09/19/2017

How Humor Can Make You a Better Leader

Try incorporating humor into different facets of your organization

A corporate executive, a politician, and a successful entrepreneur walk into a bar...

This might sound like the setup for a bad joke, but according to new research from Harvard and Wharton, if you consider leadership and humor as being incompatible, you’re probably holding your career--and your small business--back. 

Why? The ability to tell a good joke is actually a great way to show off your stature and confidence. “If you are brave enough to tell the joke that you want to tell, whether it succeeds or not, people ascribe confidence to you,” Harvard Business School professor and study co-author Alison Wood Brooks tells Harvard Gazette. 

Plus, she adds, “to tell a successful joke does, in fact, take quite a lot of competence and not just general intelligence, but emotional intelligence.” Try incorporating humor into different facets of your small business and you’ll benefit from its rewards.

This article originally appeared on Inc. Click here to read it on their site.