Using Humor for Transparent Change

It's difficult to change when we're around people who know the 'old' us. You might relate to this when you think about being around your parents or siblings as you've developed your own life as an adult. If you're a leader working with the same people, how can you evolve and become different?

Leaders can use humor to embrace changes as they grow personally. This can help face colleagues who otherwise might unwittingly keep them in a box.

Before we bring humor into it, the first step is to commit to being transparent about your development goals with those around you.

First, Share Your Goals

We can get stuck in a certain ‘persona’ in the eyes of others, where they have a fixed mindset about us. Making your intention for growth and positive change explicit to your colleagues will invite them to actively look for, and thus see, new behaviors in you rather than gloss over those new-behavior moments as if they were flukes. It will also help you give yourself permission to behave in new ways among old colleagues.

Another reason to share your goals with others is so that they can help hold you accountable. You can ask colleagues to point out if they see you behaving in the way that you’re working on changing. You may also consider making requests for colleagues to behave differently with you, especially when their behavior patterns may have a role in enabling or triggering yours. 

Take my client, Mark, a senior manager who is trying not to micromanage his people. If he tells them, "Hey guys, I am taking a class that has got me thinking I might be a bit of a micromanager. I want to try working on that and I'm asking for your help."

Then, Bring in Humor  

Let's face it—what I'm talking about in the section above can be awkward, and it's definitely not the norm in Corporate America to go around wearing your development goals on your sleeve. But this is one example of what it means to be humble. We all have ways we want to be better humans and better leaders.

Humor brings levity to the awkwardness. It gives those around you a non-threatening way to share real-time feedback.

In order to try this, you might have some work to do to get yourself in a confident place with your growth areas. (The polarities of humility and confidence actually deepen in lockstep with one another, but let’s save that for another post...)

Back to Mark. He might say, "So if I get into the weeds with you, or I reach out to ask about a detail that is beyond what I need to be worrying about, just please write back or say "Micromanagement Alert!" I might still want to know the answer at that moment, but this will help me reflect later."

This kind of transparency among a team is rare and precious. For team members to say to each other: "Hey, you're doing that thing again that you said you wanted to avoid." Even better than being called out is that the team has the safety for any member—not just the leader—to voice it themselves: "I'm doing that thing again, aren't I? Oy!"

The flavor of humor I'm talking about is, on the surface, self-deprecating humor. But it is rooted in the confidence that we all have areas to 'polish' within ourselves, and the people with whom we work the closest are some of the best people to support our growth whether they are “below” or “above” us in the hierarchical structure.

Another flavor of humor that I've found useful here is to label oneself "Old" and "New." It puts the new and old behaviors in stark contrast. I might say to my colleagues "I can feel the pull of Old Liz here who wants to ask a question about details, but New Liz knows you're handling it and wants to acknowledge your hard work."

Keep it Up

It'll be up to you to keep the topic of your change in the conversation over weeks and months. If it's just a whim that surfaces and then dies, your colleagues will write it off as insincere and faddish.

Sharing your intention to change with those around may feel quite vulnerable. It may make you feel like you are being watched, or that you have more pressure to actually behave differently. (You can reframe the pressure as healthy accountability, by the way!) Try to approach sharing goals with some playfulness and humor. 

If you can find the courage to share your goals for growth with your colleagues, it means you have already overcome an important hurdle to achievement: fully committing to your growth. In doing so, you will greatly increase your chances of lasting success.