The Joke Might Be Lost Somewhere
How humour is used by Management
Hey, fellow Leader 🚀,
I am Artur and welcome to my weekly newsletter. I am focusing on topics like Project Management, Innovation, Leadership, and a bit of Entrepreneurship. I am always open to suggestions for new topics. Feel free to reach me on Substack and share my newsletter if it helps you in any way.
The online meeting started and I was 5 minutes late since I was at the office and needed to change from a meeting room back to my desk (old school style). The challenge of connecting fast and furious to the meeting because it was a high-profile meeting with all the company management. I finally got connected on Teams and started with a joke about my late arrival since I was one of the key speakers for that specific meeting. Thankfully the COO had not arrived yet. So everything was OK, and the audience laughed a bit at my stressed yet funny arrival while they were still waiting for the Big Boss. It was a nice way to briefly break the ice and chat before the arrival of said COO. When he did, with a shy “Hello” and a clear “Let’s get on with it”, the meeting immediately started. During the years I got to know a bit the company’s COO and he is a funny guy who likes to throw a joke here and there. However, because he is always the Big Boss and the meetings are about serious topics or problems, the meeting’s flair tends to be serious as well. So, when he tries to intervene with a joke, sometimes the audience is not sure if he is being serious or joking. The question arises: How funny a Manager can be in a serious meeting?
Some years ago, a technical lead of one of my previous teams shared with me that sometimes he struggled to understand when I was just being funny and ironic or if my statement was a serious one. At first, I saw it as a way to test ideas. If I threw a solution in the discussion that was ridiculous for me, but the team somehow picked it up, it meant the solution was not that ridiculous. Unfortunately, it could also be a sign of another problem. A sign the team is not comfortable to challenge any of my ideas, even if the idea was ridiculous.
We can all agree that adding humor to our work environment is a healthy thing to do. The secret lies in how to fine-tune the humor in a way that is not misleading and makes everyone comfortable. This last part might be tricky to get. If a manager is making jokes and not receiving the same kind of jokes back from the team, there is a disturbance in the force. Managers who tend to have a very close personal link with the team need to pay special attention to this. With friends, a person can roast another friend and everybody is having fun. However in a professional context, if the Manager roasts a team member in a friendly manner, but never receives the same kind of jokes back, it means the team member is not comfortable doing it. Therefore, roast jokes should not be part of the Manager’s humor arsenal, due to the risk of being simply a jerk.
Listening and paying close attention to how the team reacts to the manager’s jokes will help the manager tune the right volume and intensity without falling prey to being inadvertently abusive. Going back to the COO story, when he jokes about a project being delivered in a given timeframe, even if I got that he is joking and not expecting that delivery at all, the joke could induce stress to other people who didn’t realize the irony of the statement and aren’t comfortable to voice their concern. In this particular case, is on the person who realized the joke (yours truly) to tune in the timeline back to reality.
That’s it. If you find this post useful please share it with your friends or colleagues who might be interested in this topic. If you would like to see a different angle, suggest in the comments or send me a message on Substack.
Cheers,
Artur