In my first blog post, The Culture Equation, I maintained that a leader can jump start culture change simply by changing the meeting culture. After reading the excellent new book, “Humor, Seriously”, I was remiss not to mention an accelerant at least its equal – levity.
Co-authors Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas combine research into neurochemistry and human behavior with the principles of comedy to bring science to what I’ve always intuitively known: that calibrated humor from the top breaks down walls across the organization by opening up dialogue, engendering trust, and spurring creativity. But don’t break out in flop sweat, you don’t have to be a stand-up comic to effectively incorporate humor into the workplace. As Corinne Purtill points out in her recent New York Times book review, a leader “…doesn’t have to be funny to build a team that embraces humor.”
The quickest way for a leader to inject levity into the daily life of the company is through its meetings. Meetings, the bane of corporate existence, are at the same time unavoidable and essential; they remain the basic unit of organized activity. Over my career I worked hard to eliminate meetings without a clear purpose. For meetings that had one, I made sure they were efficiently run but also leavened with light-hearted banter and humor – most of it pointed right back at me. If you read the book, be sure not to miss the anecdote about the management consultant who carries with him a copy of the CIA’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual. I’ll be surprised if it doesn’t remind you of most of the meetings you’ve ever attended.
What’s Your Humor Style?
As part of their research, Aaker and Bagdonas created a simple but effective tool for helping you understand your humor style. Who doesn’t like a good typology? Even if you don’t read the book, you and your leadership team would be well-advised to take this simple quiz, available for free at www.humorseriously.com, then have a conversation about it. It’s bound to lead to a better understanding of each other and how levity – in the right measure – can be weaponized to achieve organizational objectives while having more fun doing it.
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