You can always choose which face to present to the world
I’ve just finished reading Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World that Can’t Stop Talking, by Susan Cain. If you consider yourself an introvert, as I did, the book will help you recognize and apply your strengths to be more successful in a predominately extraverted world. If you’re an extravert, it will give you a greater appreciation of your own blind spots and help you get the most from the introverts around you.
But a word that only appeared once in the entire book sparked my greatest interest: ambivert. I’ll explain why a little later in this article.
Today’s business and culture glorifies the extravert ideal. We watch reality shows in which the brashest, most outgoing and shameless people grab the limelight. We put charismatic business leaders on the covers of our magazines. In meetings, those who speak up the most are seen as smarter and better leaders, and they are the ones who tend to get the promotions.
Business today glorifies teamwork, which is tailor-made for extraverts. Open-plan offices are thought to encourage more interaction, teamwork, and creativity. (From the 1970s to the 1990s, the average space per office worker declined from 500 to 200 square feet.) Yet, research shows that open-plan offices impair productivity and increase stress. Group brainstorming has been found to produce fewer good ideas than people working alone. That’s because the extraverts tend to take over, and introverts clam up.
No less a business leader than Jack Welch said: “big companies are so tilted towards extroverts that introverts within them often experience a dynamic not unlike the one faced by many women and minorities. They have to constantly overdeliver just to stay even.”
Welch further went on to say that introverts in large organizations need to release their inner extravert; they have to get out more and “deploy all the energy and personality they can muster.”
It sounds like excellent advice, but is it necessary? Are extraverts automatically better leaders and better salespeople? In his book Good to Great, Jim Collins tells us that all the great companies he studied had quiet leaders in common. Peter Drucker said that, of all the most effective leaders he had ever met, all had little or no charisma. And, as I recently wrote here, pundits who are the most confident and bold in their predictions are the most likely to be heard and the most likely to be wrong.
More recent research shows it might be more complicated than that, indicating that what matters is the relationship between the styles of both followers and leaders. A recent study showed that better group performance resulted when extraverted leaders led passive employees, and when quiet leaders worked with outgoing and proactive followers. When both leaders and followers have similar styles, performance went down.
In today’s fast-changing world, leaders rightly want to empower employees to take initiative, but that means they then have to act more introverted by asking more questions, listening more, and being more accepting of others’ views. Otherwise, it can lead to a struggle for dominance with followers ultimately becoming disenchanted that their leaders were not listening to them and following their advice. This may be especially important for sales managers. If you’ve risen from an extravert pool to your current position, you may need to tone down your need to be the center of attention and to always be right.
Even in sales, a profession which seems to be tailor-made for extraverts, the picture is not so clear.
Extraverts have some definite advantages in sales. They are action-oriented, confident, and gregarious. They’re not afraid to make the calls and reach out to high level decision makers, and they have the energy and enthusiasm to entertain and develop strong relationships. They are great networkers. I have 115 friends on FB and that’s too much. My friend John has almost 3,000 and is eagerly seeking more. Extraverts love doing these things and introverts find them to be work, so there’s a strike against introverts.
And yet, especially in complex systems sales, success comes to those who research the customer’s company, who put together effective opportunity and account plans, who ask questions and listen. Introverts may not like to make cold calls, but they are more likely to create a calling plan and have the dogged discipline to follow it. As one highly successful salesperson says in the book: “I discovered early on that people don’t buy from me because they understand what I’m selling. They buy because they feel understood.”
Because both types have advantages, it stands to reason that the most effective salespeople should combine the best traits of each, or who can flex their style to match the needs of the situation.
The key point in all this is that success in any profession is based on the effective performance of certain required behaviors and actions as the situation dictates, and these are products of will and skill. Practice and habit make things easier in the long run, so introverts can get better at doing the things they need to do, and extraverts can do the same. Personality is not destiny.
Labels can limit us. The first thing we should do is drop the labels we’ve imposed on ourselves. See, labels work both ways. If we behave as introverts, we—or others—place that label on us. Once we accept the label, it goes to work on us in the future. We react to situations the way we think introverts should react.
Labels can also empower us. If labels have that much power, why not change the label? The more I read the book, the less I identified with the pure introvert label. If you think of the distribution of personality types as a bell curve, most people will fall somewhere in the middle, so most of us are really ambiverts. This should be encouraging, because it means that you may not be as far from the center as you thought. From the center, it is much easier to move in either direction as the need arises. If you need to be assertive and outgoing, you can do so. Or, if you need to quiet down a bit and think a bit, you can also do it.
So, if you’re more introverted, take Welch’s advice and get out more; before meetings, think about what you’re going to say and plan to participate and speak out more. Seek out speaking opportunities; joining Toastmasters quite literally changed my life, because the confidence I gained in speaking in front of groups translated into many other business and social situations.
If you’re more extraverted, cut your talk/listen ratio way down. One CEO says that he purposely does not say anything for the first 15 minutes of any meeting. If you’re spouting opinions and nobody rebuts, don’t automatically assume it’s because they’re blown away by your brilliance. Maybe they just think you’re a jerk and want you to go away.
So, if you ask me which personality type is better, I’m firmly in the middle.
Use interactive visuals to make it their idea
The three most important persuasion tools any speaker or salesperson can use are stories, questions and visuals. Imagine the power if you could put those three together?
Last September I wrote an article about how to use questions to get the buyer to tell you their story. It works great during a sales call because it guides the listener to tell you a compelling story that makes your solution their idea. In effect, it gets your listeners to tell you what you want them to hear.
In this article, we’ll take it to another level by adding the third tool—visuals.
You can put all three tools together into an irresistible combination by using a whiteboard or flipchart to create the visuals in real time during your presentation. If you do it right, you can get the customer to show you what you want them to see.
Good training for future politician or business leader
The news media this week have been buzzing with discussion of Mitt Romney’s remark, “I am not concerned about the very poor…” Taken out of context, it was clearly very damaging to Romney, at least in the short run.
The Romney camp complained that the quote was taken out of context, and indeed it was. When you read the entire statement he made, it’s not quite as bad, although it’s still a statement he probably wishes he could take back.
The real point is, that anything a leader says can and will be taken out of context, and you don’t even need a “media conspiracy” for that. Even without the press as an intermediary, listeners can filter anything you say through their own biases and desires. They will provide their own context to interpret your statements. That’s why you have to constantly use outside-in thinking to anticipate what your words will sound like to your listeners.
At least politicians know this is a professional hazard and try to be on guard against it. Business leaders may not be as sensitive to the danger. They may not realize that they are being scrutinized just as carefully as a politician, in everything they do or say.
I’ve worked with thousands of bright and articulate people in my twenty plus years of training, people who are justly confident of their ability to rise to the occasion and think fast on their feet, whether it is in a sales call, an important presentation to their boss, or the give-and-take of internal meetings.
That confidence is usually an asset, but it often veers dangerously into overconfidence which leaves them vulnerable to error and discourages the preparation that could make them even better than they already are.
Here’s just one example. In teaching sales call planning I have salespeople list the top objections they expect to hear from their customers during the call, and next to it, jot down the key points they would use to answer the objection. Most salespeople find the first step easy to do, because they’ve heard some of the same objections over and over hundreds of times. Yet, because they’ve heard them so often, they usually resist writing something in the second column, because the answer is so obvious to them in their own minds. Unfortunately, when they role-play the call, and get the same objection they have heard over and over, they almost always fumble a little, as if they are re-inventing a good answer every single time. When we debrief the role plays, they will usually admit that they could have expressed the answer better.
