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    Leading by Laughing: Using Humor for Success
    Leading by Laughing: Using Humor for Success
    Leading by Laughing: Using Humor for Success
    Ebook129 pages1 hour

    Leading by Laughing: Using Humor for Success

    By Donald McAndrew

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    About this ebook

    A well-developed sense of humor is essential to successful leadership. In this book I will help you be a better leader by improving your use of humor for leadership purposes. I'll use insights from psychologists, researchers in organizations, leadership gurus and famous comedians to explain the complexities of humor and how to use it for different purposes with varied audiences. I'll also review current thinking about leadership itself, showing how humor is an available tool to accomplish many of the duties of leaders. I'll show you specific ways successful leaders have used humor in their organizations from corporations, small businesses, education, churches, health care and the military. I'll also show you how you can improve your personal sense of humor through practice, doing things every day that make you better at it, and through observation, watching people who really do humor well. And I'll give you 100+ humorous things you can try in your work as a leader.

    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherDonald McAndrew
    Release dateApr 23, 2015
    ISBN9781311340894
    Leading by Laughing: Using Humor for Success

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      Book preview

      Leading by Laughing - Donald McAndrew

      A sense of humor is part of the art of leadership, of getting along with people, of getting things done.

      --Dwight D. Eisenhower, President and Five-Star General of the Army

      Leading by Laughing:

      Using Humor for Success

      Donald A. McAndrew, Ph.D.

      This book is dedicated to my father, Bill, to my wife’s uncle, Sam Cardinale, and to my friend, Chris McDonnell, all of whom taught me so much about the nature and uses of humor.

      And, of course, this book is also dedicated to my best audience—my wife, Marge, and my three adult children, Meg, Matt and Moll.

      Copyright 2015 Donald A. McAndrew

      Smashwords Edition

      ISBN 978-1-4951-5675-5

      This book is licensed for your personal use only. This ebook may not be re-sold or given away to other people. If you would like to share this book with another person, please purchase an additional copy for each recipient. If you're reading this book and did not purchase it, or it was not purchased for your use only, then please return to Smashwords.com and purchase your own copy. Thank you for respecting my hard work in producing this book.

      Cover design by www.viladesign.net

      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

      Table of Contents

      Introduction

      Chapter 1 So what is this thing Humor, and why do I laugh at it?

      Chapter 2 And what is this thing Leadership, and how do I do it?

      Chapter 3 Positive & Negative Humor in Organizations

      Chapter 4 How Audiences Affect Using Humor: Gender, Race, Class and Second Language Speakers

      Chapter 5 Improving Your Sense of Humor

      Chapter 6 How Leaders Actually Use Humor & Things You Can Try

      About the Author

      Appendix Located in the right lower quadrant of your abdomen.

      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

      Introduction

      [Back to Table of Contents]

      We’ve all sat through humorless meetings or dealt with humorless people. In those cases we felt the flat dullness of no laughter. Think of the color gray; think of spaghetti without sauce, or think of a big glass of air. Humor adds sparkle, flavor and feeling to everything we do. Yeah, without humor we can still get things done, but with humor we get a double bonus: the doing itself is fun and the ultimate product is better. That’s true whether that work is changing a tire in a garage full of mechanics or negotiating a multi-national trade treaty at the U.N. Humor makes it better! And leaders who use humor are judged to be more effective and innovative, and their organizations are judged to be more productive and cohesive. The best leadership is awash with laughter; the best organizations pile on the smiles.

      But come on; humor is just every-day regular, right? Some of you probably think Sure people laugh at work, church or school, tell jokes and tease each other. What’s the big deal about that? If you think that, you may be surprised to find out that there is a science that researches humor. It’s not just one science but rather it is a collection of sciences, sciences like psychology, sociology, anthropology, linguistics, medicine, management, and philosophy. In fact, a quick search of the last 10 years in Google Scholar will show nearly a half-million articles, books and papers about humor produced by researchers from nearly 250 universities and research institutions around the world. Humor is a big deal!

      Humor researchers have consistently reached that conclusion because humor is a basic method of human interaction going back to the earliest days of human beings. Most researchers think of humor as a basic genetic characteristic of humans—we have the humor gene. These researchers also consistently conclude that humor is an available tool for leaders, managers, and participants in organizations. That, of course, is all of us since we all belong to multiple organizations from families, neighborhoods, jobs, churches, clubs and schools.

      If you’re reading this, you are probably a leader in an organization or you might be a future leader. And if you’re reading this, then you must be thinking that Yeah, we need more laughter or maybe even I sure could get better at using humor. This book will show you a ton of ways to get better at using humor in your organizations and in your life generally. This book will also show you a barrel of ways to use laughter to lead those organizations to new levels of success. And this book will make you and your organizations less stressed, more productive, even healthier. So come on; read it, will ya!

      ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^

      Chapter 1

      So what is this thing Humor, and why do I laugh at it?

      [Back to Table of Contents]

      People have asked the two questions in this chapter’s title since they sat around campfires grunting and poking sticks in the fire. In this chapter I will try to answer those two questions (without grunting). Part of my answers will come from the moody libraries of universities and the shiny laboratories of science. And part of my answers will come from comedians and comics who make laughter their central work issue. And, of course, part of my answers will also come from just everyday life which is full of laughing, chuckling, guffawing and shaking our heads as the river of our usual craziness rolls by.

      I’m going to divide this chapter into two main parts: (1) how psychologists and sociologists who study humor answer the two questions in the title and (2) how the comedians and comics who use humor to make a living answer the questions. Now don’t start jumping to the section about the answers of the comedians and comics because you bet it’s got to be more interesting than those psychologists and sociologist. The psychologists and sociologist may not get you laughing as much as the comedians and comics, but they will give you many more guidelines on how to use humor and laughter while leading your organizations.

      Answers from psychologists and sociologists.

      These social scientists would be first to say that although humor and laughter are lighthearted and fun, they serve some very serious functions for humans and their societies. Psychologists look to the thoughts in our heads and the feelings in our hearts to find explanations of what humor and laughter are. Sociologists look not inside but outside at our interactions with the communities and cultures in which the humor and laughter arise. It doesn’t take a smarty pants to see right away that, if you really want to know something about humor and laughter, then you better get both of these perspectives, inside and outside, in order to have a complete picture. And that’s what we’re going to do.

      Let’s start with psychologists. They believe that humor and laughter are part of the basic make-up of humans, as much as eating or language. In fact, they would probably bet that eating came first (tough to doubt that) then laughter then language. So even before our long lost relatives were talking around the campfire, they were laughing around it. They were also probably horse playing with each other, the kind of play that we see puppies and kittens do, teasing one another to play, then running, chasing, wrestling and rolling. This kind of play that is part of learning about how to fit into the social group, what we might call social play is the source of humor and laughter.

      Thinking of humor and laughter as coming from play seems smart to me since we use humor to play today. When adults want to be playful, they don’t start chasing each other and rolling on the ground (unless it’s football). Adults use humor and its resulting laughter as a way to introduce a playful element into various social situations. Humor is play, play for adults. Like play for juveniles, play for adults has a serious side that allows them to deal with thoughts and feelings that might be much more difficult to deal with if they did not have the play option of humor and laughter. Of course, many times adults use humor and laughter just for the fun of it and not to do anything very serious. Either way, they have a tool to get things done or just have some fun—a useful tool indeed!

      And remember that psychologists believe that laughter came before language; so, yes, that does mean that the earliest laughter was derived from those grunts that were the first sounds that humans used to communicate with each other. If you wanted to lay out a short timeline for how we humans developed communication abilities, you could say that the famous stories of the Bible or the great plays of Shakespeare are in a line of human communication that begins with grunts then laughs then those stories and plays. (I’ll bet Shakespeare would have chuckled at the fact that laughter was first!).

      Psychologists give us more than just a possible timeline of grunts-laughs-words. Like any academics worth their tweed jackets, they start to dig deeper into humor and laughter. They hear this thing called laughter and, like good little scientists, they ask why did it happen just at that moment? What went on in the person’s head and heart to result in the sound we call laughter? Psychologists believe that one thing had to happen in the person’s head and another thing had to happen in the person’s heart to get

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