Dear Top Executive:
Do you ever feel isolated from the rest of your organization? Are the reports you get as thin and polished as mirrored glass? Do you ever wonder why you’re always right and everything you say is always brilliant?
The answer is gravity, the special corporate communications kind. When messages go up, they get thinner and lighter. When they go down, they gain import and weight, they become increasingly ossified. What starts off as a casual observation becomes a heavy-handed order by the fourth level:
One way to counteract this awesome force is to pump some humor into the organization. It’s like oiling a good machine: everything runs better, and the force of gravity is mitigated. Luckily, most executives have a good sense of humor; so do most rank-and-file employees.
But squeezed right in the middle of organizational America, there’s a stratum of people who’ve had the humor crushed out of them. They may laugh and joke outside the company, but once they walk through the corporate doors, their spirits are stifled by the great weight of fear — fear of making a mistake, of not being promoted, of losing their job.
They will say things like “There’s no place in business for humor” and not blush with shame. They will edit and censor, suppress and intimidate to make sure nothing funny rears its ugly head — officially.
Unofficially, of course, all employees use their individual senses of humor to ease stress and smooth the hard edges of their days. Why not bring this underground humor into the open and harness it for the company? A culture with less stress and more openness is always a healthier one and often a more creative one too.
Humor can add a new perspective to an oft-covered subject. It can make a point without being preachy or shrill. Using humor tells your listeners you care enough to try to please them. It has to be the right kind of humor, of course. Like a wrong note in music, bad humor is worse than no humor at all. Humor that puts people down or tries to offend is always destructive.
What should you as a top executive do? Set an example. Laugh at yourself. Poke fun at the sacred cows that trample the corporate landscape and fertilize the corporate goals. By doing so, you can send a jolt of energy through your organization that will burn off excess gravity and stimulate creativity. Put humor on your daily to-do list.
Don’t worry. Employees won’t mistake your jokes for lack of gravitas. They’re much too smart for that. They judge your seriousness by what you do, not by what you say.
Bottom Line? Lighten up. Get a laugh. Start a gravity reduction program today.