my CEO is furious about a joke I made

This post was written by Alison Green and published on Ask a Manager.

A reader writes:

I recently had an odd situation with the CEO of my company. I am a project manager working on a high-profile, time-sensitive project that was very important to the company. Although the company is a large multinational, I work out of the small satellite office, along with the CEO for North America, the VP of my division, and a few director level folks and individual contributors. Typically there aren’t too many people in the office since people travel a lot for work and work a hybrid schedule when not traveling. I don’t talk to the CEO a lot, but we do chat a few times a month and he’s traveled to visit my project several times.

Late in the day during a key (and highly stressful) week for the project, while I was chatting with one of the directors about sports, the CEO walked over and joined in our casual conversation. (We were the only three people in the office.) At the end of the conversation, he asked me how the project was going. I use humor to deal with stress so I made a very quick joke along the lines of, “Was I supposed to be working on that project this week?” — the joke being that obviously I’d been working extremely hard on it all day, before giving an update that was all good news with a detailed plan to finish the remaining work on time.

After I delivered the joke, the CEO’s expression went completely blank but he was clearly angry. The next week, I got a stern lecture from the division VP about how making jokes like that is extremely unacceptable. My boss (director level) got a 45-minute lecture about how he can’t let his people make jokes like that (although he did not seem to care and told me it was hilarious). Another director level type working closely with me on the project told me he’d heard about the joke from the CEO, who seemed to be so mad he was telling pretty much everyone (this guy also thought the whole situation was amusing). That same week, I got the key part of the project wrapped up on time and on budget, so a major win for the company as a whole.

For context, the CEO does make jokes fairly frequently (not super funny ones, but still jokes). The entire length of the incident, from when he finished his question to when I started the project update, couldn’t have been more than five seconds. Was it really such a huge deal that I made a joke like that, and what do I do next?

What on earth.

Your joke was fine. Even if your CEO had a two-second moment of panic in thinking you hadn’t been working on the extremely important project he assumed you were working on, it would have been immediately clear you were joking because you instantly went on to explain where things stood. It’s not let you let the joke go on and on, leaving him to think for any real amount of time that you’d forgotten the project.

Candidly, I can imagine privately thinking the joke wasn’t very funny. If you’re stressed and on-edge about something, you won’t always appreciate someone else joking around about that thing, even when you know they’re on top of their part and there’s nothing to worry about. But as a human living in the world — and especially as someone managing other people — it’s ridiculous to hold that against the person afterwards. People joke! People let off steam. It’s normal, and any mild “agh, that’s not funny” stress reaction should pass quickly.

So your CEO’s reaction was wildly over the top. Angry? Lecturing your boss and the division VP, and complaining about it to a bunch of others? That’s a bananapants overreaction.

It would be completely different if he’d said to your boss, “Hey, Jane sometimes jokes around in high-stress situations — please let her know it can land wrong when others are frazzled.” But that’s not what he did.

Going forward, now that you know he reacts like this, obviously don’t joke around him — assume he will take everything you say literally and does not appreciate attempts to lighten the mood. Noted.

Normally I’d say that’s all you need to do. This should have been such a minor incident non-event that it never needs to come up again. But given that your CEO clearly doesn’t see it that way, you could ask your boss whether it’s worth you apologizing to the CEO — not a huge mea culpa, just “I’m sorry that joke landed wrong; I hope you saw later how seriously I took that project.” Which is silly to have to do, but might be worthwhile politically.