We discuss humor with Adrian Marley, General Manager, DHL Russia. He explains why he thinks humor is important in business and how he approaches it.
1. If you do simple things to become a leader, you need to practice them as a leader.
One of the concerns I've had in all of my working life is how people overcomplicate business, in terms of management and process. Why? Often, there are whole industries out there whose job is to convince people that their requirements are complicated, because otherwise they don't really have anything to sell at all. All it needs is for somebody to stand up and say "business is a really simple process": if you show respect to people and you care about your products, and you can do this with a sense of humor, then you will be successful. What else can I say? That's ultimately what it comes down to.
It's about consistently keeping the same approach with the key word being respect, because, if we have respect for each other within the business then we can achieve anything. The problems arise when somebody thinks they are better than everybody else because of the prestige of their degree or because of their MBA and they try to complicate things. This is what I call the PowerPoint generation. PowerPoint is the worst thing that was ever invented - it should've never have been allowed into the office. As soon as they invented it, the world became a worse place.
2. What do you think about simplicity in business?
Simplicity in business is not something that everybody wants to hear. It makes some people very insecure - usually those people who have lots of certificates on their walls. Many people are blessed and fortunate that they were "genetically wired" to be able to be reasonable managers or good businesspeople.
For some people, it's just the way they were brought up, and I emphasize "brought up", because it brings us back to values again. If you have the values, then usually you can fit in to business life quiet easily, and provided the environment in which your work acknowledges those values as being important, then you can move upwards quite quickly because you will be seen as being reliable and respectful.
3. What do you mean when you talk about humor?
Business is a serious thing, but there are always many opportunities to make fun of certain situations, which is exactly the right thing to do in certain circumstances to achieve your objectives. You can use humor to move things forward. If you are too serious all the time, then I think you achieve less. Although if everything is a joke to you then very few people will take you very seriously, there is a long way to go by introducing more humor than less humor into the workplace.
If you spoke to people and asked them about me then they would generally say that I have a sense of humor. It's the balance that you strike between two extremes. It becomes a natural balance, and once you have it, then things falls naturally into places.
4. How do you manage it?
It's also to do with your personality. You can't be somebody who likes to smile and have a joke in your private life and then walk into the office and suddenly have a face of stone. It's very much down to individual personalities. Certainly, within my team, there is always the opportunity for humor. This doesn't mean telling jokes; it means a level of relationship and an atmosphere in which people feel comfortable. That's how we are now. It's at the relaxed level that we are at in this interview.
5. Do you have any examples of where jokes have helped you in conflict situations?
I think if you are in a very difficult situation, then just injecting humor into it to try to diffuse the situation may produce the wrong result entirely. You might end up with something going completely wrong. The main point here is: don't get into a difficult situation in the first place. If you have a confident personality, are open with people, and you smile and you say "hello", then you tend not to get into those difficult situations. Yes, we have conflicts.
I have a very strong team of managers working for me here, and part of that strength is the fact that they have their own opinions and personalities. Without question, we see conflicts sometimes in our meetings but ultimately you can diffuse that conflict in a number of ways. And there will always be somebody who will just say something that suddenly eases the situation, but it happens naturally.
6. How does it work in this country?
I think that it is more difficult here because there is a more traditional view on business. From an academic perspective, qualifications, as a measure of intellect, are very important in this country. If you work with somebody and they believe that you are stupid, you are not going to get very far.
People very quickly assess you in this country as to whether they believe that you have value or not in terms of what you contribute to the business. That's very challenging sometimes, and it's good. And something I say to expats who come here is that the very first thing you need to do is to win the respect of people here, because if you don't have that you are not going to achieve anything, ever.
There is a tendency for a much more formal approach to business, along the lines of "How are you qualified to tell me this?", "Where are your certificates?", "Let me see what it is that you've done". That needs to be kept in perspective and balanced out. But once you have that balance, then everything tends to work well.
My first experience when I worked in a Russian company involved a meeting at nine o'clock every morning, and it was very formal. Everybody went around the room and they read what they wanted to say, and that went on for an hour and a half, and then you left. There wasn't much humor in it. It's just about people feeling comfortable to say what they think and what they want to say, and to say things at the right time for them, because that's what makes the business tick.
Prepared by Liza Barzova, Good2Work Intern, on July 23, 2009
