This week I had lunch with a friend who started in a new job a few months ago. We also had lunch a month after he started and he was really excited about the opportunity. This time, the discussion was more colored by the frustrations of the position. In my experience, when changing jobs, cities, countries or any other situation, you tend to go through three stages. The first stage is the surprise phase. This is where you learn about the new situation and are surprised about “how things are done around here”. Once you have been in the situation for a while, you enter the irritation phase. This is where you start to complain about the idiots that act in weird, illogical ways. Finally, you enter the adaption phase. This is where your expectations and behaviors are starting to align with the new context in which you find yourself. Over time, the things that used to surprise you and later irritate you become the new normal and you find it hard to imagine doing things in any other way. Especially for new leaders brought in to drive change in an existing organization, this is a particularly challenging pattern as rather than being part of the solution, you rapidly become part of the problem because of this. So, a reflection: which phase are you in? Are you conscious of the natural behaviors associated with this phase? And what can you do to counter some of the negatives?