Joyful Projects - the Secret to Real Excellence

For our final episode, let's look at how to pull this all together…joy, excellence, communication, IDEAL.  And, while those thoughts are rolling around, let's listen with fresh perspective  to the most powerful Sermon of all human history.

Let's take a minute to summarize it all together – this epic movie. We've laid some foundations, and weaved our story line that helps you lead a project, to lead a team that ideally transforms and idea into a reality. This will help tie together what we talked about in the first few episode…sort of a cliff note version on how to see how cool it is when we apply this approach to take Sunday's message into Mondays mission…and ideally lead a project with joy and excellence.

The project is done, and your team is disbanding. You knew all along this was the natural course this epic movie would play out. Your job as leader isn't just to say “good luck, hope your next job goes well.” You are their key reference, you are their key networking contact. Be proactive. Write the referrals and recommendations. Help them to see all the great achievements and accomplishments to put on their resume. Because for most of us, this project isn't a one and done – it's a stepping stone. Make sure that stepping stone isn't just a tripping hazard in their life journey but truly a way up to a joyful future.

Nobody likes to recreate the wheel right? Do you like having to learn all over again what you learned in a previous project? Probably not. Do you wish someone before you had taken the time to make a notebook of the tricks of the trade? Probably yes. Now you're the leader and you can make it so that others will learn from your experience. This is more valuable than leaving a legacy; this is about serving those who will do it in the future in a most selfless way. Let's look at some ways to pull this off.

It's now almost time to say we are done… our idea is now a reality. The team is taking a deep breath and the customer is delighted. But as a leader, we have some very important actions still to do. Let's start by being lifted up.

Last episode we talked about achieving our goal. Absolutely necessary. This episode, we are going to look at the important; accomplishing desired, maybe even delightful, outcomes. We are in the part of our drama where the idea to reality transformation impacts the hearts and minds of our team and our customer.

We are on a journey to transform an idea into a reality. That reality has both tangible and intangible dimensions. Let's talk the tangible part – what actually got built, created, transformed. In most project management books, this is the focus. For us, it's only the first half of being an IDEAL project, but it's the necessary half. In our next episode, we'll talk about the important half.

Yes! We are moving from words to actions, plans to production, thinking to doing. And, my goodness, there's a lot going on! Back to back meetings, along with a deluge of emails and voicemails – enough to feel like we can't keep our head above water, let alone lead our team. So, let's make sure we do the leading things and the managing things well. It's time to take a hint from General Dwight Eisenhower on how he did this as the Allied Commander.

Encourage. What a beautiful word; what a beautiful gift to actually be able to do that. Let's continue our look into how we can truly encourage, to give strength, to unleash inner joy. In this episode, let's look how God has encouraged those He sent on Mission and then let's see how we can learn from the perfect examples that God has provided.

We continue to transform fear, anxiety into joy. Remember our phrase from Mother Theresa? Joy is strength. How cool of a calling is this? As leaders, we transform those worries, those unknowns, those concerns that weaken us and we transform them into our strength. This is definitely not about trite slogans and being a rah rah cheerleader. Those are ok, but they won't do the real transforming of anxiety into joy. Let's do a little look at Jesus' beautiful discourse at the Last Supper. We will spend most of this podcast on some pragmatic ways to encourage.

In our project life, just like in our lives, there is that point at which we have to turn fear into joy. Like when we take on that new role for which we feel unprepared. It might be when we need to face someone with whom we have deep differences. Well, once we determine that we've addressed our concerns, we learn and move forward. Last episode, we pulled back the skin of the onion of our project in “explore.” We took a hard look at what all could bump in the night. That raised our concern level. Now is the time to face those concerns…to encounter how we as a team will move forward with joy, with excellence. This is a natural process, one that we may have taken in our faith journey. When we were completely lost, when the bumps in the night seemed to me more powerful than the coming of dawn, we may have open our eyes and encountered our merciful God through his Son, The Word made Flesh, The Savior who came so that we may have eternal life. And what followed that encounter? Well, joy. And that joy fed our hearts, and we took encouragement (noting that courage comes from the word for heart in latin). Let's put that process into our project story to feed joy and excellence.

Let's exploreOur IDEAL project story as it continues to develop! We have enabled joy and engaged excellence by inviting, initiating, indoctrinating because these steps drove out our most common fears of being alone and without meaning. We continued to build the joy that is strength by opening up the realms of possibility with dialogue, discovery and then locking in what we'll do with define. Now it's time to see what might go askew, what bumps in the road might knock us off course. It's time to be proactive. It's time to explore the risks and the opportunities, to figure out how to encounter them and, lastly, to make sure we are thoroughly enabling joy, driving out fear, with intentional encouragement. Let's take a deeper look at this step we call “Explore.”

You are navigating the turbulent waters of getting the project and project team up to a smooth running momentum. You've been having those tough, learning conversations that we called dialogues and you've discovered quite a bit about people, passions, and preferences…as well as laying some important project foundations. Let's take a look at those foundations. I don't call them decisions. I call this stage Define. It's where we give our team and our project work some necessary definition – from how we formulate short and long range goals, to what tools we'll use to keep attuned to how it's going to how we'll set the underlying rhythm to which we will play the melody of our project life.

You are in the rocky phase of the team and project dynamic, finding out all those aspects that are making transforming your idea into a reality a bit tougher. Last episode we talked about having the dialog, the learning conversation that didn't look at proving who's right and wrong, but to move the whole team up the rungs of understanding. Now that you've had the dialog, let's be intentional about harvesting the learning – don't leave that fruit on the tree! Too often we think that only fruit of the dialog is the decision. It's not. The bigger fruit is the discovery, learning not just about what we are going to do, but who, why and with what strengths and passions. If all you take away from these candid conversations is the decision, you will leave behind important fruit that will be great food for your engage excellence, enable joy journey.

We've now initiated and indoctrinated our team and ready to plunge in. Life on our project seems to be going just swimmingly. But, as they say, the devil is in the details. Realities of the project's rocky spots are becoming evident. As the conversations get intense, the realities of how our team members see courses of actions and causes of issues a bit differently make us wonder how well our team is really glued together. What we've stepped into is what is classically called the Storm phase of the popular shorthand for team dynamics – form, storm, norm, perform. Here's what's cool. We knew this was going to happen. Our job as leaders is to navigate this storm, and not just to get through it. Joyful project leadership means that we are going to take those hard conversations and lead them from being a place where friendships are strained to a place where trust is reinforced and learning how to move forward is accomplished. Yea, that's right – we're using this storm to make us stronger; oh, remember? Joy is strength.

You've invited and initiated your project team. That built the connection to the purpose and the people. Fantastic. But now... we need to make sure we have a truly solid team foundation – operating on the same values towards the same vision. It's a lot more than being on time and on budget. It's about accomplishing an ideal outcome in a way the engages, enriches and empowers our team. This is NOT about rah-rah. This is about being disciplined, determined and dedicated about what your team needs to hold dear. It's time to talk about vision and values. It's not a poster on the wall – it's the defining characteristic that will get your team through the tough moments ahead.

Enabling joy and Engaging excellence are the engine and wheels. Now it's time for the joyful journey that will transform our idea into a reality. We'll see that it's IDEAL. Yes, both ideal – as in awesome – and an acronym. We will start with “Invite” and, weeks from now, we'll wrap up with “let go”. This week we'll look at how to lay that joy enabling foundation with big words like psychological safety and advice from our mothers to be grateful. The metaphor is that you're the movie director and this is the time to really set the stage so that exciting adventure gets an engaging start. Oh – and we'll see that stories about how Abraham and Moses got ‘invited' also, which gives us even more great clues and inspiration for our own projects.

Enabling Joy, Engaging Excellence – the people and task dimensions of our project. What holds them together? Really, it's more about what's keeping us in touch with ideas, with plans, with predictions, with expectations…to put it plainly – what's holding us together as a joy enabled, excellence engaged team. Communication, of course. Now you're probably thinking, ‘of course'! but also thinking, “gee, communication is one of those big topics that is hard to get our arms around.” I agree, but here's my approach. We are going to look at the purposes of communication – not the styles, not the scripts, not the sentences – all of which deserve attention also. I've found that I can classify most project communication in one of four buckets: need to learn, need to decide, need to team, need to know what's next. I have four terms for that. Dialogue communication leads to learning. Discussions lead to decisions. Getting clear on Alignment leads to teaming. And a good drumbeat cues what's next. Let's take a first look at what these look and sound like.

People or Task – it's not really an or, it's an and.I remember back in the 80's going to a seminar on something called the management grid, a seemingly mathematical way to look at how one balances being task or people oriented. Along the way, I've been to other seminars, most recently the approach called the leadership wake, (as in the wake of a boat), that talks about how as leaders we leave a wake of results and relationships. This has been a reality of life for all time. In the Gospels we meet Martha and Mary, who seem to bring to life this balance and how Jesus addresses it. Let's take a look at these passages that resonate with us to this day and see what we learn about balancing joy and excellence.

Wouldn't it be great if we could have complete control over all that affects our project success? But guess what – we live in the real world. In the pursuit of engaging excellence, we've talked about the Rational Four – scope, cost, quality and schedule; we've talked about the Relational Three – the in-house, contractor and stakeholder families. Now we have the Readiness Two – as in, are you ready for action? On one side, we have our suppliers. We rely on them to provide those inputs that we bake into our transformation of idea to reality. We need that stuff- from tangible materials to intangible information. But it may seem that we have no control over the whims of our suppliers. Likewise, we need to make certain predictions of the future and, while, as the saying goes, we hope for the best and prepare for the worst – how do we really lead this whole area that we call risk, those threats that have a probability from likely to rare. We want to lead confidently, but not naively and we want to be protected but not smothered in needless insurances. Let's see how a joyful project might think about these topics.

I hope that the popular song is playing in your head. I won't sing it, I promise. In this episode, we continue unpacking the components of Engaging Excellence. Previously covering the Rational Four, we now delve into the Relational Three. Let's step away from the idea of human resources. Let's think of those we've got with us on this journey to transform an idea into a reality as a family. Let's remember what it means to be the steward, the custodian of the talents entrusted to our leadership on this project. I think you're going to find this a great reminder of what we already deeply believe, but sometimes, in the stress of tight schedules we let ourselves start to only see these wonderful people as just ‘resources.' Let's be better than that.

In this episode we are going to step back and reinforce our understanding of joy. We want to really appreciate how powerful this is, why Mother Theresa said that joy is strength. Remember, this podcast is helping us to take the power of Sunday's message into Monday's mission, so we are going to listen to Jesus talking about Joy, and then St. Paul putting joy in the context of the fruit of the Spirit. If you've been still a bit confused about what I mean when I say joyful projects, this should really dispel that darkness.

Just like Enabling Joy had three components, so does Engaging Excellence – but there's are some layers to this onion. In this episode, we are going to look at the first pillar, the component I call the Rational Four. The other components, the Relational Three and the Readiness Two will be addressed in future episodes, but you may already see some neat synergy there. In the Rational Four, I hold myself to my promise to not use the M word, as I provide joy enabling, excellence engaging perspectives on cost, schedule, scope and quality. It's not really about that bookkeeping on the spreadsheets – this is about our ability to enable our team to have the creative conversations on what to do about that spreadsheet information.

Joy can be a misunderstood term, and often we are not really sure that it means to enable joy. Now that we've distinguished joy happiness from pleasure happiness, we know that joy is strength, an ingredient. The key is to understand the components of joy, and in this episode we'll explore how those components are right there in the Genesis creation account. How appropriate – creation – God's transforming of his idea into a reality. Starting to get the picture now? Let's see what God exemplified as He gave mankind dominion.

As we mentally prepare for accomplishing a project, we put a lot of energy into budgets, schedules, requirements, procurement tactics, and getting people on board.  That's great!  But are you really preparing for the dynamics of this epic adventure where you will pull together a team and transform what is now just an idea into a reality?  Guess what!  In leading a project, you are very much like the director of a movie.  Those schedules, those budgets, those requirements – they are all like the parts and pieces of a movie – everything from the idyllic farmhouse to the car chase scene.  But a movie at its core is not about the scenery or the phenomenal special effects – it's about the plot. How a hero beats the odds, how a couple overcomes some comical alienation to live happily ever after.  Your project epic is such a movie.  And you need to be prepared to direct it. The good news is now knowing that it will have twists and turns. Let's learn how to be proactive so that right in scene one, you're setting the stage for a phenomenal climax and closing scene.

Let's explore!  In this episode, we begin to explore why joy is the powerful ingredient that will lead to success when you are transforming your ideas into a reality, in accomplishing a project that not only delights the customer but, more importantly, is a passionate and rewarding purpose for those doing it - your team! Paul is using Lead the IDEAL Project, which you can download from Amazon or buy a workbook version on Lulu.com.