simplerich

The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up by Adrian Gostick and Scott Christopher was sent to me recently to review and I asked people on twitter how they felt about my reviewing books sent me for free. The consensus was as long as I fessed up to it then there was no harm done. This is me copping to getting a freebie and enjoying it.

I’m reading The Levity Effect: Why it Pays to Lighten Up and listening to Brain Rules from audible at the same time and they’re surprisingly related. I’ll cover Brain Rules later. For now The Levity Effect is being reviewed. It was good. I enjoyed it. It’s a book that will be enjoyed, I believe, by people who already believe what it’s saying. I don’t know that the people who don’t believe it will be persuaded by the book. It’s not that there isn’t enough evidence suggested in the book. It’s just that it’s not terribly persuasive. As such I think it will mostly preach to the converted. I can’t, for example, see my boss reading it and embracing it. That’s now how he does things stylistically. That’s not fair. He does try.

One of the things the book does work hard to point out is the difference between fun and funny and it’s a good distinction. It can be fun at work without someone having to be funny. Fun is not the same as funny. It’s been said at my work that if one enjoys their work then their work will be fun, not fun like volleyball fun, but fun as in “I enjoy what I do and feel fulfilled doing it” fun. I totally see that and agree with it, but that doesn’t mean a little silliness doesn’t have its place at work. According to a lot of the research presented in The Levity Effect the bottom line is always better if people are enjoying themselves at work. Morale is up, people are more productive, and turn-over goes down… how is this not persuasive? I don’t know.

My favorite part of the book is where they discuss how important fun is as a measure of the strength of a relationship. Trust, Communication, and Creativity are all increased by the precepts put forward by The Levity Effect. That part was a surprise to me, but the truth of it came to me as I read it. The people I was most comfortable with and most trusted were the people I was most able to joke around with. I’d never put that together before. I use humor to establish relationships and maintain them.

The list of things to do that help introduce levity also look as if they would be good for team building and morale building. They don’t expressly say that, but people who have fun together I think will perform better together. If you’re a person who believes that work is something that we do an awful lot of and so it should be fun because we’re doing it a lot you should read this book. If your boss tries it then leave this book laying around where the boss will see it. Maybe he’ll give it a read. If your boss is a reader let them read it. It’s a good book. I don’t know how persuasive it is, again, it persuaded be because I already bought into it.

If you’re a manager and you want to be a more effective manager this book will help. Please though, don’t forget you have an HR department. Read the back portion of the book. Remember that mean isn’t funny, and the authors are spot on when they warn that if you’ve got to start a joke with “I hope nobody’s offended but…” or end with “just kidding” then you probably shouldn’t say it. Those things are typically not a good idea. This book is a good idea, after the recession we’ve been in lately and the grim news about it and the cost cuts and lay-offs many companies have been through I’d say it’s a book whose time has come.

The Book Review: The Levity Effect by Rich Griffith, unless otherwise expressly stated, is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License.