Are you having professional fun yet?

Being a professional is serious. But does that mean it can never be fun? And isn’t fun, in the professional sense, important, even if it’s not ‘serious’?

I once asked a senior partner in a major firm, “so what do you do for fun around here?“. Thinking it an innocuous question, I was expecting our discussion to open up around values, culture, talent and purpose, as this is exactly where the question has taken me with others. I was a bit taken aback when his eyebrows raised, he stiffened and gathered himself before leaning forward and clarifying my confusion. “What we do is recruit the best and the brightest from university and work them so hard that they squeal. That way they’re learning the fastest and we are getting the most out of them. Our work is too important to be wasting it having fun.“

I realise now I should have asked about professional fun, though old school 'leadership' doesn’t understand that concept either.

Over time, I’ve found that a key differentiator between professionals who grind out their career and those who are successful and relaxed is that high performers who thrive over time enjoy their work in sophisticated ways. Indeed, I have the most fun when I work with professionals who were having a great time and running sustainable, profitable, innovative and fast-growing firms.

What professional fun can be.

Professional fun is related to several important ideas:

• The notion of flow, doing difficult work in a fully engaged and highly effective way. 
• Game theory, which understands the human need for progress, rewards, challenge and variety.
• Design thinking, which is a structured way to engage creativity and non-linear thinking to solve complex problems.

So rather than being trivial, professional fun is essential to professional impact.

Driving value.

In a professional firm, it’s easier to drive relentless activity than to create the space to design better activity. Here are some questions worth asking of any firm:

• What is the accounting code for investment in the future?
• Where is the return on investment measured?
• What events do you organise to refresh the business model, to infuse innovation throughout the firm, and to create meaning beyond performance?
• When does the firm actively bring its professionals from different experience cohorts, countries and specialisations to address the firm’s hardest problems?
• Is it only the ‘most senior’ people who do this and do they know how to play with problems rather than dig at them?
• Are your problem solving, strategy-setting and innovation events structured to elicit engagement, curiosity and creativity, without making the task hopeless or too easy?

In games, players are given progressive wins of various kinds, enough to constitute a reward, not so much as to be boring. Failure is built in – failure that isn’t catastrophic, but leads to learning. What is your firm's attitude to (constructive) failure? 

Similarly, design thinking recognises that to solve a problem, it needs to be fully explored – played with - before setting out to find a solution. The idea is to work in both ‘problem space’ and ‘solution space’. This means to explore different ways to think about and formulate the problem, since complex problems do not yield well to the repeated use of a single approach. For success you need to integrate diverse approaches. The problems of the business of the firm are different from the client problems the firm addresses – the solution to an innovation problem does not arise by auditing it, for example – yet it’s hard to get out of your normal professional convergent goal-oriented mindset to engage your less-used innovation design muscles. Much professional work is replicated between clients, relies on standardisation of methodology and addresses well-known problem structures. Driving value for the firm itself can mean the opposite: addressing new problems, with complex structures and demanding many integrated approaches.

The current challenge

As an industry, professional services firms are facing new challenges to the core partnership business model and to the value of their core offerings. The return for seeking professional fun is a deeply effective response to these complexities.

• Re-engagement of jaded, tired and underperforming experts.
• Strings of small wins that add up to a change in the performance parameters of the firm.
• Greatly enhanced teamwork, where new synergistic solutions emerge from well-designed interactions.
• Some big wins, tackling big issues for complex groups of stakeholders.

There is also a suite of personal rewards that underpins the value of professional fun.

• Enhancing recovery. In a game-based, playful approach to problems, a different part of the brain is engaged, which enables the over used part of the problem-solving mind of a professional to rest.
• Difficult unexpressed emotions come to the surface, and, although painful, have space to be resolved.
• A deeper connection to meaning.
• People who are having professional fun, seem to be able to persist in the face of difficulty, because the task is important and is connected to something bigger. This big picture is viscerally felt in the small transactions.
• Self-esteem and self confidence result from both small wins and big wins. This also frees up the mind to be more creative, more relaxed, and more disciplined in solving problems.

A nice side-effect is that people who are involved in playful, creative, innovative tasks together, develop in-jokes and bond into a close-knit cohort, which can produce value for a long time. Ironically this can become so much part of the culture that its value goes unmeasured.

Leading through fun.

Success is no longer based on a wartime metaphor. The leader who understands, and develops professional fun in a structured, disciplined, but flowing way can create real lasting value for the firm:

• It accelerates your firm’s ability to solve its complex problems quickly, with better solutions.
• The firm innovates systematically; everyone’s involved; it’s not just a nice idea.
• Your colleagues refresh their deeper talents beyond their technical skills and this know-how is transmitted across the organisation.
• Your teams become more engaged, with the related benefits in pure efficiency.
• A firm that is clearly having professional fun attracts the best people.

The place to start is with yourself. If you’re in your optimal frame of mind, you will more likely lead well. This means that you are clear on the three critical issues facing the firm in your strategy cycle, you have systems that build the firm’s capability to address them and you have designed the culture that relishes resolving exactly those issues.

So, rather than bristle at the question, can you answer ‘how do we have professional fun around here?’ in a way that drives value, embeds lasting success and generates excellence?

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