Ria Dash
Toastmasters member since : June 28, 2021
Education: 10+2 : ICSE and ISC (Computer Science) with an average of 94.20% and 90.25% respectively – Rajendra Vidyalaya, Jamshedpur, Jharkhand (2014-2016)
B.Tech (Information Technology) with an average CGPA of 8.11 out of 10 – Kalinga Institute of Industrial Technology (KIIT Deemed University), Bhubaneswar, Odisha (2016-2020)
2x Gold Medallist – International Olympiad of English Language
Toastmasters offices held and terms of service:
Vice President Public Relations, RCB Phoenix – July-December 2021
Club President, RCB Phoenix – January-June 2022
Vice President Membership, RCB Phoenix – July-December 2022
Vice President Education, RCB Phoenix – January-June 2023, July-December 2023
Assistant Division Director Program Quality, Division J, District 121 – July 2022 – June 2023
Area Director, Area 03, Division C, District 121 – July 2023 – June 2024
Club Sponsor, Christ Kengeri Club, Area 03, Division C, District 121
Toastmasters honors and recognition:
- Awards: 3x Triple Crown Award Winner, Pathways Mentor Award, 2x Pathkeeper Award, Area Director’s Award for the year 2022-2023, District Director’s Recognition 2022-2023, Winner – Evaluation Contest (Club Level & Area Level), Second Runner Up – Evaluation Contest (Division Level), First Runner Up – International Speech Contest (Club Level),
Best Club Officer Award, Outstanding Leader Award.
Paths: Presentation Mastery, PM5 ; Strategic Relationships, SR5 ; Visionary Communication, VC5
Relevant work experience and how it relates to Toastmasters and your role as a District leader:
Work experience: Software Quality Assurance Engineer (HP Inc., Print R&D Centre, Bangalore) – October 2020 to Present | Communications Lead since 2021 at HP India Diversity, Equity and Inclusion Council, HP India Next Generation Business Resource Group and Saksham (RCB’s Women Support Network) | Pillar Lead since 2022 at HP’s R&D Culture Pillar | Training Facilitator since 2023 at HP’s Climate Fresk Initiative | Global Ambassador since 2021 at the Society of Women Engineers (SWE) | Co-Lead since 2022 at the HP SWE Awards Committee.
Volunteering experience: Director (Drafting) at TEDxKIITUniversity, Undersecretary General (Drafting) at KIIT MUN Society, Editor-in-Chief of the International Press at KIIT International MUN 2019, Senior Editor of the KIIT University Magazines, Documentation Officer at the National Workshop on Capacity Building for Localising SDGs- Agenda 2030, organised by UNSSC, Bonn (Germany).
I firmly believe that my shenanigans in the corporate arena in the past 3 years have enabled me to also be a brand ambassador of Toastmasters throughout. Wherever I go, I carry the baton and the brand value of Toastmasters with me. Everything I do at work – with respect to my technical contributions and otherwise – majorly revolve around the way I effectively communicate and relay information across, which again, is directly proportional to the things I have learnt from the Toastmasters fraternity. The fact that I have led multiple initiatives both within and outside my workplace gives me an exposure and an experience with respect to leading and learning. I am the youngest Business Resource Group lead in my organization, and it makes me confident that I can be a great District Leader as well.
What experience do you have in strategic planning?
To be honest, strategy forms a major chunk of most things I do. The best way to strategically plan your course of action is to have a goal and a vision – both of which I have been constantly doing with respect to my home club as well as Area C3. Starting from helping members plan their speeches, leading membership campaigns, chartering new clubs by designing pitches that would attract more people and strategizing how the clubs can achieve 5+ DCP before the program year ends are some of the prime examples. With my home club, RCB Phoenix for instance, we hit a rough patch in between when our members would miss meetings frequently. Since I come from a corporate club, I built a plan to communicate with the HR and the Reporting Managers and encouraged my fellow club officers to set up 1-on-1 meetings with members to understand their pain points and concerns. We also encouraged the reporting managers to encourage their employees to participate and set up a strong Rewards and Recognition model to make sure every member is appreciated. For Area C3, one of the clubs, RNS Toastmasters Club, was constantly losing members as students were unwilling to pay – I created an elabortate membership campaign with club officers doing door-to-door classroom promotions, social media promotions as well as the faculty encouraging students to get mandatory memberships for a boost in their resume. I did not just strategize and let these plans go to waste – I also kept following up with the team on a weekly basis to check if we are on track. And now, after rigorous efforts, we are finally abput to add 100 students in the upcoming month. Area C3 also became the first area to charter a new club – Christ Kengeri Toastmasters Club. To make this happen, I had to repeatedly contact the student coordinators, help them with the materials that they shall present to the students to get their buy-in, work with the college administration to facilitate seamless payments and so on. One of the recent events where we had to startegize in order to maximize participation was Colossus – the Division C Meet and Greet – where I planned, designed and led the entire confluence from scratch. I also led the PR campaign and made sure our feed is vibrant, attractive and everyone in District 121 knew what was going on. To break from the monotony of usual division meets, I also came up with a cultural showcase where members would volunteer to present their talents in front of the wider audience. We were targetting a maximum of 80 registrations, but due to my team’s action plan to boost participation, we ended up having 110 participants on the final day. This gave the college students an ample amount of exposure to even some of our Toastmasters from the corporate arena, and Colossus was a massive success.
Also as one of my learning paths as Strategic Relationships that I recently completed, I know what it needs to have a foolproof strategy and collaborate to make things happen in the best way possible.
What experience do you have in the area of finance?
While I haven’t explicity worked in any of the finance teams at Toastmasters, I have had an experience in budgeting our finances for Colossus – the Division C Meet-and-Greet – starting with finalizing individual registration fees, allocating a budget for awards and recognition and arranging food with minimal contribution from the attendees. I also have an ample amount of experience working towards accounting and auditing in various corporate events that happen in my organization (especially finalizing budgets for events that I lead) as well as large scale events such as TEDx conferences back in the University.
What experience do you have in developing procedures?
I firmly believe that strategic planning and developing procedures go hand in hand – in order to be a good strategist, you must also know how to develop a procedure that adheres to your strategy. Starting with strategizing corporate events and the flow of employee engagement activities at work, to also developing procedures to get the best speakers in my years as a TED Conference Director – I have worked tirelessly to develop procedures that guaranteed participation from national and international stakeholders. With Colossus-2023 and the promotional campaigns that I worked on as well, I had a solid framework and procedural layout to get maximum engagement from members across the division. While working towards pursuing club leads, I had a detailed procedure (from scheduling information sessions to helping the student council conduct classroom promotions, to conducting education sessions for interested students and helping them submit the paperwork) – every aspect of the procedure was especially curated by me, in association with our Division Director. Not just that, in my home club, RCB Phoenix too, boosting member engagemnet by circulating member interest surveys, creating an action plan to work on the feedback collected from those surveys and planning speeches and fun meetings in synchronization is something that I have been doing since the past 3 years – which has helped my club achieve President Distinguished Status for the 3rd time in a row now, within a period of only 6 months!
What lessons did you learn from previous leadership positions?
When I signed up/nominated myself for the position of an Area Director, I thought, “How difficult can it be?” I had been a Toastmaster for only about 2 years then, but the amount of exposure that I have had is immense. So have my achievements – starting from 3 Triple Crown Awards to Path Completion Awards 2 times in a row, to Pathways Mentor Award – my Toastmaster journey had showered me with accolades and opened up doors that I never knew existed. I had been a Club President, a VPPR, a VPM and a VPE. I had navigated the various facets of public speaking for over 2 decades then, and with each passing elocution/speech contest/spoken word poetry performance, I kept learning something new. And with these learnings, I have always wanted to explore ways on how I can give those learnings back to the community. The position of an AD – the hierarchy, the badge, the recoginition – it all seemed too lucrative. I was excited to lead, to learn and to thrive in the process. But little did I know the technicalities – what it takes to run an area, and how different it is from running a club. Dealing with a group of about 30-40 people and then exapnding your horizon to a 100 – it is tough. And what’s tougher is, they look up to you – in the hopes that you will have answers to all their questions. And I learnt that it isn’t enough if you think you’re good, they need to think you’re good too. It isn’t enough for you to think you deserve being a leader, your clubs/area should think you are worth being followed or listened to. I learnt that patience is of paramount importance – things take time, and the more you’re patient with stuff, the sweeter the fruits would taste. There’s protocol, there’s procedure and it is imperative that I am flexible – flexible enough to know that I can be wrong, that the way I do things might not be the only way and anyone can have a revolutionary idea, all we need to do is to be open to accepting everything.
The higher up you are on a pedestal, the more crucial it is for you to be kind and humble and accepting. Your team shouldn’t be too hesitant to approach you, they shouldn’t think you are a forbidden fruit. You are more of a peer to them than a leader. It is difficult, yes. Nothing is ever easy. But you need to believe you can. And that’s how you will. You might have plans and the best laid plans can go awry – you got to be calm and patient and always ready to adjust. That’s what makes a good leader, a great leader.
Why do you want to serve as a District leader?
I have always believed in servant leadership – and there’s this amazing line from a book I read sometime ago, that says, “The higher up you are on the food chain/ladder, the humbler you have to appear.” And this sort of stuck with me. As an Area Director, I have had a lot of eye-opening revelations – I always thought it would be easy, having worked with a varied range of people in the past 14 years in various communities.
I truly feel that as a leader and a learner, I have a lot to offer and a lot more to learn; and there is no better opportunity than being a Division Director for me to help every club grow and also help myself grow in the process.I have already had a beautiful experience as the AD, and it only makes sense for me to take the next step as the Division Director to take my leadership journey forward. I have a lot of ideas, and I want to bring about a massive change. As the AD, I have assisted my Division Director in multiple initiatives – be it chartering a club, conducting pre-charter meetings, leading a division-level PR campaign, scheduling and organizing networking events and so on.
The reason why I feel I am a perfect fit for the Division Director position is because I have learnt to feel the members’ pulse, I know what they need and I know what needs to be done for these clubs to flourish. I want to set an example, as the youngest Division Director, and tell them that if I can achieve a bunch of milestones, they can too. I want to be accessible to them, for them. For college clubs, I want to be the bridge that fosters a college-coroporate connect. For community clubs, I want to bring in a relatability index. For corporate clubs, I want to establish a system – a template, to show them how an effective corporate communicator and leader should be. The members of every club need someone they can establish a frequency with, someone who can share their concerns and be open to accepting vulnerabilities, and as an increasingly self-aware individual who’s never too afraid to accept what they can or cannot do, I think I can bring that comfort to the table. And once the clubs are comfortable, they’ll also be unhinged in terms of performance.
I am open to stretching my limits and serving any other areas/divisions as well, not just Division C, whatever the leadership would decide.
In your opinion, what are the District mission’s major objectives and how would you work to achieve them?
I feel that the District’s major objective has always been “to build new clubs and support all clubs in achieving excellence”. But that’s not all. At D121, we empower individuals to become more effective communicators and leaders. The reason why we’re different is because everyone communicates, even plants have their way of communicating when they need to be watered. But what makes us Homo Sapiens, what classifies us apart, is our ability to communicate “effectively” – to evoke emotions and response. And that’s what we nurture and value at D121. Nothing unites people better than a good story – and every story at D121 deserves to be heard. How I wish to work towards achieving the District’s mission is to ofcourse strategize and deliver in terms of numbers, but also connect and emotionally invest in each club and each member. Every single member is important, even if we can touch one single life with our presence – that shoudl trigger the Butterfly Effect. I do not just wish to create effective communicators, but also stronger leaders – leaders who can be the flagbearers, the successors, the charioteers and the brand ambassadors of D121. Excellence might mean different things to different clubs – they might have different benchmarks and as a District Leader, it shall be my responsibility to make sure all the benchmarks are met and all the voices are herad – and our standard as one of the best districts in the Toastmasters fraternity is elevated with each passing day.
Additional information about yourself:
I lie somewhere between a Panda and a Pegasus. I am loud, lazy, opinionated, aesthetically inclined, perpetually bored, outlandishly expressive and fiercely competitive. I am a seasoned debater, a storyteller, a connoisseur, a pop-culture enthusiast, an artist (well, almost), and a musician – technically, a nerd. I believe that there are no heartbreaks that chocolate and poetry can’t fix; and that all of humanity is a cosmic joke. I also wish to own a British accent and a library in the future. For the longest time, I have enjoyed the limelight – the true joys of being center-stage. And so I have always been plagued by the question as to what more do I possibly have to offer back to people. I see myself as a performer, a speaker, a storyteller, a changemaker, someone who compels people to listen to her, someone who can transform the way people see themselves and help them become better, stronger and more fearless. I am supremely ambitious and also a sore loser, so competing with myself every passing day to become better than I was yesterday, is something I relentlessly do. But being a sore loser doesn’t make me delusional. I am very self-aware, I know what I am capable of, what difference I can make and also have the power to acknowledge things I cannot do and strive in order to learn how to do that from the best. I can adapt, and I can grow – irrespective of the circumstances – as I said, very similar to a Panda!