Laughter at work. Is there a better sound?
For me, humour and its offspring laughter are two of the most valuable presents a good manager can bring to a team. That’s not to say the manager (let’s make it a bit more personal: you) needs to be a comedian. Far from it. But you do need to appreciate the sheer beauty and value of having fun, enjoying humour and simply “having a laugh” in the workplace.
Work isn’t a game, of course. It can quite literally be, serious business. Especially if you’re the owner and thus the person who pays staff for their hard labour. But I’ve noticed a pattern: the “higher” you go up in an organisation (particularly a larger one), the more serious you become. Or if you prefer, each rung you climb up the corporate ladder the bigger the chunk of humour gets shaved from your brain. It’s like an inverse correlation curve.
I understand why this can happen. I suspect you do, too. There’s a huge fear factor there. “I don’t want to say something silly and lose my job because now I earn truckloads of money.” Plus, we live in an age of the faux-outrage person and cancel-culture (cue comical boos and hisses). But being someone who is happy to laugh and joke around a bit at work doesn’t mean you become someone who is reckless, nasty or wildly inappropriate. People are tricky creatures; you need to understand the subtleties of human behaviour at work and get to know your staff in order to sensibly pick your mark. But a manager who loses the laughter spark and turns up to meetings with their Big Floppy Mr/Mrs Serious Hat on all the time is, for me, someone I don’t trust. Because I know it’s fake. A lie, a sham. And guess what? Their team members know it too.
Friday is a fun day to think about this sort of stuff. Which is why I like to write my posts on a Friday morning. For all you managers out there: it’s a good thing to lead with humour. No, scrap that: it’s a great thing. Please don’t succumb to the (false) notion that the more senior you become in a business, the more serious you need to be. Don’t be one of those kids at school who was a “goody-two-shoes” … nobody really liked them. Instead, be one of the fun kids. You might occasionally get into trouble but that’s the risk we all take, with humour. It’s worth it. Be that maverick manager who isn’t afraid to laugh and enjoy life at work.
Your team will thank you for it.
