One of the classic dialogues from the movie, The Dark Knight is when the villain — The Joker — crashes a party and, with a mixture of menace and mirth, asks the terrified group, “Why so serious?”
This is a line that will not be out of place in many workspaces today. In the mad race towards deadlines, profits and valuations, leaders and their teams sometimes forget to laugh and smile a little more. And yet, humour can go a long way in not only making our work lives happier but also in easing the everyday dealings and transactions towards smoother and more effective outcomes.
The leader has an important role in ensuring this. The team often takes its lead from her. If the leader is very serious and rarely breaks into a smile or frowns at a joke, then the rest of the team tends to be serious as well. But if the leader sets the tone that humour is welcome in the workplace, the team also gives itself the freedom to laugh.
But the leader needs to approach this the right way. She does not want to come across either as the ‘Chief Clown’ or as someone who allows serious things to be dealt with flippantly. But at the same time, she wants to create a culture where people can laugh and have fun while achieving the organisation’s objectives.
Why should leaders pay attention to this? Let’s look at three benefits.
A culture of openness
The best example a leader can give is to show that it is okay to laugh at oneself. Self-deprecating humour harms nobody; at the same time, it encourages the team to look at the lighter side of things, at being honest and authentic in their communication. Importantly, it makes them willing to look at their weaknesses without fear.
The story is that during World War II, a man was arrested in London for calling Winston Churchill a fool. The next day, in the House of Commons, Opposition members were ready to roast the government for this. “Are we living in a police state,” they shouted, “Where we cannot call the PM a fool?” Churchill’s reply was truly disarming — “The man was not arrested for calling the Prime Minister a fool,” he said, “But for letting out a state secret at a time of war.”
Some leaders are extremely sensitive about being laughed at. However, this does not prevent boss-jokes — it just shifts it out of the leader’s earshot. But a leader who lets the team see that she’s fine owning up to a weakness or idiosyncrasy, creates a workspace that encourages healthy criticism, openness and feedback. There’s less back-biting, less gossip and more sharing when people know how to take a joke.
As Max Eastman put it: “It is the ability to take a joke, not make one, that proves you have a sense of humour.”
Handling a crisis
Very often, we can navigate through a difficult crisis by relying on a sense of humour. I recall a difficult crisis-resolution meeting headed by the Chairman of our client organisation. Our company was being criticised for a perceived lack of sensitivity in dealing with the client’s concerns and things had reached such a stage that a termination of contract was on the table.
The Chairman began proceedings by listing out the big concerns and running through several areas where we had fallen short. The mood was grim. When he finished and it was our turn to respond, I began by saying that I felt a little like Osama Bin Laden, who had just been captured by the Americans (This happened while the hunt for Bin Laden was still on).
The whole group, which was tensed and worked-up until that point, broke out laughing and we were then able to move on to discussing each other’s issues and concerns constructively. I don’t think a serious start in my response would have achieved that same outcome.
Many issues can be debated using confrontation, but the outcomes will be poor. Humour helps us focus on what’s common to us all. We all love a good laugh; we all break into guffaws watching a good Charlie Chaplin clip. It subtly shifts the mood from what separates us, to what unites us. It goes from creating an often-destructive climate by harping on what we disagree, to a constructive climate that begins with focusing on what we agree.
Helping with better thinking
Most often, we deal with serious issues at the workplace and risk ending up becoming very serious people whose thinking is narrow and cramped. When you enter a conference room at office meetings, the temptation is to look for a corpse, given the funereal expressions on everybody’s faces!
MBA candidate Eric Tsytsylin, put it nicely in a video presentation featured on the Stanford website, when he said that working adults are “in the midst of a laughter drought”. This laughter drought often leads to a creative-thinking drought.
It need not be that way.
Tense and stressed minds usually have trouble finding creative and constructive solutions. Lightening up the atmosphere at work not only makes everyone happier but also helps create a conducive environment for out-of-the-box thinking and broader perspectives.
AJ Jacobs, who wrote the bestselling books Drop Dead Healthy, The Year of Living Biblically and My Life as an Experiment ,said, “Humorous thinking has parallels to the way we should be thinking in business… taking disparate ideas and mashing them together.” Humour helps teach the synthetic-thinking that is so necessary in today’s inter-connected world. By de-stressing the mind, we allow it to reach out beyond a restricted space and search for more effective and lasting solutions.
A caveat
A word of caution — humour that is vulgar, sexist, racist or which offends others of a different gender, religion or language group in any way — is no sign of humour. It is in poor taste and says much about the person indulging in such banter. In such cases, joining in the guffaw makes us partners in crime. When we do not laugh, we send a clear message that such a brand of humour crosses the line and will not be tolerated.
So, let’s learn to use humour the right way. It has big benefits. When we lighten-up and loosen-up, the burden of leadership becomes much easier to carry, for us and our teams.
Let us end by smiling at an oft-quoted favourite.
At the end of a job interview, the human resources person asked a young engineer fresh out of a top university, “And what starting salary were you looking for?”
The engineer said optimistically, “In the neighbourhood of $125,000 a year, depending on the benefits package.”
The interviewer said, “Well, what would you say to a package of five weeks’ vacation, 14 paid holidays, full medical and dental, company matching retirement fund to 50 per cent of salary and a company car leased every two years, say, a red Corvette?”
The engineer sat up straight and said, “Wow! Are you kidding?”
And the interviewer replied, “Yeah, but you started it.”