a way learn whether I want to work for them in the future.

Did you have any fuckups? How did you fix it? Please, tell us the most vivid one

I wouldn’t call this a fuckup, but we had several misunderstandings when we needed to plan the date of the next meeting. This all comes to the effective communication in which we tried to listen to and respect each other.