Project 8 is a problem
The Competent Leader Manual has 10 projects. Â Project 8 deals with Motivating People. Â Members are required to do three of five roles, at least one of which has to be from the first two roles named. Â These two roles both require the member to conduct campaigns or chair a contest.
Problem 1
Chairing a speech contest is not an eligible activity. Â This is the text of the relevant role
“Membership campaign or contest chairman. Â Your club conducts several membership-building campaigns or contests each year. Â With the approval of your club’s vice president membership, organise and conduct a membership building contest, motivating members to participate and helping the club grow.”
This makes no reference to speech contests. Â It is quite different. Â Unfortunately the wording of the first role is ambiguous until the explanatory paragraph is read. Â Either members and club officers don’t bother to read the explanatory material or they know of the problem and ignore it. Â This role is very badly worded. Â It should be presented as two separate roles
Membership campaign
Membership contest chairman
Problem 2
Members and club officials in most clubs are wrongly claiming credit for successfully completing Project 8. Â They are using the chairing of club, area and division speech contests as fulfilling the requirement. Â It doesn’t, as is perfectly obvious from Project 6 which lists chairing a club speech contest as a separate role from the two chairing roles in Project 8. Â Have a look at at the 6 possible roles in Project 6 and see what I mean. Â A club membership campaign or contest and a public relations campaign are there too, separate from a club speech contest.
Problem 3
This problem applies particularly to strong, successful clubs. Â They have very great difficulty in providing opportunities for more than two or three members genuinely to complete either of the first two roles. Â How many membership contests or public relations campaigns can reasonably be run in a given year? Â This is particularly a problem for clubs with effective websites which attract the bulk of their new members. Â I know of several such clubs in WA which have this problem. Â It might sound incredible, but such clubs don’t run traditional member recruitment campaigns because they already have more than enough new members being recruited from the website.
Project 8 is a bottleneck for strong, successful clubs with many members working on the CL award and needing it to progress to the ALB award and finally to DTM. Â .
What can be done about this problem?
I don’t know. Â A new version of the CL Manual has recently been published. Â It contains the same role requirements as the original Manual. Â World Headquarters are not going to publish a revised edition for quite a while which recognises the problem I identify above, even if they agree with me.
Members and clubs which wish to promote the successful completion of the CL award will either have to turn a blind eye to the problem and use speech contests as an acceptable substitute or to find creative ways to conduct membership contests or public relations campaigns. Â But read the manual. Â Taking part in such campaigns or contests is not adequate – organising them and motivating other members to take part is the requirement. Â This is an ethical problem for Vice Presidents Education who sign off the completion of Project 8.
What do you think about this problem?
Do you agree with my analysis? Â Have you any creative suggestions for getting around the bottleneck?
Add your comment.
David Nicholas DTM
Member 318284
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