Monkey See, Monkey Do

If you ever needed a really good reason to improve your performance at the front of a room or at the podium, consider this ...

In an article on "Social Intelligence and the Biology of Leadership" published in the Harvard Business Review in September 2008, Daniel Goleman (of EQ fame) and Richard Boyatzis wrote this:

"It turns out that there's a subset of mirror neurons whose only job is to detect other people's smiles and laughter, prompting smiles and laughter in return. A boss who is self-controlled and humorless will rarely engage those neurons in his team members, but a boss who laughs and sets an easy-going tone puts those neurons to work, triggering spontaneous laughter and knitting his team together in the process. A bonded group is one that performs well, as our colleague Fabio Sala has shown in his research. He found that top-performing leaders elicited laughter from their subordinates three times as often, on average, as did midperforming leaders. Being in a good mood, other research finds, helps people take in information effectively and respond nimbly and creatively. In other words, laughter is serious business.

Wow ... if we all took this to heart, meetings could be a heck of a lot more fun, huh?!