Taking on roles

No matter if you are new to Toastmasters, or if you are a seasoned member, taking on roles is essential to running a smooth meeting.

Here are some roles you may want to start off with and work your way up to more and more challening positions. All these roles involve taking notes and speaking in the meeting.

• Ah counter
  • Note and count the filler words people use, words like “and, so, like, um,ah” and so on. This will help people notice them and hopefully reduce their use. Encourage people to pause instead.
• Grammarian
  • Choose a word of the day, something that might not be commonly used and yet not so obscure that you wouldn’t ever use it.
  • Also, note any interesting words or phrases, this tests your listening skills and also highlights those words to others.
• Timer
  • Help keep the meeting on time! This is very important as many meetings go over time nowadays and don’t accomplish what they set out to do.
  • Note how long sections of the meetings take, i.e. introductory round table, what time the sections start at, etc.
  • Typical speech timing is 5-7 minutes, you may use flash cards or background colors to indicate timing, i.e. green at 5, yellow at 6 and red at 7. If the speaker doesn’t mention the timing, you may want to ask.
  • Table topics is 1-2 minutes.
  • Evaluations are usually 2-3 minutes.

These roles are a bit more challenging because you may have to adjust on the fly to changing circumstances, but this is great training as this is what happens in our every day lives!

• Table topics master
  • Come up with questions that people can answer in 1-2 minutes. Try to think of questions related to the meeting theme, this will help people get into the right frame of mind to answer.
  • Introduce the benefits of practicing impromptu speaking to get audience buy in, there may be guests that don’t know how it works.
  • Give your own thoughts or reasoning behind the questions afterwards, create a bridge between topics, to smoothly transition.
• Evaluator
  • Many people shy away from evaluation roles because they don’t feel comfortable giving feedback; they don’t want to offend!
  • Try to change your mindset and think of it as helping others grow, if you don’t tell them what you like and what could be improved, how will they get better?
  • Think of at least two things you enjoyed about the presentation and one thing that could be changed.
  • Tell us the things you liked, the things that could be improved and end off with the thing you like the best.
• Table topics evaluator
  • In addition to the suggestions above, you may want to just think of two points per speaker, or you may want to generalize and tell us what you liked in general and give some references to speakers that illustrate your point. For example, if everyone had great organization, you might say that and mention, I really liked it when Sally clearly stated the 3 points she was going to talk about.
• General evaluator
  • This is another challenging role, because there are so many aspects of the meeting that you could give feedback on… it can be overwhelming!
  • Pick and choose a couple of points to talk about, things that stood out to you as being very good, or could be improved on.
  • If you find yourself talking about the same subjects each time, try focusing on different aspects each time, i.e. if you usually talk about people’s vocal variety, perhaps talk about their presentation organization.
• Toastmaster
  • This is really not that bad of a role to play, yes, you are involved from beginning to finish, but there is a template you can follow and that doesn’t usually change.
  • If there are last minute changes, but other club members will typically suggest those changes and help out when needed.
  • To keep the meeting running smoothly, you may have to adjust the agenda, for example, if you have a lot of attendees, instead of asking an introductory question that requires a lengthy response, ask for one word instead. This will reduce the time it takes for everyone to introduce themselves.
  • Smoothly transitioning from one speaker to the next is also important, get introductions or background information ahead of time about each person speaking, those details will help with introducing and handing off to each person.

Take on some of the easier roles first and then, as you become more comfortable, sign up for the harder ones. Observe how others do the role; take the aspects you like and make the role your own. There are no absolutes when performing the roles, practice makes perfect!