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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Stand-up comics have to be just about the bravest people around.

If you’re a singer and the audience doesn’t enjoy your performance, you can blame the composer, the arranger, or your backup band.

If you’re an actor you can blame the script, the director, or the other actors in your show.

But if you’re a stand-up comic, it’s just you and the audience. They either laugh or they don’t. If they don’t, you’re up there with your bare face hanging out, soaked in flop sweat and with nowhere to hide.

We’ve been talking about political correctness and its impact on the workplace the last couple of weeks (“Polite-ical correctness,” 4/4/2016 and “It’s my turn to be the victim!” 4/11/2016). But so far we’ve barely touched on the most important dimension of the issue: Humor.

As a leader and manager you aren’t paid to be a comedian. You are paid to, among other things, create a healthy work environment.

What makes a work environment healthy? First and foremost, nobody in the workforce should feel threatened or harassed.

The law (as I understand it; I did lead HR once upon a time but I’m not an attorney) makes allowances for reasonability. For example, Jehovah’s Witnesses don’t celebrate birthdays. That doesn’t mean your other employees can’t celebrate birthdays. It does mean no one should pressure their co-worker to join the festivities.

But being unthreatening and unharassing doesn’t make a workforce healthy, any more than not having a fever and rash means you’re feeling fine. A manager who considers this an achievement needs to set the bar a wee bit higher.

This is where humor comes in. In my experience, in healthy work environments employees kid around — something that’s awfully hard to do without humor being involved.

Humor being what it is, though, kidding doesn’t always turn out to be funny. But then, there are no level-of-humor benchmarks you can draw on to determine the absolute level of funniness of a given wisecrack.

If the worst that happens is that nobody laughs, you’ll have an employee with newfound empathy for what stand-up comics risk at a professional level, except that all your employee has to say is, “Well, I thought it was funny,” and everyone moves on.

But there’s precious little in the way of kidding around that doesn’t risk offending someone, for several reasons the kidder has no control over.

The first has to do with DNA: Some people just weren’t born with the sense of humor gene. Strangely, the Americans with Disabilities Act ignores this syndrome and big pharma has yet to develop a treatment. It’s too bad, because the afflicted sometimes take offense at a remark specifically because their understanding of humor is, at best, theoretical.

The second reason is obliviosity. Congenital wisecrackers can be oblivious, more focused on eliciting a smile, guffaw, or something in between than on how what they’re about to say might offend a listener.

The third is the legitimate piece of what those who complain about political correctness are griping about — as a society we’re encouraging people to feel victimized, causing everyone to tip-toe around everyone else.

But as Offense-O-Meters are no more commercially available than level-of-humor benchmarks, it isn’t up to you or anyone else to tell an employee who’s feeling offended that he or she is wrong.

So what, as a business leader, do you do?

HR “best practice” says you play it safe. If there’s kidding, banter, jibes, or repartee, discourage it.

This will keep you out of trouble and the company out of court. It will also kill team performance. Teamwork depends on trust. Stop the joking around and you’ll pretty much wipe out the interpersonal relationship-building that trust depends on.

Or, you can establish a more relaxed atmosphere, with give-and-take and all the good-humored wordplay that goes with it.

And if someone does take offense? At the risk of horrifying your average HR professional:

Meet privately with the offended party (call him “Jim”). Explain that he has four alternatives.

The first: File a complaint with Human Resources. That’s his right and he’ll get a fair hearing with no retribution later on.

Second: Explain to the offender (call her “Jane”) that she was offensive, and why. If Jim chooses that course of action, you’ll be happy to mediate if he’d like.

Third: If Jim isn’t comfortable talking to the offender, you can have a quiet word with her instead.

Fourth: Jim can shrug it off and decide it isn’t worth making a fuss about.

So long as you’re completely neutral as to which alternative you’d prefer, you should stay out of trouble.

Just, whatever you do, don’t make a joke out of it.

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|In: Business Ethics|Last Updated:

Political correctness is killing this country, or so I’ve heard.

What I haven’t heard is a clear, crisp definition of what the phrase political correctness means.

When I first heard it I was pretty clear on the concept: It meant I couldn’t tell Polish or Italian jokes anymore. This was back in high school, where my clarity about the concept came courtesy of a much larger and more muscular Polish acquaintance who made certain I understood his point, reinforced by a seriously cute Italian girl who explained that I’d just reduced my chances of dating her to the sort of number mathematicians use negative exponents to express.

Along with the recognition that racially-and ethnically-oriented jokes were in bad taste came an increasingly widespread recognition that the extensive and colorful variety of racial and ethnic pejoratives that had been in common use, and the various stereotypes that had accompanied them, were no longer to be uttered in polite company either.

As my own heritage has in the past been used as a verb meaning “to negotiate beyond the point of reasonableness” — a stereotype I’ve often wished was more accurate when negotiating compensation and consulting rates, even while finding it offensive when spoken aloud — I long-ago made my peace with political correctness.

My perspective is, I recognize, less than universally shared — a situation I always find puzzling. In this case I’ve often wondered if the main problem is one of pronunciation: It should be spoken as “Polite-ical correctness.”

The problem, friends and acquaintances have explained to me, is that the desire to avoid offending anyone has been taken off a cliff, as in the example of calling people who are particularly short in stature “vertically challenged.”

Which leads in turn to the question, why would you want to call attention to someone’s past-two-standard-deviations stature? If they suffered from some other unusual size characteristic … say, unusually small hands … would you … oh, wait. Never mind. We crossed that boundary a couple of months ago.

None of this would be in bounds for Keep the Joint Running were it not for the nature of the most recent attempts to make political correctness socially incorrect.

Which is that right now, among some members of the political (as opposed to the polite-ical) class, political correctness means being forbidden to attach bigoted and factually incorrect stereotypes to all Muslims of all stripes everywhere in the world.

And, for that matter, to all Sikhs as well, because many of those who complain about political correctness aren’t all that well-informed, not only about Islam but also about what it means to wear a turban.

This is a legitimate KJR topic because, in your role as business or IT leader, you’re likely to hear colleagues emulating their favorite political personage or pundit, expounding loudly, unfavorably and in public about Muslims.

Which, whether they realize it or not, insults the DBA, developer, or sysadmin in the next cubicle. One of those who feels offended might report to you. If so, you have a legal responsibility to make sure they don’t work in a threatening and harassing environment.

Depending on your personal moral code, even without HR’s dictates you might figure you have a responsibility to help out someone who’s on the receiving end of verbal bullying, because being a bystander in a situation like this is the sort of passive behavior that won’t make you proud of yourself when you look in the mirror tomorrow morning.

More important than this: Why would you want to let some uninformed lout spew garbage that drives good employees to work for a competitor? We’re all in a fight for talent. That being the case, fight to win.

Sometimes, even with the best of intentions we hold back, for no other reason than that we aren’t sure what to say in embarrassing circumstances like these. If that’s what’s troubling you, be troubled no more.

I recommend starting by looking at the offending party with a sour expression and a don’t-look-away gaze that’s just short of a stare. When you’re sure you have their attention, say, “What you’re saying is offensive and uninformed. You’re welcome to your opinion, but you aren’t welcome to share it here. What you’re doing is a firing offense, so we’re both better off if you button it right now. Save it for a bar after you’ve left the office. People in bars expect to hear folks who have had a few too many expressing their ignorance in loud voices.”

Well, okay, maybe that isn’t the best way to handle it.

Tempting though.

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