How Humor Can Fuel or Fizzle Your Leadership

“Help! I’ve fallen and I can’t get up!”

Printed in giant, red block letters, these words were flanked on the left by a picture of an elderly woman lying in front of a set of stairs who presumably had fallen to the ground.

This advertisement had been attached to the door to my office with a note that read, “Chad - Thought this would be helpful for your situation!”

This was the greeting I received on my first day back in the office after I had fallen down the basement stairs in my house, which caused me to miss time from work and to seek medical treatment for periodic back spasms thereafter.

At the time, I thought it was a tone deaf attempt at humor. In retrospect and after a series of events I described in previous articles (Post #1, Post #2, Post #3), it now seems like one of the earliest signs of an organizational culture that promoted control and dominance at the expense of humanity and respect.

In the months before the culture of dominance was clear to me, the boss made frequent comments about my age. Although I wasn’t yet in my forties, I was several years older than the boss and every other person on the team. Then, when I was demeaned and humiliated in front of the entire team for not being able to “keep up,” I couldn’t help but think about the boss’s ageist taunts, not the least of which was the advertisement for the medical alert device.

For people who use humor as a part of their leadership or personal style, how they dispense that humor can have either favorable or disastrous results. Humor is a powerful and transformative tool in the leadership toolbox, and whether that power is leveraged to “build up” or to “tear down” is a direct result of how it is used.

On the positive side, humor can create happiness, dissolve tension, foster social bonds, and protect people from the negative effects of stress at work, as well as create the social lubricant necessary for unleashing collaboration and creativity, as described in an October 15, 2019 article for Greater Good Magazine. A touch of humor also increases the likability of supervisors who use it as part of their leadership styles. This is particularly true for leaders who engage in self-deprecating humor, which can lessen the natural fears that all people have of those in positions of power and authority.

However, when humor is done at the expense of another person, it can encourage self-limiting beliefs in the target, as well as make it acceptable for others to adopt negative attitudes and even engage in harmful behavior toward that person.

One example of this is the phenomenon of “stereotype threat theory,” which says that when people are subjected to harmful and negative stereotypes, those people tend to conform to those same stereotypes. In this way, the labels placed on people become limiting self-beliefs.

“Sticks and stones may break my bones, but words can corrupt and change me” may not be the way you remember the childhood rhyme, but this revised phrase more accurately describes the impact of verbal labels.

There is no doubt leaders’ use of humor will impact their teams, and how they use it will determine the type of impact it will have.