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Hi Reader,

Last weekend, I volunteered at a local neighbourhood festival. I'm no stranger to volunteering, however this time I did something I have never done before - I was in charge of setting up the festival’s beer garden!! 🍻

Of course, I had no idea what I was doing. Luckily I was given a team of trusty high school students to help me figure it out.

How to set up a beer garden 101

We started by hauling ridiculously heavy fencing across the soccer field and then attempted to assemble it, without any instructions from the fencing company. It took a couple high school brains and a few head scratches to crack that puzzle.

While working on the fencing, I had another team set up the tent in parallel to save time, because that's what efficient project managers do especially when tasks aren’t dependent on each other. Of course, we still managed to trip over each other a few times.

We then discovered that the lovely couple who lent us the tent, fresh from their wedding the previous weekend, had accidentally given us the extra-large cover instead of the medium one. With the wind picking up, the oversized cover setup turned into a real challenge, involving plenty of creative tucking and lots of tape to keep everything in place.

Once the beer van arrived, we thought we were ready to go. Or so we thought. We soon discovered we forgot to leave an opening for the beer to be unloaded. So we had to unpuzzle half the fences, give the beer people a path to unload, then re-puzzle the fences back together.

We were done. Whew.

At this point, we decided to take a break by sitting on the brightly coloured Adirondack plastic chairs, which seem to be a true staple of Canadian outdoor spaces.

Friction in the beer garden

Our rest was short lived. One of the other volunteers came over to tell us we had set it up wrong, as it needed to be offset to the stage, not straight on. So we had to rotate everything 180 degrees.

My high school students still had lots of energy, so we moved things around per the new specifications.

What stood out to me about this incident was that the volunteer, let’s call them “the rearranging volunteer”, didn’t come to discuss it with me first, even though it was well known that I was the designated leader of the beer garden installation, and proud of it.

The rearranging volunteer instead came barreling in (no pun intended) and began directing my students to move the entire installation. I wasn’t sure how to respond, since I had been given different instructions about where to place the garden. So, I decided to step back and let this person take the lead.

We later learned that there had been a miscommunication between two festival staff members, and I had received an outdated version of the beer garden plans. The rearranging volunteer had the updated plan.

Chilling out in the garden

Here’s our finished product:

I know, it’s just a small beer garden, but we pulled it off!

The high school students that helped were not allowed in the beer garden while we were serving, but that didn’t stop them from trying to sneak in to say hi occasionally.

Later in the day, after my beer serving shift, I was waiting in line at the hot dog stand when the "rearranging volunteer" approached me. They apologized for their earlier actions and explained that, as a process improvement specialist in their day job, they sometimes tend to be a bit too assertive. I immediately understood, as I can be just as pushy and overly enthusiastic in my own project manager role at times.

We both chose the same hot dog, fully loaded with pickles, mustard, sauerkraut, bacon bits, celery salt, aioli, and crushed potato chips. We went back to the beer garden and, interestingly, also chose the same beer to drink. Then we sat on the Adirondack chairs and started to chat about process.

We realized we had a lot in common in our day-to-day work. This person also found it challenging to get everyone on the same page, especially when changes weren’t clearly communicated to the entire team. They admitted that they often come across as too forceful and are working on how to dial it back.

I shared that I could relate. Early in my project management career, many of my mentors told me I needed to learn when to speak up, and also when to hold back. Finding the right balance of communication is often specific to each situation.

Lessons learned

By the time we finished our hot dogs and beer, we had agreed on our lessons learned:

• First, read the room. It’s always best to identify who’s in charge before offering input.
• Second, know when to thoughtfully speak up or when to stay silent. Make sure you fully consider whether speaking up is helpful at the moment, or if it’s better to wait. Or perhaps, it’s sometimes wiser to say nothing at all.

In the case of this particular situation, we agreed that speaking up was the right decision, while recognizing that there’s more than one way to approach these situations.

If anyone needs a beer garden set up for their next fundraising festival, feel free to reach out. You have two experienced, process-oriented professionals ready to help!

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