Leaders drive change, plain and simple. It’s a big part of what we do and how we’re evaluated over the long-term.
How we communicate the why of the change is often as important as the actual change itself. Some might even say it’s more important. You as a leader, need to leverage the power of storytelling to reach, connect, and engage with each of your key target audiences to drive the positive change.
Can your storytelling use humor? Will mocking it help an initiative succeed?
Magdalena Cholakova, an associate professor at the Rotterdam School of Management, is interested in how organizations cope with the challenges and pushback brought on when implementing change.
She conducted a study focused on a major change initiative launched in 2015 by The Netherlands office of PWC, the accounting tax and advisory firm.
The initiative was called Vision 2020. Here’s the gist: The organizational culture traditionally focused on financial targets, but the new Vision 2020 sought to have employees care and make a difference. The change initiative had a big idea messaging campaign around reimagine the possibilities.
You see the challenge here, right? This new way of thinking was contradictory to the company culture created and lived for decades. Instead of putting blinders on and hoping this challenge would go away, the leaders at PWC chose to acknowledge and even embrace it by poking fun at it.
Guess what? It worked.
Cholakova’s research found that humor helped accelerate the change process. I say it’s because humor made the story more believable, which made it more memorable and credible, which made the change more doable in the minds of team members.
Cholakova is quoted in a Harvard Business Review article about the study as saying, “Jokes about this situation allowed people to accept the coexistence of two different sets of goals without necessarily resolving their underlying tensions. This then gave people a chance to make sense of the goals together and gradually understand the tensions and find ways to resolve them.”
In other words, the leaders led and leveraged storytelling to improve communication throughout the team. Then they let the team members figure out how to make it all work.
Think about how many times you’ve watched humorous commercials. You remembered them. I’ve discussed them.
Whether it’s Progressive’s Flo or Dr. Rick on “becoming your parents” commercial, or for that matter, Geico or State Farm commercials, or any other slew of commercials across products and industries that have leveraged humor to tell their story and influence you. They’ve made it memorable.
Humor makes consumers more likely to pay attention to the ads. Well, leaders can use humor in the same way to gain acceptance and input from their team members.
PWC had managers making fun with stories such as, “Hey, Jack, the team really appreciates your attempt to reimagine the possibilities by putting the PowerPoint slides in the wrong order. But perhaps you can be more careful next time.”
I’ve always said that when employees are making fun of your messaging, you know it’s working. I remember when I was working at UPMC in Pittsburgh, hearing the director of security yelling to me from the parking garage, “Choose your security as if your life depended on it.” I smiled knowing we had broken through with our storytelling.
But let’s be clear, not everyone is great at humor, and humor needs to be more positive than negative.
Cholakova said that research calls this affiliative humor when it’s positive, as opposed to aggressive humor, which is negative.
That security director in the parking garage was using affiliative humor.
Think of it this way though.
Use common sense. If you think it might be negative or hurtful, then don’t use it.
The Link LonkApril 10, 2021 at 04:00PM
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David Mastovich | No joke: Humor can help your storytelling succeed - TribDem.com
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Joke
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