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Welcome to Episode 301 of The Non-Anxious Leader Podcast. I'm Jack Shitama. Before we get into today's episode, I want to let you know that if you are new to this podcast, you can reach me at jack@christian-leaders.com. I love to hear your feedback and ideas for upcoming episodes. If you want to get more resources, you can go to thenonanxiousleader.com, where you can subscribe to my Two for Tuesday email newsletter. I'll also put a link to that subscription page in the show notes. Now, without further ado, here is episode 301, How Humor Helps You as a Non-Anxious Leader. And how it doesn't. The idea for this episode came from an admired leadership substack post, Leaders Can Carry Too Much Truth Through Humor. I'll put a link in the show notes. It's actually about what not to do, but it got me thinking because I believe humor can be helpful for you as a leader. Nobody takes the class clown seriously, but that doesn't mean you need to be serious all the time to be an effective leader. In fact, that will make you less effective. Left unchecked, seriousness creates anxiety and makes it harder for you and the people you lead to work effectively.

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In family systems theory, Edwin Friedmann emphasizes the importance of using humor to keep things loose as an antidote for anxiety. In a failure of nerve, Friedmann writes about the importance of managing anxiety, your own and that of those around you. The effect of humor is to keep things less anxious. In doing so, it helps everyone. He writes, "The principles illustrated here have to do, among other things, with injecting humor and keeping things loose. The looser your presence is, the looser everyone's relationship will be with you and one another." You might be thinking, I don't want a loose relationship with the people I lead. I want them to take me seriously. Used appropriately, humor will not diminish that. Before I get into how and why humor is important for the non-anxious leader, I want to cover some notes of caution. First, make sure your humor is appropriate. If it is off-color, offensive, and/or demeaning, then it will raise the anxiety level in the room. Plus, you will likely lose the respect of others. In this case, content does matter. Second, if your humor comes across as sarcastic, then you're better off not using it. As John Gottman has noted in his study of relationships, sarcasm is a telltale sign of a relationship that's in trouble.

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Even if you don't mean it to come across this way, how it's received is more important than your intent. Third, and this is the point of the admired leadership post, If you are using humor to disguise your true feelings in a passive-aggressive way, in the long run, you will damage emotional connection. This is the opposite of self-differentiation. It's a way of expressing one's true feelings by joking about it. As the article notes, leaders can, quote, use humor to weekly disguise a truth or criticism to deflect the possible interpretation they are being mean or insensitive. They can always tell others they were only kidding to escape their obvious guilt, end quote. This is using humor to avoid healthy self-definition. Instead of expressing themselves directly to someone in private, the leader calls someone out indirectly using humor as a cover. As the article says, this will put people on edge, increasing tension instead of reducing it. So now that I have covered how, when, and why humor can make things worse, I will cover four ways that humor can help you as a leader. The first way that humor can help you as a leader is by building trust.

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I'll put a link in the show notes to a blog post I wrote about trust. When you laugh, you release oxytocin. In that post, I note that oxytocin builds trust, and trust is your most important asset as a leader. What's surprising is that humor doesn't just build people's trust in you as a leader. It also builds trust among team members. That's because the humor, and therefore the oxytocin, has the effect of building trust with anyone you come in contact with during the burst of oxytocin. In one study, people who watched a funny video clip were 30% more likely to reveal personal information to a stranger than people who watched a neutral video clip. This goes back to Friedman's point about keeping things loose. Humor not only builds trust, but it helps teams bond in important ways. The second way that humor helps you as a non-anxious leader is that it supports innovation. In his book, Little Bets: How Breakthrough Ideas Emerge from Little Discoveries, author Peter Sims shows that humor is critical to innovation. According to Sims, a playful and humorous environment is most critical for innovation when ideas are in their infancy because that's when they are most vulnerable to getting killed.

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Humor. Game-changing ideas are much less likely to survive in a super-serious environment because you will err on the side of caution. Humor loosens things up so you are less afraid to go with a new idea. The Third way that humor helps you as a non-anxious leader is that it promotes more effective learning. When you laugh, you also release dopamine, which aids in memory and information processing. When you are trying to get a point across that you want people to remember, make sure to inject some humor. This is true in a workshop, staff meeting, sermon, or even an informal setting. Humor will make what you say more memorable. Finally, the fourth way that humor helps you as a non-anxious leader is that it improves negotiations. Researchers Karen O'Quinn and Joel Eronoff set up a study where participants negotiated the price of a piece of They found that when sellers threw in the playful line, and I'll throw in my pet frog, with their final offer, participants granted 18% more in concessions than did the control group. Another study found that sending an inoffensive funny cartoon to someone during a sales negotiation generated 15% more and profits.

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It's believed that in both these examples, the use of humor helps to develop trust, which leads to better outcomes. As Friedmann notes, because appropriate humor keeps you loose, it makes it more likely you will present yourself as a non-anxious presence. I don't recommend that you force humor into a situation. However, be yourself in a way that lets your humor be a natural part of that situation. You will be less anxious and a better leader. That's it for episode 301. Don't forget that you can connect with me at jack@christian-leaders.com and find more resources at thenonanxiousleader. com. If you have found this episode helpful, please share it with a friend, somebody who can benefit, and leave a review. Thank you for your help. Until next time. Thanks and goodbye.