PS: Love your body Larry.

PS: It takes a big man to admit when he's wrong. I am NOT a big man.

PS: Does this proposition entail my dressing up as Little Bo Peep?

If you know the movie, we're halfway to being besties.

If you don't know the references, that's okay.

But if you don't know the references and then learned that these were post scripts in official Air Force email traffic, you might be concerned about the defense of our Constitution.

Don't be.

Alan Stanwyk, John Cock-tos-ton, and the Underhills are on top of it.

These are actual post scripts from emails between me (an Air Force officer) and Master Sergeant Steinkraus, an enlisted member of the flight I commanded.

There wasn't any funny business going on.

There weren't any top secret messages being relayed. (Or were there?) (There weren't.)

Those one-line post scripts - sender aliases from the Chevy Chase movies Fletch and Fletch Lives - weren't just me being funny. They were deliberate. Strategic, even.

(I'm not proud of using the word "strategic" to describe Fletch quotes, but here we are.)

That minute connection over obscure movie quotes accelerated our trust and communication. Which led to higher professional performance.

I'm not saying every email was post scripted by Chevy Chase. I'm also not saying this technique was taught or endorsed by official military communication protocols.

But it was something I used as a thread of connection between Sergeant Steinkraus and me.

Why?

Because in a high-stakes, high-stress environment like the military, rigidity works on paper. But relationships work in the field.

The beauty of the post script was that it allowed us to maintain operational discipline while simultaneously nurturing personal connection. The body of the email was always formal, respectful and mission-focused.

But that final line? That was The Full Stop^TM.

It was a deliberate, active pause that disrupted the routine of military communication and forced a moment of genuine presence.

Think about it: You're grinding through your 47th email of the day, most of them formatted identically and suddenly - "Love your body Larry."

Your brain does a double-take.

You're present again.

That tiny disruption achieved several vital leadership outcomes that sound suspiciously like I read a management book (I did, but only because someone made me).

It created psychological safety.

By signaling a shared, non-work-related secret, I implicitly told Master Sergeant Steinkraus: "I see you as a person with interests outside this uniform. It's safe for you to be human around me."

Google's Project Aristotle research, where they studied 180 teams across the company, found that psychological safety was the single most important factor in high-performing teams. Teams with high psychological safety reported 2.5 times better work performance and were significantly faster at admitting mistakes.

When people feel safe being themselves, they're far more likely to take professional risks, offer constructive dissent and admit errors quickly.

These behaviors keep planes in the air and missions successful.

It broke down artificial barriers.

Rank is necessary for clarity and command. But it can also become a communication barrier.

Humor, particularly shared, specific humor, is a universal solvent for hierarchy.

Turns out, MIT researchers spent actual grant money studying this. Their work on team dynamics found that shared cultural references between different ranks accelerate trust formation compared to purely formal interaction. The effect is measurable and significant.

That Fletch quote allowed us to bypass the rigid Officer/Enlisted divide for one moment. It made the professional conversation that followed (or preceded it) more human. More honest.

More likely to include the sentence “Ma'am, I think that's a terrible idea" when I needed to hear it most.

It invested in resilience.

Stress and burnout thrive on monotony and isolation.

A quick, unexpected quote injects momentary levity. Research published in Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes confirms that high-quality humor in high-pressure environments leads to measurable improvements in task focus and problem-solving abilities.

The Full Stop^TM disrupts the fatigue cycle and allows the brain a micro-reset.

It's the equivalent of a brief coffee break for the mind, enabling us to return to critical tasks refreshed and focused.

Or at least slightly less likely to make a catastrophically stupid decision.

This technique’s effectiveness at building resilient, cohesive teams led me to use it in other contexts as well.

A few years later, working in the Pentagon, an environment notorious for high pressure, long hours, and the kind of fluorescent lighting that makes you question your life choices, I was part of a team that included another officer and an enlisted airman.

We had a different shared language.

This one less about 1980s movies and more about a certain New York coffee shop.

Our emails followed the exact same pattern: professional body, formal signature and then a post script quote.

PS: Joey doesn't share food!

PS: Pivot! PIVOT!

PS: She's your lobster.

These simple phrases were more than just inside jokes. They were tools of cohesion. They created a unique internal culture for our small unit. One that fostered instantaneous understanding and deep commitment.

The level of trust that was established through this low-stakes play is still evident today.

We've all since moved on or retired, but the three of us still regularly text each other Friends quotes. The two of them are even in my phone as Monana and Regina (Phalange), and I'm hopeful that I'm in their phones as Chauncey.

When Monana moved on from the Pentagon, I created a miniature version of Phoebe's Gladys "art" as a going-away gift.

Tiny plastic babies and a Barbie doll arm (or leg - I honestly can't remember which) extending from the frame.

Because nothing says "I value our professional relationship" quite like a horrifying miniature art tribute.

That's not just nostalgia.

That's a language of care built over years of tiny, deliberate connections.

Humor, when used deliberately and respectfully, isn't a distraction from leadership.

It's an accelerant for it.

It doesn't replace competence, discipline or mission focus. But it creates the conditions where those things thrive. It builds the trust that makes hard conversations possible. It disrupts the autopilot that makes us miss what matters.

And you can put that on the Underhills' bill.