“Humor isn’t a soft skill or a nice-to-have. It’s one of the most powerful and human tools leaders have. It’s primal. It’s biological. And if you know how to use it well, it creates connection, cuts tension and clears the path for better work.”
—Forbes Magazine (August 22, 2025)
By asking our question and no puns intended, VIM Executive Coaching is not trying to be funny. The absence of laughter indeed, the lack of workplace happiness in general, has become a tremendous concern to executive leaders and obviously, their employees.
The solution for making happier work environments is not to encourage telling more jokes or bringing-in a high-powered consultant to teach stand-up. Though telling an innocent joke or two causes no harm, we have seen far too many work environments where CEOs fancy themselves comedians on one hand, and are autocrats on the other. Employees don’t need jokes, but they do need authenticity.
Business writer Heinz Waelchli in his August 2025 article, “Understanding the Importance of Authenticity in Life and Business,” explored the organic basis of authenticity in organizations and he identified four key areas (please note the italics are ours):
- Self-awareness: Understanding your genuine thoughts, feelings, and motivations. Authentic leaders are unafraid to be vulnerable, to speak from the heart and to give and share their rationale for wanting to go down a certain line of action or reasoning.
- Unbiased processing: Evaluating experiences objectively without distortion. Authenticity stems from executive leaders and their subordinates who see challenges for what they are, without a filter of excessive optimism or pessimism. The challenges are emphatically not due to unfair judgment of others or some convenient eye-rolling blame-game.
- Genuine behavior: Acting consistently with your core values. Authenticity must be based on core values, and begs the question as to what core values the organization embraces?
- Honest relationships: Developing connections based on genuine self-representation. Throughout the organization, are the connections top-down and then, bottom-up honestly shared or are they a kind of shell game where honesty is cloaked and connections are artificial?
Back to the source
So, whatever happened to laughter in the workplace? It plummeted with the decline in true authenticity.
“Yes, but –” many might say, “we make every attempt to be ourselves!” However, that is where all this authenticity talk goes off the rails. Because authenticity is much more than jokes and being ourselves.
In a September 2025 article appearing in Psychology Today, the author said (our italics):
“Let’s stop demanding authenticity from those on the margins and start expecting more empathy and civility from those in power. It is not the junior employee’s responsibility to “bring their whole self” to work; it is the leader’s responsibility to create a culture where multiple selves can coexist respectfully.”
The comment is remarkably and perceptively correct. Authenticity is not a function that can be turned on and off in faucet like fashion. It must be cultivated. And, it all stems from leadership.
If laughter has gone, and with it, authenticity, it cannot be dictated. It cannot be an enforceable action because the person enforcing must also be the person actually practicing the soft skill.
Humor in the work place is quite important if, for no other reason, it is a bell-cow for determining authenticity, empathy and the cultivation of civility. The old workplace adage of “do as I say, not as I do” is as antiquated as the slide-rule.
Executive leaders must strive for more empathy and civility in order to achieve greater authenticity and true happiness in the work environment. If a good joke or two comes out of it, so much the better. With respect to those who preach the virtue of happiness, it cannot be forced or dictated, it must be authentically embraced and practiced from the top down.