How Toastmasters made me a better software engineering leader

It’s more of a personal story rather than anything else. Still relevant to the software development industry as to any other kind of business, so it seems.

Toastmasters International is an organization that helps develop public speaking competencies and leadership skills. You join a local club near your living place and attend weekly meetings during which people are doing rather curious things, like helping each other grow in a friendly atmosphere.

There are a few (usually 2–3) speeches on any topic that typically take 5–7 minutes. The evaluators give positive feedback on the speech’s strengths as well as areas of improvement. Other support roles help to maintain time constraints and focus on fluency of speech and clarity of language. There are at least ten roles involved in every meeting.

Being part of it for about seven years now, I can confirm that it both shaped me as a leader and grew me to be a better person.

Pareto principle again

I started taking on leadership roles at the university and was engaged in a court-registered NGO cooperating with the universities in Łódź, my home city. Afterward, my co-founders and I set up Makimo. And a few short years after that, I joined a local Toastmasters club.

Was I a good leader back then? Of course not.

For my first few years as a leader, I’d say that 80% of the time I was learning management from my own mistakes, and about 20% of the time my choices were correct. It’s been a long journey since then, and a very rewarding one. Starting from zero experience to being able to communicate and find common language with most of the people I meet. Here’s where Toastmasters’ structure gives a lot of growth opportunities. If you are elected to be a club board member, you become one of 7 people responsible for the continuation of the club. That lasts only six months in my club, so it’s a brief period.

Every six months, the club board changes its composition, which I don’t have access to in my professional life. In Makimo, most of our employees have worked here for many years, and the company structure doesn’t change too much, which means I work primarily with the same people over time.

On the other hand, club boards allowed me to see how group dynamics evolve with seemingly insignificant changes. A new person on a club board can completely change what the group can achieve. One determines vision; the next is magnetic and charismatic – a person you’d love to talk to. Another one breaks the status quo every time they see an opportunity.

There are people you need to work around to make progress. Some have temperaments and character qualities that make them harder to communicate with. With others, you need to set clear boundaries.

Going through a whole gallery of different people, I gained intuition on how to respond to a new person to make the most of our communication – just because I’ve already been in a similar situation. It’s like all these color-coded personality indexes, but instead of empty knowledge, it’s a mastery rooted in practice.

Seeing the diversity in action effectively removes the “know-it-all” attitude I had when I was younger. It isn’t about me or anyone else on the club board anymore. The right approach is to carefully balance everyone’s needs so that every club member would want to return to the club next week, next month, and next year.

It can be gratifying, too, as I started to appreciate smaller and smaller differences between people. It feels like studying a painting. Most people look at it for a few seconds and then go elsewhere. But with time, you see the details and even start understanding why these details are there. This experience is much richer. Now imagine you can feel the same about the people around you.

Engineering is a team activity

The balancing act of satisfying everyone’s needs is crucial to software development. I’ve often seen developers disheartening as they felt their work had no meaning at all. I’ve often seen clients worried because of a lack of communication from the engineering team.

And I’ve seen great moments too. The first deployment of an application, a client using the software for a few years without any problems, a small tool that improves someone’s life.

In Toastmasters, I learned to listen closely to people.

Some might think empathy is impossible to learn. And to a degree, that’s true. For example, I can mirror someone’s emotions, which has been part of me for as long as I can remember, and I’m not sure you could learn that.

That said, I believe that in many aspects we’re teachable. There are elements of empathy that one can develop.

In the past, the ability to mirror emotions caused a lot of distress in me. I couldn’t even look a person in the face as I became immersed in the eyes, mouth, and eyebrows, and stopped to listen to their words.

Thousands of deep and generous conversations later, I became accustomed to feeling my emotions and others’ emotions in addition to the actual content of the conversation.

That completely enriched my experience of team meetings. I usually can guess correctly:

1. Whether my team members understand each other completely, to some degree, or they are talking at cross purposes, and then point it out;
2. Who agrees, is skeptical, or needs to voice their concerns during a discussion.

Of course, I’m not a psychic; I can only feel these cues because my team members embrace openness.

Nurturing people around you

The values of Toastmasters are Integrity, Respect, Service, and Excellence. I could say a lot about each of them, but right now, I’ll go with the value of Service.

It means that every leader should serve their peers. I’m no exception here. That’s why I love to help anybody and I’m pretty much always up for a few minutes of conversation that can empower someone to do what they need to do.

It doesn’t need to be just empowerment. If the team members are quarreling, I don’t step in too soon because I work with adults and believe in their maturity. However, if they need help, I’m at their disposal.

If I’m quarreling with my colleagues, when the emotions drop down, I usually feel bad for my behavior, and then, at the nearest suitable moment, I apologize to them.

I’ve started a few coaching/mentoring relations with my colleagues and taken other steps to grow other team members I work with — the methods typically circle around discussions, guidance, and giving and receiving feedback.

Many of these ideas come from Toastmasters. Taking roles on the club board and as an Area Director (an advisory role to a few clubs) has given me a lot of space to experiment with how to serve people and how to manage conflict, and Toastmasters mentoring program gave me the experience of how to be a mentee and a mentor.

Summary

Yes, I know how to write computer programs too. So if you are a software engineer, senior software engineer, or businessperson, consider joining similar initiatives. The benefits are untold:

1. You develop your leadership skills by working with ever-changing teams of people and can respond to various types of people’s characters and temperaments;
2. You develop empathy and learn to listen closely to others. Your communication changes to be more empowering, generous, and warm. You see more and appreciate people more;
3. You start nurturing people around you so that they can go forward not only in work, but in life too – through mentoring, empowerment, and healthy conflict resolution.

That makes Makimo a bit special, as I want it to be a place where you can have friends. I wouldn’t say that I’m a close friend to each of my team members, as I define that as being involved in each other’s lives on more levels than work. However, I consider it a success that I have at least some of them here.