Leadership with Humour: Using Humour to Lead Yourself and Others

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This course teaches the skills of creating, selecting, and appropriately using humour to enhance one's leadership at work.

Course description

Developing humour skills (from humour appreciation to curating, producing, improvising, and knowing when to abstain from humour) is becoming a key interpersonal competence for accomplished leaders. This course aims not only to equip participants with research-based knowledge of types of humour and their different effects in leadership, but also with the ability to free their creativity and to practice with creating and using humour in leadership circumstances.

"I am just not that funny" is what many managers still say today, when asked whether they use humour at work. Only 50 years ago, managers would have similarly thrown their hands in the air and said, "I'm just not a born leader!". We know today that leadership can be developed. It is time to embrace the notion that humour can be developed too.

Participants will learn about the several types of humour and their effects on follower and organisational outcomes, about the psychological antecedents of humour, about factors that influence how humour is received by various audiences. They will practice with releasing their own creativity, deconstructing and reconstructing jokes, preparing a humour-supported business presentation, improvising with humour in direct interactions. They will learn to avoid common traps presented by humour in a work context, to master verbal and nonverbal humour and to create a "personal humour style" that fits their own personality and preferences.

Prior to this course, you may choose to also take our "International business leadership" course that offers general leadership development and knowledge and represents a perfect base on which to then build humour skills for leaders.

Continue reading below for more information.

Summer courses

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Fees and scholarships

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How to apply

Application and admission details

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Course level

Master / Advanced / PhD

Course coordinator

Emilia Bunea, PhD.

Credits

3 ECTS

Contact hours

Language

English

Tuition fee

€735 - €1310

Learning objectives

By the end of this course, participants will be able to:
- Have a complete understanding of frameworks applicable to humour in leadership, its antecedents and outcomes, and conditions under which it may misfire.
- Have enhanced self-confidence about being able to develop their humour abilities and the practical tools to do so.
- Have a deeper understanding of their own "humour style" in connection with a deeper understanding of themselves as (future) leaders.
- Be more effective communicators and influencers in a leadership context.
Forms of tuition and assessment
Students will be taught through lectures, case discussions, exercises, simulations and presentations.
Assessment
- in-class participation: 20%
- simulation 20%
- written assignments 30%
- individual presentation 30%
For the simulations, each participant will play a leadership role in a realistic work setting and will apply the humour skills learned.
About the course coordinator

Dr. Emilia Bunea (course coordinator) is a leadership educator, a career corporate leader, has two grown children and two overgrown cats. She dabbles in improvisation theatre and standup comedy, sometimes on a stage in a club, other times in the classroom. Her TED talk on why leaders should take their leisure seriously has hit a nerve with a wide audience. She muses about topics such as managers' jokes and what your golf handicap says about your leadership in her Psychology Today blog "To manage is human".
Preliminary course schedule

Here you can download the preliminary syllabus for summer 2024 with more information and the timetable.