223. Laughing Matters: Levity, Leadership, and Lasting Connection

[00:00:00] Matt Abrahams: One sure way to connect and to build relationships is to bring levity into your communication. My name is Matt Abrahams and I teach strategic communication at Stanford Graduate School of Business. Welcome to Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. I always look forward to interviewing my guests, but today I am super-sized excited to be revisited by two guests today. Not only are Naomi and Alison fantastic teachers, authors, and communicators, they're amazing people. And I'm proud to have them as collaborators and friends. Alright, enough gushing. Let me formally introduce you first to Alison Wood Brooks. Alison is the O'Brien Associate Professor of Business Administration and Hellman Faculty Fellow at Harvard Business School. Alison's research focuses on the science of conversation and interaction, and she teaches an award-winning course called Talk. Which also happens to be the name of her new book Talk: The Science of Conversation and The Art of Being Ourselves. Alison is also our first three time guest ever.

[00:01:11] Alison and I today are joined by Naomi Bagdonas. Naomi runs her own consulting company where she helps not only organize high stakes gatherings, but coaches leaders to be more successful. She's coached CEOs and celebrities for media appearances on Saturday Night Live and The Today Show. She trained at the Upright Citizens Brigade Theater and teaches courses about humor at the GSB and the San Francisco County Jail. Along with Jennifer Aaker, she wrote the only business book I have ever learned and laughed through called Humor, Seriously: Why Humor is a Secret Weapon in Business and Life. Thank you both for joining me. This is such a thrill for us to actually be in person together. We talk all the time on Zoom and on email. It's wonderful.

[00:01:55] So Alison, I'm gonna start with you. You are on tour for this awesome book, Talk. What has surprised you in terms of what's interested people the most? Uh, there's so many good things in here. I'm curious what has interested people more than anything else?

[00:02:07] Alison Wood Brooks: The content of the book is based on my course, also called Talk. And so I've had such a lovely privilege of seeing how a lot of people react to this content over many years, and I think the lovely people that I've encountered on my book tour are reacting in ways that are similar to how my students have reacted to the course. A couple things that stand out. One is about question asking. I think that just is an evergreen topic and skill that really resonates with people. Both on the asking side, they have so many fears about asking or hesitations, and on the receiving end, of annoyance when people don't ask them enough questions. And then one other thing that's really stood out to me on book tour is that it seems like people really want to get this in the hands of teenagers. I know that it's helpful to adults and executives and people who have fully developed their conversational skills, but a lot of parents are co-reading the book with their teenagers because there seems to be quite a bit of fear and concern about kids these days not actually developing their conversation skills as, as much and as well as they could.

[00:03:15] Matt Abrahams: That was something that was surprising to me when my book came out, all the parents saying, hey, my kids need this, and there's work to be done there. What is the one big bit of advice you give on asking questions? 

[00:03:24] Alison Wood Brooks: Oh, top line advice. So easy. Ask more questions, obviously. Much of the advice that you will read in this book or hear about on its surface seems so simple, but when you try and put it into practice, it's really hard. So the top line simplicity of this advice is really important. Just ask more. Go into every conversation with this mindset of, I can't leave this conversation not having asked any questions. I should be pushing myself to ask on the margin of a few more. Once you get past that top line advice of ask more, then you can get into the nitty gritty of what is a good question, in what circumstances, and what types of question asking should we avoid.

[00:04:04] Naomi Bagdonas: I wanna add one thing that I loved, that changed me and the way that I interact with people, is this idea that everything that someone gives you, they are giving you gold, and follow up questions are this magic way to uncover meaning and intention. Because we all attribute different meaning to what people are saying, and there's so much to be uncovered with really good follow-up questions. I'm curious, is there anything related to follow-up questions that you in particular love? 

[00:04:39] Alison Wood Brooks: Something that I've realized, there's a lot of rhetoric you'll see on LinkedIn or among people that's like, well, don't ask this question. Ask this question. And to some extent, there is maybe a little bit of a difference between what makes a good question or not. But the better mindset to realize is no matter where you start on a topic, whatever that root question is, what actually matters more is that they're gonna give you an answer. You listen to their answer, and then what's the choice that comes next? Because even a boring sort of mundane question can become great by asking great follow-up questions. If you're constantly searching people's answers for treasure and then diving in towards that treasure, it's gonna take you to great places, even if the original question isn't anything special.

[00:05:25] Matt Abrahams: And not only do follow up questions signal that you're interested in listening, it also allows you to connect better. And it can set you up for a, a better relationship in the future. Naomi, you've been doing a lot of work in leadership and leadership coaching, and I'm curious, is there something new that you're looking to do, or are doing, that, that helps you help leaders be more effective?

[00:05:47] Naomi Bagdonas: I teach a class here at Stanford called A New Type of Leader with Jennifer Aaker, who's a dear friend of all of ours and an amazing collaborator. We now have all of our executives create guiding principles, and the idea is, what are the principles that when you are living in alignment with these principles, or in resonance with them, your life unfolds magically better. And they're different for everyone. So one of mine, I'm gonna be curious what yours are, one of mine is go where there's light and heat. And what that means for me is if I today set a goal for five years from now, it will not be anywhere near as good as if I navigate my life palms up. And I pay attention to where there is light and heat, and I follow those instincts. Now, that's not true for everyone, but for me, I have found that living in alignment with that principle is really important and makes my life better. So I'm curious, is there a principle that each of you have? 

[00:06:49] Alison Wood Brooks: Doing that, palms up and chasing light and heat, means that you also need to leave space for serendipity. Even practically speaking in your schedule, in your calendar and psychologically in your mind, in order to sort of chase that energy when the opportunity arises. Do you do that very intentionally?

[00:07:06] Naomi Bagdonas: I do that extremely intentionally, so I have a portfolio career, which means that I have different percentages allocated to the different things I'm doing. I have a fifteen percent serendipity fund. What that means is that fifteen percent of my time and my budget is allocated to pursuing serendipity. If I am giving a talk somewhere and I have a conversation with an executive who's in the audience afterwards, and they say something about something that they're working on, or perhaps it's an event that they're leading, and they say there's no chance that you're gonna be in New York next week, are you? And in my mind, if there's real light and heat there, I go, okay. Serendipity fund. Actually, yes, I am in New York next week, and it's part of the work that we do. Matt, to your point, not only what are these guiding principles, but how do you design structures in your life that allows you to live in alignment with them, which is super important.

[00:07:59] Matt Abrahams: I'd love for one of you just to define what is levity and perhaps the other can share why it's important, and I invite you to share with us what your students get when you guys have that discussion in your class. What is levity? Why is it important, and how do you help students understand that? 

[00:08:14] Naomi Bagdonas: Levity is a mindset. Levity is navigating your life on the precipice of a smile. 

[00:08:21] Matt Abrahams: I love that saying. 

[00:08:22] Naomi Bagdonas: It is looking for reasons to be delighted rather than disappointed, and it is staying open to the possibility that joy and magic are everywhere if you just look for it. 

[00:08:35] Matt Abrahams: It seems to me that a key to that definition is being open to it. Many of us feel judged, evaluated, threatened in our work, in our conversations. How do you encourage your students, the people you coach, your friends, your family, to be open to those moments of levity? Because they, they're very rewarding intrinsically, but how do you encourage people to be open? 

[00:08:54] Alison Wood Brooks: So the whole premise of Talk, the book, and Talk, the course, one of the really profound things that I, I hope people come away with is that every interaction is co-constructed. That includes levity. It's not just happening in your own mind, it's not just happening in their mind. It's something that you are co-constructing together. And so there's, it's a two-sided challenge. One is about creating moments of levity, and the other is about appreciating and receiving moments of levity.

[00:09:20] And I think to succeed in fulfilling this mission of the mindset and the universal goodness of levity, you need to really be open to both. When you see opportunities, do you seize them to create, uh, levity in conversation? And when someone else offers you this bid for humor or for warmth or connection or levity, do you accept it? Do you accept it with open arms or do you judge it and keep it over there in a box and feel threatened by it? That feeling of acceptance and openness is part of the levity mindset, and it's not just openness. It's like a, almost a proactive appreciation for it. 

[00:09:59] Matt Abrahams: It sounds like presence and being other focused are critical ingredients to being in that place where you can be open.

[00:10:05] Alison Wood Brooks: When we think of humor or levity, it's easy to think of it as this like extra bonus thing. Or like some people I know are funny, or like that meeting we had that funny moment of laughter and that was great, but it was ancillary, it was extra, was like this bonus thing. And then we got back to work. What we find as behavioral scientists is actually, it's not just this extra thing. It's incredibly core to how people are relating to each other. It is a core determinant of the status hierarchy in every group. It's just the correlation between levity and status, power, influence, persuasion, and all of the other goals we're trying to achieve is so intrinsic, that it's actually not to think of it as this extra thing, but more, this is a core goal that we need to engage with to sustain conversational engagement in a successful interpersonal exchange. 

[00:10:56] Naomi Bagdonas: And the research around this is so robust that teams, when there's the presence of laughter in team meetings, those teams are more successful and more creative. Leaders with a sense of humor, not even a good sense of humor, just a sense of humor are seen as more motivating, more admired. Their teams report being more engaged. And so there are all of these benefits. Even when you ask couples to reminisce about shared moments of happiness versus shared moments of laughter, those couples that reminisce about the shared moments of laughter then afterwards report being twenty-three percent more satisfied in their relationships. And so even the act of recalling these moments, they're not just valuable in the moment for making us more creative, higher status, more successful, more bonded, but they also have incredible benefit down the line of maintaining that relationship satisfaction. 

[00:11:48] Matt Abrahams: Many people listening might be afraid that I'm not funny and, and I wanna direct everybody to Naomi and Jennifer's book Humor, Seriously, which helps all of us become more comfortable with and understand how to use humor. When I reflect on what you both have studied and work on, it seems to me that there's a lot of nuance and fluidity that's involved in both conversation and, and in levity and humor. And that can be something that's very hard for people to pay attention to the nuance. Or to allow themselves permission to adjust and adapt. Any suggestions or guidance on how to let go so you can do that? Um, a lot of people hold on tightly to what's comfortable and you're asking and saying there's benefit to pushing yourself to be uncomfortable. 

[00:12:38] Alison Wood Brooks: So a lot of what makes people good conversationalists, not just levity, but including levity, but even asking questions or switching topics, it's these little fleeting moments that require risk taking and a little bit of courage. When things start to get boring, it means you need to muster yourself up for that moment and say, I'm gonna go take us in another direction. Or I'm gonna ask a question that maybe is a little risky and may, maybe they're not gonna wanna answer, but I trust that they're gonna tell me they're not comfortable answering it if it's too personal. So it's these little bids that require risk taking and a, and a bit of courage and levity for sure requires it. It's like these little fleeting opportunities arise, and are you gonna be courageous enough to take that risk? 

[00:13:23] Matt Abrahams: I always ask people three questions. People can listen into your episodes, Alison, people can listen to episode 73, 169 to hear your answers. Naomi, in episode 13, so I'm actually gonna turn the tables. I've never done this before. What question should I have asked, that I haven't asked, for us to discuss? 

[00:13:40] Alison Wood Brooks: I would love to hear from both of you what you struggle with when you think about levity, particularly in conversation. Well, you've both spent a lot of time thinking about communication and about levity. In your experience as a human in the world, what sort of keeps you up at night about it, or stresses you out, or you find tricky still? 

[00:14:05] Matt Abrahams: So when I attempt to be funny, or when I am funny if people laugh, sometimes it will happen so quickly that I'm not thinking about it and I worry about, I stay up at night thinking about, did something I say offend somebody? Is there something that I said in some way, because it was in the moment and it just came to me. And did it potentially offend somebody? And so I worry about it and I replay it in my head over and over. Thankfully, my wife encourages me, one, to talk to the people I'm afraid I've offended rather than building it into something bigger in your head. But that's the thing around levity that really, I, I think it, the beauty of it is it happens in the moment and when you have spontaneous levity, it's just amazing and fun. But in my case, sometimes I am afraid that it maybe, maybe I push somebody in the wrong way and, and that worries me. 

[00:14:49] Alison Wood Brooks: It's an impossible problem to solve because even when people laugh and are having a great time, you really don't know you. You can't read someone else's mind. You don't know what sticks with people and what doesn't. There's a lot of nice evidence suggesting that we ruminate about the wrong moments. Maybe that joke was, that was totally great and they loved it, but there was something else you didn't even notice that actually they're continuing to ruminate about. We're very misaligned in what we ruminate about after conversation. There's great research by Gus Cooney, Adam Mastroianni, Dan Gilbert, about the liking gap. Do you know this work? People like you a lot more than you think on average after a conversation. We're all overly pessimistic about how we think things have gone compared to how they actually went. 

[00:15:29] Matt Abrahams: Naomi, what's your answer to Alison's question?

[00:15:31] Naomi Bagdonas: I have a body of work, and I teach at Stanford about the power of humor in leadership. I worry that sometimes people can feel a bit nervous about bringing levity if that intention is already set, right? So if someone starts conversation with me and they're like, oh gosh, okay, this person is assessing me and my humor and my levity. And that pressure is the most surefire way to kill someone's joy and levity. And so I spend a lot of time thinking about, how do I create a really safe space where this person's goof can come out? It's not about me being funny. It's not about me bringing humor. It's about, am I creating the right space, the container for other people to fill it. Rather than people sitting on the wings and thinking, okay, that person is gonna fill the humor, which I think is a broader principle around for leaders, how do you create the space for other people to fill it? Rather than people sitting back and, and thinking what you're be like.

[00:16:30] Alison Wood Brooks: Are there specific things you do that you think help make people, relieve that pressure and make people feel safe to play? I think people feel the same way. They're like, I'm so nervous to talk to you. I feel like you're evaluating, and it's almost the opposite. It's like, I understand how complicated this thing is that we're doing, and I think I have more grace than forgiveness for flops. 

[00:16:49] Naomi Bagdonas: It's related to this. It also relates to a broader principle, which is what are the cues, the visual and the physical cues that you're giving off? I was at a dinner party a couple weeks ago and everyone was sitting around, it wasn't actually at a table, it was sitting around couches. And it was a group of people who, we were all professional connections where we should really be getting along, but the conversation was a little dry and stilted, and we were also sitting really far away from each other. This room just was really big, and I just could feel like, gosh, how do we bring some, and so I, I just moved to the floor. I just sat on the floor because all the food was in the middle. I sat on the floor and I started eating. And one person laughed, and then one other woman went to the floor, and a guy kicked off his shoes and sat cross-legged on the couch. And you could feel the energy start to shift. And so it's, it's not just about levity, it's more about humanity. Because when you give space for people to bring their humanity, their sense of humor will follow. 

[00:17:47] Alison Wood Brooks: And breaking the formality, breaking the pace. I often, like if there's a certain expectation or norm or whatever, if you can break that a little bit, it really grounds people and bring them together.

[00:17:58] Naomi Bagdonas: Yes, yes, totally. 

[00:17:59] Matt Abrahams: I coached a very senior leader of a company we all know and he had some bad news to deliver. And he did something on his own, not through my coaching. He came off the stage in a room of about two thousand people, and just coming off the stage and having the tough conversation changed the whole dynamic. What's required though, to accomplish this, is this meta awareness of what's going on and what's needed. And it's holding that duality of, I'm in the moment, I'm present, but at the same time, I'm observing and feeling what's going on so I can make the difference. And that is a skill that, it's hard to develop, but courses, like all of us teach, hopefully help our students do that. You both have helped us in so many ways. Not only did we talk about levity, but we had moments of levity, and thank you for that. And thank you for sharing your passions and your research to help all of us get better. It was a true pleasure to have you both here. Thank you. I know both of you traveled to be here with me today and I appreciate you doing that. Thank you. 

[00:18:54] Naomi Bagdonas: You are such a beautiful and generous collaborator, and it's a gift to be here and the work that you're putting into the world is also such a gift. 

[00:19:01] Matt Abrahams: Thank you. I'm blushing. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Think Fast Talk Smart, the podcast. To learn more about humor and levity, please listen to episode 13 with Naomi and Jennifer Aaker. And to learn more about Alison's work, please listen to episode 73, 89, and 169. This episode was produced by Ryan Campos, and me, Matt Abrahams. Our music is from Floyd Wonder. With special thanks to Podium Podcast Company. Please find us on YouTube and wherever you get your podcasts. Be sure to subscribe and rate us. Also, follow us on LinkedIn and Instagram, and check out fastersmarter.io for deep dive videos, English language learning content, and our newsletter. Please consider our premium offering for extended Deep Thinks episodes, Ask Matt Anythings, and much more at fastersmarter.io/premium.