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.