One of the most important lessons I’ve learned, through some bumpy lived experiences over the past 5+ years, is that you have to meet the organization where it’s at. When you know something isn’t working well, or you see a significant opportunity to improve upon something, it’s tempting to start by visualizing the dream/end state. Having a clear vision as to how you want to evolve a process, develop an employee, or accomplish a program of work can be extremely valuable and help set you on the path to achieving it; however, there is one major watch out. If your current reality is wildly different or has little resemblance to your ideal end state, you must respect your starting point and calibrate the path forward accordingly.

Far too often, we try to jump from current to end state, and then wonder why the end state doesn’t result in the desired outcomes we hoped for. One of the clearest examples of this, and an important lesson learned, came from our own failure with our first attempt at rolling out a formalized performance management program at Avanti. When I joined Avanti, we didn’t have a formal performance management program and expectations around performance reviews were quite loose. Coming from larger, more sophisticated, and more formal organizations, we had a strong desire to institute something better at Avanti. We selected a comprehensive program based on the Balanced Scorecard framework, and created and rolled out extensive, weighted average rating cards for every single role in the company. A lot of time and work went into preparing all the scorecards. We celebrated the roll out and were quite excited about it initially. Then after one painful and ineffective review cycle, we shut the program down.

The program failed (and we erred) because we didn’t acknowledge or respect our organization’s starting point and tried to go from nascent (1/10) to professional (10/10), with no bridge between. With the benefit of hindsight, I now appreciate that to successfully administer a balanced scorecard performance program framework assumes (a) your leaders are well trained and experienced in delivering performance reviews, (b) you can quickly and easily (emphasis here) retrieve the metrics you define as critical to measuring performance, (c) your employees understand the purpose of the program and are bought into the measurable behaviors being important indicators of job performance, and (d) you have a plan in place to sustain the program after the initial roll out. Because we lacked all the above, there was no buy in from employees or people leaders, and the program was short lived.

The example above nicely highlights the broader point, which comes up often in various forms. If you respect your starting place, it becomes easier to plan for sustainable changes and calibrate the change required to get towards your end state. It’s tempting and well intentioned to strive for greatness right from the start, but rarely works when there’s a significant gap. If excellence is the goal, it’s ok to work your way there deliberately and intentionally over time.

It’s important to have fun at work. Not every hour, day, or necessarily every week, even. But overall, you should be able to find opportunities to interject some fun into your work. Successfully completing challenging professional goals is difficult so being able to find humour and cultivating a culture where levity is normalized is incredibly important. Having some fun is an important aid and complement to hard work.

Additionally, a huge amount of your time is spent working. If you’re able to find elements of fun in it, it makes your entire work experience that much more positive. While that’s not a revolutionary concept, it’s something you rarely hear spoken about as an explicit objective, despite the fact that it can be a really important feature of a healthy work culture.

There is a key distinction between the concept of having fun with your colleagues and becoming personal friends with them. Being ‘friends’ with your colleagues is certainly not a pre-requisite to having fun and enjoying working with them. I have worked with many colleagues that I wouldn’t want to spend meaningful time with outside of work, and yet have really enjoyed the experience of working closely together with over many years. I see people rightfully be wary of how close of a relationship they develop with a boss or direct report (and occasionally peer); however, you can remain colleagues and still have a lot of fun working together and from my perspective, that’s not only ok, it’s also a wonderful thing.