At Pixar, Ed Catmell viewed the craziness that filled the studio corridors with laughter, delight, and cute fluffy monsters as the true connective tissue of the company. But he never thought it was the job of a leader to try to dictate the terms of the culture from the height of his status. As he says, “Fun is not something that comes down from the top.”
On the contrary, a culture of ease can – and should – come from all levels. And if you look, you can find potential energy everywhere. In numerous interviews, the authors of Humor Is Serious found that the sources of this potential — the employees who help create a culture of ease — usually fell into the description of one of three archetypes: The instigators, the culture bearers, and the Hidden Pearls.
Humor is serious
Culture Bearers are born leaders and rising stars of the organization for whom humor represents a natural strength. Hidden Pearls are diligent but discreet high performers who provide unexpected opportunities for levity. And instigators are instigators of disorder and rule-breakers who do things their own way and are rather nonconformist by nature.
How each archetype is used advantageously and the extent of their influence on the organization depends on the established corporate culture and current goals. Throw the instigator into Pixar, and it might take root. But if you throw the instigator into the Yankees’ club locker room, he could cause a real shake-up. Or rather, it’s already happened.
There are few organizations with higher stakes or higher pressure than Major League Baseball. And yet, as Alex Rodriguez, a New York Yankees legend, tells us, the culture of ease was a key driving force behind the team in the 2009 World Series. But just a few years earlier, the club had a very different atmosphere.
The New York Yankees are baseball’s most popular team. But with that baggage of history and tradition comes a certain distaste for rocking the boat. Longtime Yankees owner George Steinbrenner, who ran the team for 37 years, has even been known to impose a strict hair policy: no “tails” on the back of the neck and no facial vegetation except a mustache. “We were Goldman Sachs in baseball,” Rodriguez joked.
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But when the team gathered for spring training in 2006, there was a lot of buzz – and not just healthy buzz – surrounding one of the team’s new players: center fielder Johnny Damon, who had been acquired from the rival Red Sox in the offseason.
Damon was, needless to say, a colorful character. He reveled in everyone’s attention. Drove a black Ferrari. Titled his autobiography “The Idiot.” He once threw a pumpkin off his balcony on the 34th floor for fun. How could a guy like that, a classic Enforcer, fit into the formal culture of the Yankees?
He didn’t. And here’s why it worked. The first day, Rodriguez says, Damon walked into the club locker room “at 6 a.m., with his boom box blasting Kid Rock at full volume” (frankly, it would have been weird if Kid Rock sounded muffled). “It was a moment,” Rodriguez recalls.
Rather than making unwanted waves, the carefree energy Damon brought to the team electrified the band. “A lot of people’s sense of humor opened up,” Rodriguez said. Not only that, “It made us play better. It made us relax, and our performance went up.” Soon, other players were drawn into the carefree orbit. Pitcher A.J. Burnett started a new tradition: every time a teammate hit a home run or a strikeout late in a game, Burnett would smear pie in his face.
Damon’s energy was contagious, and Rodriguez was the quickest to realize how it helped the Yankees thrive: “In the sabermetric world, where all players are judged by numbers – home runs, RBI, slugging percentage – there are people who walk into the clubhouse and change the game. People who change the atmosphere, the energy. The locker room gets brighter and the team plays better as a result.”
Damon and the instigators like him are directly challenging the establishment. While their approaches tend to be riskier and more disruptive, they can drive culture change-but only if leaders like Rodriguez are shrewd and flexible enough to embrace them and recognize their influence.
When Pixar culture faced an obstacle in its path, it was the instigators who led the turnaround. As Catmell recalls, years after the company’s founding, the first employees (once rowdy youths) moved on to another phase of life. Many had families and young children, so instead of staying out late to have fun and relieve stress, they rushed from work to their families. As a new group of young people joined the company, they drew social cues from an entrenched balanced culture. As Catmell describes it, he woke up one day and realized, “We’ve lost our zeal.”
Catmell didn’t put up with it: He called on the faithful instigators, laid out his observations, and encouraged like-minded people to change.
According to Catmell, all it took was a push to action, and the instigators immediately got to work, rallying the troops, breaking the rules and rekindling the fun. After that impetus, the animation studio team decided to dismantle the old truck. Then, over the weekend, without asking permission, they reassembled the truck in the middle of the studio. The truck in the studio may seem like an inconvenience to some, but, as Catmell simply put it, “these are great symptoms.”
When the culture goes off course, the instigators become catalysts – lightning bolts of excitement that rekindle subversion and a spirit of nonchalance. Catmell says, “There will always be people in a company who are ‘a little bit of that.’ If everyone were like them, you probably wouldn’t expect great work accomplishments. But an organization’s culture needs these geeks because they signal to everyone else that it’s okay to be different.
By identifying and elevating the Enablers, you encourage fun and play and make it clear that breaking the rules, smashing windshields and blasting Kid Rock at full volume every now and then is okay.
Culture Bearers
Culture Bearers are your rising stars who are highly respected in the organization and also have a penchant for humor and play. If supported and encouraged, they can be a secret weapon in planting a sustainable, contagious culture of ease.
To illustrate their role, let’s go back to 2015 and look at the fast-growing online education startup Coursera. CEO (and former Yale president) Rick Levine started the weekly town hall meeting as usual, going over a list of current priorities and progress made. But this particular meeting was attended by an uninvited guest. The mysterious stranger stared intimidatingly through a Google Glass headset from behind Levin’s back and suddenly began interrupting the esteemed CEO while the staff watched, mesmerized and delighted.
The man looked exactly like Sebastian Troon, CEO of Udacity, Coursera’s chief competitor, and his taunts became more and more aggressive as the meeting progressed. In the manner of an angry supervillain, he regularly interrupted Levin, criticizing his rival CEO, and indeed Coursera itself, defiantly exaggerating his German accent: “Oh-oh-oh… you think you are so fancy and smart, yah? My self-driving cars are slicing circles around you!” – he smirked.
This comedy was met with raucous laughter and applause, and the Coursera staff enjoyed the eccentric speeches. Yet Levin remained unfazed.
“Trun” was in fact Connor Dimand-Youman, one of the first people invited to work at Coursera and reputedly a stellar employee. Respected by all for his rigorous work ethic and rapid career progression, Diemand-Yauman was also known among his colleagues for his mischievous sense of humor and his ability to breathe life into a dry routine.
Months earlier, Diemand-Yauman had arrived at a corporate Halloween party wearing the same Sebastian Troon costume. Levin could have simply laughed with the rest of his team at Dimand-Yauman’s antics, but instead, using his position to celebrate and accent Dimand-Yauman’s prank, he asked if he wanted to go as Trune to the general public.
By encouraging and enthusiastically leading the pranks, Levin consistently supported Dimand-Yauman and his approach to levity, encouraging everyone else to follow his example. “Rick and other senior leaders have encouraged our efforts in making Coursera into an organization where we are happy to work,” Dimand-Yauman said. – “They’ve given us so many opportunities to play, to bring joy and to find new ways to enhance the culture (and ultimately the effectiveness of our company).
Levin’s recognition of the Coursera Culture Bearers was sincere, vivid and profound. The result of their combined efforts has been a sustained culture of fun and play at Coursera, which, years after Dimand-Youman left, is still cited by employees as a major factor in their decision to come to the organization (and stay long term).
To activate the Culture Bearers, call them into action, share the challenges and opportunities they can address from their position.
Treat them as colleagues, share organizational concerns with them, and let them tackle key issues with you – and bring their own style of play. In this way, you will foster the growth of someone who can provide great value both in the present and in the future.
Hidden Pearls
Our third archetype is easy to miss. Hidden gems are high-performing, hard-working people, most often keeping their inspirational (and inspired) skills, quirks and hobbies to themselves.
Hiroki Asai, the former head of Apple’s design studio, liked to “get creative” at company-wide meetings. Shortly before another event, Asai learned that one of the junior members of the team, a talented and dedicated designer, was also a classically trained singer – a fact few of her colleagues knew about.
When Asai took the stage that day, he invited a coworker to join him, explaining to the audience that she had come to share her team’s recent win. But as soon as she took the microphone, the curtain of the enormous stage swung open to reveal a gospel choir that immediately began to sing along to the exceptionally gifted young woman’s powerful belting technique.
The audience erupted in enthusiasm as the performers, who had been the “help,” danced their way to the stage. The auditorium filled with cheers, laughter and harmony (both musical and soulful), and the singer’s performance in front of her two thousand colleagues elicited a storm of applause.
You may not hear the gospel choir shouting (or singing) “it’s good for business,” but Asai would disagree with you.
To begin with, identifying the unique talents of the Hidden Pearls, those diligent, often unnoticed high performers lurking in every corner of your organization, is a powerful recipe for humor and the joy that goes along with it. It brings us back to an ingredient we know and love: the unexpectedness inherent in discovering talent provides delight.
It doesn’t have to be funny, it just has to be true to elicit laughter and joy.
Going far beyond the moment of shared laughter, it helps shape a culture that is deeper and more enduring. As Asai saw it, the rise of the Hidden Pearls in the organization (“quiet heroes,” as he called them) served as a signal that each employee–regardless of position or status–is valued not only for what they produce on the job, but also for what they like to do outside of work. That meant that whatever your unique hobbies and personality, they were welcome here. Hidden pearls are some of your most powerful allies in conveying that message.
Relationships work in reverse as well: when people feel comfortable putting their whole selves – personal hobbies, quirks, qualities that make them unique and special – into their work, they are bound to have a sense of humor as well.
Based on the book “Humor Is Serious
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Cover Story: unsplash.com
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