Maybe Management Is Already Serious Enough
Humour, hierarchy and learning not to confuse the seriousness of leadership with taking myself too seriously.
I have a version of myself that appears when a leadership conversation becomes particularly serious.
He is prepared. He has the facts. He knows exactly what needs to be said. He has probably thought through three possible reactions and prepared for all of them. Most importantly, he has made a deliberate decision not to let emotion get in the way.
I have used this version of myself before when giving difficult feedback. At the time, I thought that was what the situation required. There was tension, there were people affected by the behaviour, and I wanted to make sure the conversation stayed factual rather than becoming personal. So I became almost robotic.
The problem is that leadership does not happen between two robots.
That is something I have had to learn gradually. Serious situations need to be taken seriously, but I am less convinced that the leader always needs to look serious while doing it.
There is a difference between the two.
This article is inspired by real workplace and leadership experiences. I do not use real names, company names or identifying details. Roles, teams, organisational structures, projects and business context may be removed, generalised or combined to protect the people and organisations involved while preserving the underlying leadership reflection. Where conversations are referenced, wording may be edited for clarity and anonymity.
01 — The strange performance of management
There is something slightly absurd that seems to happen when people become managers. We develop a management voice.
Things we would previously have described as “a bit of a mess” become “an opportunity to create greater alignment.” A simple disagreement becomes “a useful tension to work through.” Sometimes someone will spend five minutes carefully describing a problem and I will realise that almost everyone in the room understands exactly what is happening, but nobody wants to be the person who simply says it.
I understand why this happens. Leadership carries responsibility, and language matters more once other people start attaching additional weight to what you say. A careless comment from a manager can travel much further than intended.
But I also think something gets lost when professionalism becomes a performance.
This may be part of why I have always found The Office so funny. Michael Scott is an exaggerated collection of almost every managerial instinct that should probably be resisted: wanting desperately to be liked, confusing attention with connection, avoiding discomfort, inserting himself where he is not needed, and regularly misunderstanding the impact he is having on everyone around him.
I am not proposing Michael Scott as a leadership model.
That would make this a very different collection.
But the comedy works because the underlying situations are recognisable. The meeting that did not need to exist. The manager making something about themselves. The awkward attempt to motivate people. The person trying so hard to demonstrate leadership that everyone else in the room becomes uncomfortable.
The show exaggerates it. Workplaces provide the source material.
And I increasingly think being able to see some of that absurdity is useful.
02 — Humour changes the distance
I use humour a lot in how I interact with people. I do not mean that I think managers should become entertainers, or that every meeting needs somebody trying to make the room laugh. I would find that exhausting.
It is more ordinary than that.
Sometimes something is objectively ridiculous and it helps to acknowledge it. Sometimes I have made a mistake and there is no reason to pretend otherwise. Sometimes a conversation has become so unnecessarily formal that a small joke reminds everyone that we are still people talking to one another.
I have noticed that those moments can change the feeling in a room remarkably quickly.
That matters because management creates distance, even when the manager does not intend to create it. The relationship changes. A question can suddenly feel like an assessment. A casual suggestion can be interpreted as an instruction. A short message from a manager can cause considerably more analysis than the person sending it ever imagined.
I have been on both sides of that.
The higher I have moved in organisations, the more conscious I have become that I cannot entirely control how much weight someone gives my words. I might think I am casually exploring an idea while someone else is already wondering whether I have just changed their priorities for the week.
Humour cannot remove that power difference, and I do not think it should try to. But it can occasionally make the relationship feel a little less artificial.
It signals that I am aware of myself in the room too.
That is an important distinction for me. I am far more comfortable making myself the target of the joke than making someone else the target, particularly when I am the most senior person in the conversation. What feels like harmless teasing between peers can feel very different when one person controls performance feedback, promotion opportunities or simply has more organisational influence.
The person with the most power probably has the least reliable information about whether their joke was actually funny.
People laugh at the boss.
Sometimes because the boss is funny.
Those two things should not automatically be confused.
03 — The point where humour stops helping
This is also where I think my own relationship with humour becomes more complicated.
I do not only use humour because I enjoy it. Sometimes I use it because it makes things easier.
And not everything in leadership should be made easier.
There are difficult conversations where the temptation to release the tension can become a way of avoiding the tension altogether. If someone is receiving feedback that genuinely matters, making a joke because I am uncomfortable with the silence is not necessarily helping them. If someone raises something serious, immediately making the room lighter can unintentionally tell them that I would prefer the conversation not to stay serious for very long.
That takes me back to the more robotic version of myself.
For a long time I think I saw two settings: relaxed Kyle and serious-manager Kyle. One could joke, challenge, tease and think out loud. The other arrived prepared with facts, removed emotion and concentrated on getting the difficult conversation right.
Neither version is necessarily wrong.
What I have been questioning is why I thought I had to choose between them.
The lesson from some of my harder leadership experiences has not been that I should make difficult conversations funnier. Quite the opposite. There are moments where the most respectful thing I can do is sit with discomfort and let someone process what they have heard.
The change for me has been recognising that seriousness does not require removing my personality from the conversation.
Being human does not weaken accountability. Warmth does not make difficult feedback less clear. A leader can acknowledge that something is awkward without making light of why it matters.
There is a middle ground that I probably understood instinctively in ordinary conversations long before I understood it in the difficult ones.
04 — Maybe we are making this harder than it needs to be
I think management already contains enough pressure without leaders adding unnecessary theatre to it.
There are targets, difficult decisions, restructures, missed expectations, customer problems, career conversations and countless situations where the answer is genuinely unclear. People are dealing with all of that while also having lives that continue outside the office.
Not every interaction needs additional managerial gravity.
Some of the strongest working relationships I have had were not strong because every conversation was profound. They were strong because there was enough trust for conversations to move naturally between serious and completely unserious. We could challenge something properly, disagree, solve the problem and still laugh together afterwards.
That does not make the work less important.
I think it makes it more sustainable.
It also keeps the leader in perspective.
Leadership positions can quietly encourage people to start taking themselves extremely seriously. More people ask for your opinion. You are invited to more conversations. Your calendar becomes increasingly impressive and increasingly impossible. Eventually it becomes quite easy to mistake being consulted frequently for being correct frequently.
Humour is useful protection against that, particularly when I am capable of laughing at myself.
I do not want to become the person who needs everyone around me to maintain the fiction that I always know what I am doing. I certainly do not always know what I am doing. Most leadership decisions I find interesting exist precisely because the answer is not obvious.
Perhaps that is another reason The Office has stayed with me.
Michael Scott desperately wants everyone to recognise him as a great manager. Much of the comedy comes from the gap between how he sees himself and what everyone else can plainly see.
The uncomfortable part is that the gap is not exclusive to fictional managers.
We all have some version of it.
There will be things I do as a leader that make complete sense to me and look ridiculous to somebody watching from the other side of the room. There will be moments where I believe I am helping and someone else experiences interference. There will be times when I think I am providing clarity and someone hears control.
I would rather remain curious about that gap than become too senior to laugh at the possibility that it exists.
That may be what I value most about comedy in leadership. It is not about being the funny manager. It is not about making every workplace more entertaining, and it definitely is not about using humour to escape difficult moments.
It is a reminder not to confuse the seriousness of the responsibility with the seriousness of the person carrying it.
I am still learning where that line sits.
But I suspect I will be a better leader if I never become too important to find myself slightly ridiculous.
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