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 s...

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 ...

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 wil...

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 ...

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...

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 – f...

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...

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...

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...

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 direc...

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, b...

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 w...

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...