Page 168 - Roy W. Rice - CEO Material How to Be a Leader in Any Organization-McGraw-Hill (2009)

You Listen More Than You Talk • 149

good emotion to use is humor. Fear, anger, revenge, and retaliation aren’t
good. Besides, without fun, it’s killing to do the capacity of work needed
to be done.
Don’t expect everything you attempt to come across amusing.
People view different things as funny based on their age, life experience,
confidence, and wiring in their brains. (Their not “getting it” is usually
more about them than about you.) Even Hallmark Card’s Shoebox Divi-
sion (the humor division) tosses out four of every five funny verses
presented to its editors. Professional joke writers for the Lenos, Letter-
mans, Colberts, and Stewarts of the world have, on average, 1 in 16 jokes
that make it on the air.
Don’t try to be funny; just tell a narrative with an unexpected twist.
“Enlarge the trivial, and trivialize the large”. Self-deprecate, self-mock,
and self-parody.

You’ll have a better career if you can make people laugh.

You should laugh heartily at least once a day—not at others, at
yourself. Don’t worry if they laugh too hard or hardly at all.
Humor is being human. You are a human being before you are a
leader. Your career will go nowhere if you can’t maintain the human
factor. Communicate as frequently and as personally as you can; be as
human and down to earth as possible.
“We all breathe the same air. We all cherish our children’s future.
We are all mortal,” said President John F. Kennedy.

I want to assure you that I feel the same pain and the same stress and
the same jet lag as anybody else.

ƒ

At company Christmas parties I act drunker than I am to be human
and approachable. Now it’s not all acting. Same approach when I
give an extemporaneous speech: I get up there, loosen my tie, and
speak extemporaneously. Fact is, I memorized the important parts,
including planning some jokes to slip in.

When you use humor and be human, you change the energy in the
situation, diffuse emotion, relieve tension, reduce burnout, improve