Laughter and Leadership

“You can’t laugh if you’re not comfortable.”

That line comes from Dr. Teruni Lamberg, an associate professor at the University of Nevada who has spent years researching what separates leaders people follow from leaders people merely report to. She said it to me on my podcast, and I’ve been quoting it ever since — because hiding inside it is a leadership audit no engagement survey will give you: how often does your team laugh when you’re in the room?

The Humour Cliff

Stanford’s Jennifer Aaker and Naomi Bagdonas asked people around the world a simple question — “Did you smile or laugh a lot yesterday?” — and found that the answer falls off a cliff right around the age we enter the workforce.

We don’t lose our sense of humour. We suppress it, because somewhere along the way we decided serious and professional were the same word.

The cost of that decision shows up everywhere leaders look for it: leaders with a sense of humour are rated 27% more motivating by their teams. Not 27% funnier — more motivating. Humour reads as confidence, honesty and humanity, which are the three things every mission statement promises and every all-hands struggles to deliver.

What laughter actually does to your team

When people laugh together, their brains release the same bonding chemistry as trust does — while cortisol, the stress hormone, drops. A laughing team is literally a less-defended team: more willing to float the half-formed idea, flag the risk early, admit the mistake while it’s still small. Psychological safety has a sound, and it’s laughter.

When we laugh, we relax. When we relax, we learn.

The researcher who stumbled onto it

Dr. Lamberg didn’t set out to study humour. She found it by accident, in the middle of a statewide project with teachers.

“One day it dawned on me as we were laughing together and bantering back and forth,” she told me. “I remember turning to my colleague and saying, we know that we are productive when we laugh and when there is playful banter. How do we quantify this?”

Her colleagues had just made a documentary. About her parking. (She maintains she is a good driver. The documentary suggests otherwise.) Everyone laughed — and then, she noticed, the room could suddenly get into far more complex work than it could before.

“When you create humour, you are also creating relationships and a level of comfort,” she said. “What I found in my leadership research is that an innovative leader — a leader who motivates people — knows how to make people feel comfortable. They know how to create an environment where people feel welcomed to sit at the table and discuss their ideas.”

She interviewed researchers whose teams changed their fields nationally and internationally. One group at UCLA held a retreat where faculty and graduating students cooked together. As they cooked, they laughed. As they laughed, they brainstormed — and the innovative connections showed up in the relaxed hour, not the scheduled one.

Humour dissolves hierarchy

Here’s the part every leader should sit with. Dr. Lamberg’s research found that humour quietly dissolves hierarchy:

“Not everybody feels the same level of power. You’re a professor, and someone else thinks, well, I don’t have a PhD so I don’t have something to say. Humour allows everyone to put themselves on a similar level where they can share their stories. A sense of humour allows us to be more human.”

Which matches what I see from the stage. Humour is part of our caveman brain — we want to belong to the clan. A joke at your own expense is a way of showing an open hand: look, no weapons. I’m showing you my vulnerability. Let’s work together.

And when the crisis comes, it’s the leader who can still find a bit of hope or laughter who gets the team through the dark stretch. As Dr. Lamberg put it: at the end of a long hard day, petty things become more important — “humour humanizes the situation.”

I asked her what else showed up in the leaders who succeeded. Her list: passion, aligning actions with a higher purpose (walking the talk), integrity, and the ability to motivate others — by painting a picture, or by using humour.

“In order to use humour, you really have to observe what is going on in the room,” she added. That’s observational comedy, and it’s the hardest kind to pull off — on a stage or in a boardroom. It’s problem solving: looking at the same situation as everybody else, and finding the connection between A and B with a punchline.

Two kinds of funny (use these, skip the rest)

Your one-week humour audit

• Count the laughs in your next three meetings. (Zero is a data point.)
• Notice when you suppress a light comment — ask yourself what you were protecting.
• Open one meeting with something genuinely human instead of the agenda.
• Watch who laughs last and least on your team. That’s often your safety problem, not your humour problem.

Leadership isn’t stand-up. Nobody needs you to have a tight five. But if your team hasn’t laughed in your presence this quarter, you don’t have a comedy gap — you have a comfort gap, and it’s costing you their best thinking.

Dr. Teruni Lamberg is the author of Leaders Who Lead Successfully and an associate professor of mathematics education at the University of Nevada. The full interview aired on my Laugh Long & Pro$per podcast.

Until next time — Laugh Long and Prosper!