10. Make Room for Fun in the Workplace (Nurture Lightheartedness/Levity)

A few months ago I was traveling on an American Airlines flight between Chicago and home. As luck would have it, I was served a cup of sparkling water by a very pleasant, smiling, and chatty cabin attendant. Looking for something to read, I pulled the house magazine, American Way, from the seat-back pocket. As I scanned the contents of the periodical, my attention was drawn to a one-page review of a business book written to promote levity in the workplace. The book was described as a call to companies and their leaders to “lighten up.”

The review was appealing, and it brought back a memory of my earliest days in corporate America. I was 25 years old and working for Westinghouse Electric Company within the commercial Nuclear Energy Division as an HR newbie. I must have been full of the joy of landing a real job, with real pay, at a place where many other young folks worked. We had a brand-new building, with walls painted bright primary colors and a glass and steel façade. I was loving it, and it showed. A group of us would meet regularly for pre-workday coffee (I took my caffeine in the form of Diet Pepsi), had lunch together, and occasionally stopped into a local pub for a beer or cocktail after work to wait out the commuter traffic.

As far as I can remember most of us in the group were committed to doing good work, and most of us were satisfactory-or-better contributors, and at some level we all showed potential for advancement. But, we had a good time at work, too. There was a lot smiling, chatting in the halls, playful teasing, sports and fashion talk, and general spreading of goodwill, all laced in between accomplishing tasks and delivering on objectives.

For some reason, my manager’s manager, a division director, saw me as both a “high potential” employee and the Pied Piper of this happy group. So, late one afternoon, he summoned me to his corner office (with windows that overlooked the Pennsylvania Turnpike—nature at its best) for a “chat.” His word, not mine. He sat behind his desk with his pipe (A word about pipes a little later), which alternated between his teeth and his hands for packing and repacking. He told me that I had a great future ahead of me. But, he said, I was at risk of throwing it all away because of my behavior at work.

I was riveted to my seat, as I asked the nature of my transgressions.

He leaned toward me and offered that the managers were beginning to think that I was not serious about my job and not behaving professionally. So, being the person my father and mother had raised, I asked to hear the evidence against me. He told me that I smiled all the time, and I was seen to be far too “loose and casual” to be serious about my job and my work.

Anyway, I really thought he was kidding. But he wasn’t! You see, I was among others behaving counterintuitively to the management. They believed deeply that work was serious stuff, not to be “played with.” Any regular show of joy or levity that was outside organized social events indicated a lack of seriousness and care, and it was considered nonprofessional. Basically, if you are having a good time at work, you can’t be getting anything done.

It took me one week to decide to look elsewhere for work, but I checked out long before I physically moved on 15 months later.

Thank God, the days of smoking in the workplace were numbered. But I sometimes wonder if the old guy had a legitimate point. Because as I recall my days at Westinghouse, the guy who read me the riot act certainly never plowed up new ground when it came to accomplishments and contribution.

Now, a word about pipes, if you will excuse the intrusion into this space. About 35 years ago, I was promoted into my first real management role, where I could actually hire and fire people. Well, my division director took me out for a welcoming lunch, and over coffee (Diet Pepsi still for me), he offered this sage advice, “Never hire a pipe smoker! They spend all their time loading, packing, lighting, relighting, emptying, cleaning, and repeating the sequence. They may look smart and serious, but they never get anything done!

What I Learned from Marie Montessori

Twelve years later, I had the best kind of learning experience, dealing with this same subject. It was “discovery learning”; you know, one of those times when you learn something that is so cool and eye-opening that it stays with you forever, where the news is not brought to you, but rather you find it yourself, much like a paleontologist turns over a rock and discovers a rare fossil.

When I was head of HR at SAS Institute (now called SAS), and we were expanding our benefits options, one of the possibilities we considered was adding on-site day care for infants, toddlers, and preschoolers to support our growing complement of working mothers and young two-career families.

As we interviewed companies and independent day-care providers in our search for a day-care solution that would fit our need, values, and culture, we asked our employees, who would be the beneficiaries of our choice, for any information they may have had access to that could help us. One of our young mothers suggested that we consider establishing a Montessori Day Care and Preschool, and she even suggested a person who could serve as director of the center and lead teacher.

We obliged and brought the outside specialist in for an interview to discuss what Montessori had to offer SAS and its families. It turns out that the Montessori method of child development offered much to SAS, and I was totally enlightened by what I learned that day, and by what I have learned and retained as a “values touchstone” for more than 25 years since.

At SAS we prided ourselves on building and nurturing a healthy and creative work environment. We believed and behaved as though people—given the right resources, guidance, and infrastructure, and the appropriate amounts of encouragement and recognition—would amaze us with the things they could and would do on behalf of the company. Well, to my surprise and joy, an Italian physician, Maria Montessori, was way ahead of us. Back before the turn of the twentieth century, Montessori, who died in 1952, was showing the world, or at least Europe, that creativity is fostered in children (and that learning and achievement are enhanced) in environments where high expectations are set and where there is a rigid infrastructure. But the approach is a balancing act, because the infrastructure cannot be too burdensome. People must be encouraged to take their own leads to achievement and be cheered for it. This is all done with the assumption that the outcomes are aligned and do not violate the established infrastructure.

So what does this and Maria Montessori have to do with levity (fun!) in the workplace. Well, it happens that one of Maria’s principles (I view her as an old friend now...I wonder if she prepared gnocchi from scratch?) is that work is fun and should be fun; play is fun and should be fun. They are just different kinds of fun. She believed and showed that when work is done without joy there is less creativity, less engagement, and far less productivity. So, your goal as a manager is to lead people to a place where learning and work are joyful experiences. The result is that satisfaction comes from achievement, and the quality and volume of the outcome is enhanced. Moreover, the creativity applied to the tasks builds learning, which, in turn, virtually guarantees better results—and more “fun”—in the future.

In Rule 1, “Understand Why Employees Come and Why They Stay,” I referred to Douglas McGregor’s Theory X and Theory Y Management. McGregor was a professor at the MIT Sloan School of Management, and in his book The Human Side of the Enterprise, he indentified these two approaches to management. With Theory X Management it was assumed that people needed to be managed, pushed, and supervised. It assumed that without management, people wouldn’t produce at all unless there was a risk that something would be taken away from them.

With Theory Y management, the management orientation was focused on the practical application of Maslow’s hierarchy of human needs. Theory Y assumed that work comes as naturally to people as play, and moreover, if people are given the right guidance, resources, and encouragement, they will naturally produce, and do so very well, with positive outcomes.

To put this in a more common vernacular, Theory X management believes that people, at their core, are lazy and need to be pushed, whereas Theory Y management assumes the opposite, that people are naturally curious and productive, and when they are put in the right place, with the right resources, they will be successful.

Okay, at the risk of causing an explosion, let’s combine McGregor and Montessori. All kidding aside, they are remarkably similar: Montessori and McGregor assume that there can be levity in the workplace and in learning environments, and that levity is the natural disposition of ideal work and educational settings!

So, how valuable can having fun be? Herb Kelleher, cofounder and two-time CEO of Southwest Airlines, was intent on making his company a fun place to be. He believed that customer service was at the core of any successful business. And he also believed that employees provide the best customer service when they are having fun doing their work. So he and Colleen Barrett, his longtime number-one assistant (who eventually took a turn as Southwest’s president herself), insisted that the Southwest hiring process include a test of an applicant’s sense of humor. Each applicant was asked to stand up and tell a joke before the panel of interviewers. Now, was this a test to see who was funny or could deliver a punch line? Nope! Southwest was looking for people who would be able to take the job seriously, but not themselves; people who would be comfortable and thrive in an atmosphere that required a lot of teamwork and camaraderie; and who would embrace being externally focused toward the customers and other employees. They were also looking for candidates who found joy in life and saw the glass perpetually half full. Think it has worked in Southwest’s favor? You bet.

So leaders are wise to introduce fun into the workplace and to foster lightheartedness. Executives certainly don’t have to be funny or lead the joke telling. It is far more important that executives and managers are pleasant to be around. And one can be a hard-working, driven, and demanding taskmaster, and still be a person with a pleasant demeanor.

In fact, as we found at SAS, and as you will find by implementing the principles in this book, fun in the workplace is not mutually exclusive to productivity. Indeed, one actually enhances the other, and having fun in the workplace isn’t necessarily an indication that little work is getting done—as long as the fun isn’t reckless and doesn’t violate the values, mission, or established company infrastructure.

What’s more, when that sense of fun is in the workplace, the extraordinary becomes common. Why? Because everyone can be so in the zone that extraordinary acts come naturally to them. By analogy, think of what people say after they have performed a rescue of some kind. It seems as tough they invariably say “it wasn’t anything heroic, just something anyone would do.”

They are in the zone, and the extraordinary seems common.

Think of sports figures who put in amazing performances—like Magic Johnson. Remember his rookie year? Game 7 of the playoffs, and Kareem has a migraine. Magic plays center—not his natural position—and effortlessly pours in 40 points to lead the Los Angeles Lakers to the championship. That night, he looked as though he was having a blast, and I am sure he was. He was immersed. In the zone. The extraordinary came naturally.

You hear the same thing about artists. They get so immersed in their work that they go without sleeping or eating. This can go on for days at a time, and yet when they are asked if the work was hard, they look up baffled, as if to say, “I didn’t think it was work at all. I was having fun.”

I know it seems idealistic to assume you can expect constant peak performance, heroic acts, and spectacular individual contribution on a daily basis, but you can build and sustain a workplace environment where these feats are possible. And that’s half the battle.