Chris Lewis is founder and chief executive of Lewis PR, a global communications agency with offices in 25 cities around the world.

Q. What do you remember about the first time you managed a team?

A. I was 18 and working as a young mechanic for a company called Kawasaki, and I was managing a motorcycle racing team on the weekend. It was my first job and I remember feeling quite inadequate. That job taught me a lot about the basics: looking after yourself, discipline, hard work, and the importance of loyalty.

Q. What lessons did you learn early on?

A. A leader has moral responsibility. Leadership is not a set of skills; it’s a moral issue about doing the right thing. Later on, I studied management, which is all about doing things right, but that’s not the same thing as leadership.

Q. So what makes a good leader?

A. Someone who seeks responsibility. The moral issue is a great one and I think that’s what differentiates smaller businesses from larger ones, because this responsibility is something that has to be taken, it’s not given. You have to feel that you have a contribution to make. It’s the same as being in politics.

In the business world, we’ve seen conscious wrongdoing. It’s no surprise an organization like Google has written at the heart of its motto, “Do no evil,” which rather presupposes that most others would do the opposite in business. Businesses used to serve their communities and I think we’re returning to that, especially in the West.

Also humor: if you don’t have a sense of humor when dealing with your team, you miss a very vital opportunity to transmit your values and culture. Humor is a deadly serious thing. It shows sense of timing, sense of appropriateness, and it shows a certain view of the world.

Q. How do you use humor as a leader?

A. I use it all the time. I think it’s the duty of leaders to be self-deprecating, and it’s their duty to ensure the environments they work in have a strong sense of humor because that releases stress. Humor fills the gaps between the experienced and the young. You don’t need to be knowledgeable or skilled to have a sense of humor and it’s something that is quite useful when you’re working across cultures because that’s often the only thing people have in common. Humor does travel quite well.

Q. Why do you think humor is so important in leadership?

A. In countries like Singapore and China there is a culture of deference to seniority and to authority, but as they do, they also often abrogate responsibilities, they don’t take control. And when you’re looking to challenge orthodoxy in the market, you need everybody to aspire to a level that may be above what they do. That means taking on risk — including the risk of failure, and if they fail, and there isn’t a sense of humor about it, they won’t get back up.

In my book, success is not destination, it’s an attitude. And that attitude is defined by trying and failing constantly.

Q. In Asian cultures isn’t there often a real fear of failure or losing face?

A. In the British culture as well. In Britain, if you fail, you’re a pariah, you’re cast out. Americans are a bit more accepting of failure. The majority of my staff here in Asia are young, aspirational women. If you destroy their confidence, you take away their skills sets and you stop them aspiring. That’s where the sense of humor comes in, you’ve got to teach them to laugh at their mistakes and to laugh at their failures, so they keep going.

Q. When was the last time you laughed at a mistake you made?

A. This morning, actually. I told a meeting how I had been trying to do this acquisition and how I had ignored all the financial tax advice on it, that the company was not compliant. I pressed ahead thinking we could find a way around it. And because I’m so stubborn and pig-headed it cost us £50,000 before the deal failed. The auditors had told me the deal would fail and I didn’t listen to the advice.

You tell others about your mistake publicly, and the more senior you are the better. If the feeling is that authority is always correct and infallible, no one takes risks because they don’t think it’s O.K. to fail.

In my view, if you’re not failing, you’re not trying hard enough.

Q. How do you think your management style has changed in the last 30 years?

Article source: http://www.nytimes.com/2013/05/20/business/global/leading-with-the-help-of-humor.html?partner=rss&emc=rss