The Role of Humour in Leadership and Development

Laughter is one of the great unifiers and levellers of humanity.  Although different people and different cultures may find very different things to be amusing, the fact is that every society understands the concept of laughter and its therapeutic benefits.

The difficulty for leaders is that while the benefits of laughter and high morale, both personal and collective on the part of the team, is recognized, the use of humour still needs to be carefully controlled.

Occasionally laughing at oneself and encouraging others to do likewise is highly beneficial. It is great for stress relief and allows people to occasionally stand outside of themselves and take a broader perspective of their activities in a much wider and more human context. For that reason, humour and light-heartedness typically play a significant part in certain elements of australian aboriginal culture development program.

 However, there is a danger with the misuse of humour.
What one person may find to be amusing and human, another may find to be insulting, mocking or patronising etc. The problem is that it can be extremely difficult to predict, with any degree of certainty, just how a different person or group of people will react to even the best-intentioned joke or witticism.

Another problem for the leader as far as humour is concerned arises from it possibly being misconstrued as flippancy. By definition, someone leading an activity or a group of others needs to be seen, on the whole, to be taking the matter seriously and allocating it a degree of gravitas.

The leader who is seen to be constantly ‘horsing around’ and apparently more intent on having a good laugh than achieving their objectives, can sow unease and concern into others around them. So, the aspiring leader needs to understand the place of humour in a shared enterprise and use it appropriately - but also in moderation and be on guard against it being misinterpreted as a failure to be acting responsibly.

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Youth Leadership Development - Can anyone make a leader?

Whether leaders are born or made has been one of the greatest philosophical debates in leadership development over thousands of years.

It doesn’t matter how many learned academic works you read, you won’t find a single cohesive answer in response to the question.  It tends to be an emotive subject and one in which passions can occasionally run hot.

Many authorities would agree that before starting the debate, you need to decide what type of leadership you are talking about.  Some people provide what is termed inspirational leadership by setting an example of desirable behaviours others can follow.  They may not have a position of authority as such but they show people around them what can be achieved by having the right mind-set and application etc. 

In a sense, that is a pretty sound definition of leadership.

Of course, leadership is sometimes rather more direct and requires people to motivate a group of individuals around them and occasionally make decisions where consensus cannot be reached.  Those individuals also have to position the group to help them deal with failure or problems just as effectively as they do success.

These issues and challenges are universal.  Groups need to be motivated and led just as much in say European societies as they do in Aboriginal and Torres strait Islander leadership societies.  

Almost anyone who has worked in coaching people to step into leadership roles where decisions will need to be made, will perhaps privately admit that some individuals are rather better positioned, in terms of psychological makeup, to assume the mantle of such a role than others.  That doesn’t mean that other people are not capable of being developed and grown into such positions but the techniques required to do so may be different to those applied to individuals who have more latent orientation in that direction.

In a sense, it is possible to make a case for saying that some people are born with a greater predisposition towards assimilating leadership responsibilities than others.  However, that doesn’t mean that they will necessarily make good leaders unless they have appropriate training. 

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Top Tips for Restoring Someone’s Confidence

One of our primary objectives at the Stars Institute is to try and improve the self-confidence of the people who attend our various courses and sessions.

 Obviously, space doesn’t permit us here to go into a lot of detail but we will pick out a few key themes.

• Identifying the cause(s) of low self-esteem. Some people simply walk through life believing they are not capable of effective leadership and motivation. It’s not easy but it’s important to try and understand what is causing that. Generic tendencies are a useful clue but they are not always the final answer, as sometimes specifics are required. 

• Showing, by example and exercise, that they are not alone. Low self-confidence is endemic within many sections of the Aboriginal and Torres Islander communities. Yet one of the classic symptoms of a lack of self-confidence is to assume that you are the only one struggling with the problem and that everybody else seems to be fine. By proving that not to be the case, the challenges can be seen to be part of a much wider cultural context.

• Encouraging positive actions to deal with some causes of low self-esteem. Knowing that an aspect of your life is badly damaging your self-confidence is one thing but the effect may be unlikely to go away unless you take positive steps to address the cause. In some cases, that may not be possible but in others, with a little willpower and some appropriate help, it may be.

• Allow the individual to demonstrate success. It’s an old and valid saying that “nothing improves self-confidence better than success”. Completing a range of exercises and group activities where the individual is empowered to achievement, can boost self-esteem immeasurably. 

• Developing a regime to monitor and continually improve your confidence. The benefits of any training course, seminar or education program, needs to be maintained and rolled-out long after it is finished. That means that self-confidence improvement activities will need to be continued by the individual as part of their everyday life. 

 Nobody is pretending that it is easy to address this fundamental problem but it can be done providing you have appropriate and skilled individuals assisting. That’s where we come in!

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Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander Leadership

The French Emperor Napoleon I had a very novel question he always asked when presented with a recommendation that someone was promoted to the rank of General in his armies.

After dutifully listening to the inevitable lengthy list of all the attributes and qualifications of the person concerned, he would ask pointedly – "Yes, yes, that’s all very well - but is he lucky?"

At the Stars Institute of Learning and Leadership, we have no ambitions to try and produce military dictators who then try to take over the known world!  Even so, Napoleon’s mention of luck does have some relevance to Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership programs.

That is - what is luck in the context of leadership?

That’s actually a complex question and we do not pretend to have all the answers to it but what we do know is that many events, both positive and negative, attributed to ‘luck’ are in fact no such thing.

Programs looking to develop Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership need to take into account the fact that more than 200 years of cultural subjugation has led to members of these societies having a predisposition, perhaps understandably so, to believe that they are ‘unlucky’.

Breaking down the anticipation of failure and encouraging people to think that to some extent they can create their own success isn’t easy.  When it is achieved, it can also be difficult to encourage the realisation that success has come about as a result of their personal development rather than simply that their luck has changed for the better, as that can lead to thinking that it could reverse itself in future.

Of course, misfortune can strike anyone at any time and for reasons they could not possibly have foreseen or had any degree of control over.  Once again though, it’s important not to see that as yet more evidence of inevitable bad luck but instead as those inevitable life obstaclesthat need to be overcome.

We know that this change in mindset can be achieved and we regularly achieve it as part of our Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander leadership programs.  Why not come along and allow us to convince you that luck plays a much smaller part in your life than you might believe? 

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Do you cut-and-run?

There is an age-old expression along the lines of it being useless to "flog a dead horse".

Few expressions are quite so evocative. The idea that a dead horse is going to run faster if you hit it harder with a crop is self-evidently ludicrous.

The expression is meant to convey the wisdom that all of us need to sometimes accept that something we have been trying to achieve just isn’t going to happen.  It’s meant to stop us investing further time, effort, emotion and possibly money, in something that is by definition doomed to failure.

Of course, like so many other old sayings, while there is some wisdom here, there are also some dangers.

Clearly all of us need to recognize when something is, to all intents and purposes, effectively dead in the water. Trying to constantly make a success of something that is doomed is a waste of your time and effort.

Yet, there is a flip side to this. Sometimes going that extra mile and making that extra bit of effort can make all the difference between success and failure.  This leads us into the domain of equally famous sayings such as “perseverance wins” or “try, try and try again”.

So, how do you know when something simply doesn’t justify any more effort being put into it and can be legitimately described as being a failure and that activity where a little more persistence may yield fruit?

As you might have guessed by now, there is no easy answer to this.  This is largely to do with experience of life coupled with the application of certain analytical techniques which we at the Stars Institute will teach you to think about.

However, what is important is not to pull the plug on any of your endeavors or enterprises due to a lack of self-confidence.  On balance, when speaking of leadership development and training within Aboriginal communities, there is probably a much greater pre-disposition towards a lack of confidence leading to a too-quick jump to assuming failure rather than a stubborn and irrational refusal to accept defeat.

Like so many things in life, differentiating between failure and a further challenge is difficult and something that can stretch our judgmental capabilities.  We are here to help you think about these things and show you how to do it. 

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