Today’s article is brought to you by a guest author – Lee Harding, who publishes The Introverted Recruiter.
I’m Lee Harding. I’ve spent more than 20 years working in recruitment and people leadership, and these days a lot of my work focuses on something I’ve spent an even longer time trying to understand: being an Introvert at work.
I’ve led international teams, trained thousands of people and spent years watching how people are hired, managed, promoted and developed. I’ve also spent a fairly ridiculous amount of my own career believing I needed to become more outgoing to succeed.
I didn’t.
And I think workplaces still get quite a lot wrong about people like me.
When I was 11 years old, I was told I was too quiet
I found my old Year 7 school report a while ago and four different teachers had essentially written the same thing in four different ways:
“Lee is a quiet member of the group…”
“Lee works steadily in his quiet manner. It would be beneficial if he tried to participate in class discussions without waiting to be asked.”
“Lee has worked quietly this term. He does not answer in class very often. I would like to see him contribute more frequently.”
“Lee would benefit by volunteering more oral questions in class.”
The funny thing is, my actual work was good. Nobody was saying I wasn’t learning, wasn’t trying or was falling behind. The thing they kept picking up on was that I was quiet.
I don’t think any of those teachers meant anything bad by it. They were trying to help. But when you’re told something often enough as a kid, you start to believe it’s something you need to fix. I certainly did.
Then I got into the workplace and started hearing different versions of the same thing. I needed to speak up more in meetings. I needed to be more visible. At one point I was told I was “too quiet to be a leader” and “wouldn’t make much of an impact”.
For a long time, I genuinely thought that if I wanted to progress in my career, eventually I was going to have to become more outgoing, speak more, put myself out there and basically become a little bit less... me.
It took me years to realise I’d gotten Introversion completely wrong.
Introversion isn’t the same as shyness
Being Introverted and being shy are often lumped together, but they’re not the same thing. Shyness is much more about feeling uncomfortable or inhibited around other people. Introversion is a broader personality trait and, for me at least, a huge part of it is about energy.
I can stand on a stage and speak to hundreds of people. I can lead a team, have difficult conversations, run training sessions and challenge senior people when I think they’re wrong. I can also spend an entire day doing those things and be absolutely knackered afterwards.
That doesn’t mean I’m secretly shy. It means all that interaction takes energy.
I think this is one of the things workplaces get wrong about Introverts. Someone who doesn’t say much in a meeting isn’t necessarily frightened to speak, and turning down a networking event doesn’t automatically mean they lack confidence.
Sometimes they’ve simply had enough interaction for one day.
If you’ve already spent six hours in meetings, the thought of another two hours making small talk over drinks might not be particularly appealing.
I’m not saying Introverts want to sit alone in a darkened room all day either. I like people. I like working with people. I’ve spent most of my career in jobs that involve people. But I also know that some of my best work happens when you give me a problem, leave me alone and let me disappear down a rabbit hole for a couple of hours.
Psychologists use the word “flow” to describe those periods where you’re completely absorbed in something and almost lose track of time. A 2020 study of 165 people found that Introverts reported experiencing solitary flow more frequently and more intensely than social flow.
That sounds very familiar to me.
Give me a problem, some space and a couple of hours without interruptions and I can disappear into it.
Quiet is very easy to misread
One of the strangest bits of feedback I’ve received from a boss was that I was too calm.
Apparently, it made it look like I didn’t care.
The problem was, I did care. A lot. I just didn’t display it in the way they expected me to.
When something goes wrong, I don’t tend to become visibly stressed. I normally get calmer. I want to understand what’s happened, work out what we’re going to do about it, and get on with fixing it. I’d always thought that was quite useful.
But that feedback made me realise how much we judge people at work not only on what they do, but on whether they look like we expect someone doing it to look.
Enthusiasm is a good example. Some people are naturally very expressive, so you know when they’re excited about something because they’ll tell you. Other people aren’t like that.
The same goes for ambition. Some people are very comfortable talking about where they want to be in three years, putting their hand up for opportunities and making sure senior people know what they’re doing. Someone else might be just as ambitious but far less comfortable advertising it.
Neither behaviour tells you who is actually better at their job, but one is definitely easier to notice.
And being noticed has consequences. It affects who gets invited into conversations, who gets opportunities and who gets talked about when promotion or leadership roles come up.
This isn’t entirely in my head either. A major meta-analysis combining 222 correlations from 73 separate samples found Extraversion was the most consistent Big Five personality trait associated with leadership across different settings and leadership criteria, including leadership emergence.
It’s that word “emergence” that interests me.
Because the person who most obviously looks like a leader isn’t necessarily the person who’s going to be best at leading people.
I know that from my own career. Remember, I was once told I was too quiet to lead and wouldn’t make much of an impact. I’ve since spent years leading people and progressed through multiple leadership roles without ever becoming the loudest person in the room.
One study I particularly like looked at what happened when Introverted and Extraverted leaders worked with different types of employees. Adam Grant, Francesca Gino and David Hofmann found Extraverted leaders performed better when employees were relatively passive. But when employees were proactive and brought their own ideas forward, Introverted leaders performed better. The researchers linked this partly to Introverted leaders being more receptive to employee proactivity.
I’m not sharing that because I think Introverts make better leaders. I don’t believe that any more than I believe Extraverts make better leaders.
What I take from it is that context matters. The people you’re leading matter. The job matters. Having one mental picture of what “leadership potential” looks like is probably going to cause you to miss people who don’t fit it.
Some brilliant leaders command a room. Others listen, ask good questions, notice things other people miss and make space for the people around them.
We need both.
Meetings reward the people who think out loud
Somebody asks a question in a meeting and three people immediately start talking.
I’m normally still thinking.
It’s not because I don’t have an opinion. Usually I do. I’m just working out whether it actually makes sense before I inflict it on everyone else. By the time I’ve done that, the conversation might have moved on.
Some people work out what they think by talking. Other people think first and then tell you what they’ve come up with. Neither is better, but meetings tend to heavily reward the first one.
We introduce a topic and expect an immediate response. The people who are most comfortable thinking out loud start talking and the conversation gets going. Eventually somebody asks, “Anyone got anything else?” We allow approximately three seconds of silence before moving on.
Then we wonder why the same people contribute in every meeting.
You don’t need to completely redesign meetings to change that. Sometimes just sending the important questions beforehand helps. Give people a bit of time to think, don’t panic because nobody immediately fills a silence and be open to somebody coming back with a thought afterwards.
This will help you get the best ideas from everyone on your team.
Back-to-back meetings cost more than the time they take
Meetings aren’t just a problem for how ideas get heard. They’re a problem for when the actual work gets done.
We can put someone in back-to-back meetings from 9am until lunchtime, give them half an hour to grab something to eat and then expect them to sit down at 2pm and immediately produce their best work. Then somebody messages them, someone else wants a “quick chat” and there’s another meeting at 3pm…
By the time they finally get a clear hour to concentrate, there’s not much brain power left.
As an Introvert, you might have used a huge chunk of your energy before you’ve even started the work that needs your deepest attention.
I’ve learned to manage this in my own diary. Where I can, I try not to have meetings before 11am. My energy is highest first thing, so I use those first few hours for writing, thinking and problem solving. By the time meetings start, the work that needs the most concentration is done and I’ve still got plenty left for an afternoon of talking to people.
It doesn’t always work. Sometimes somebody needs me first thing and I’m there first thing. That’s work. But there’s a big difference between occasionally working against your natural rhythm and having your entire week designed for you with no control over it.
If someone knows they do their best thinking in the morning, maybe they don’t need a recurring meeting dropped into 9am every Tuesday just because everyone happens to be free. An empty space in someone’s calendar doesn’t necessarily mean they’re doing nothing.
They might actually be planning to work.
Which would be nice.
If you want someone’s best thinking in the afternoon, it’s worth considering what you’ve asked their brain to do all morning.
Networking is only one way to build relationships
Meetings aren’t the only place I’ve spent years thinking I needed to behave differently.
I hate networking.
Put me in a room full of strangers and tell me to “work the room” and I’ll spend an unreasonable amount of time pretending to be interested in the refreshments.
To be clear, I can network. I’ve been to the conferences, dinners and events you’re supposed to go to if you want to build relationships at work. I just don’t particularly enjoy doing it that way and, after a couple of hours, I want to go home.
I’d much rather have a proper conversation with one person than 20 surface-level conversations with strangers.
Relationships absolutely matter at work. Knowing people outside your immediate team is useful, and having people around the business who know who you are and what you’re good at can absolutely help your career.
But networking events are only one way of building those relationships. I’ve built some of my strongest professional relationships one-to-one. Mentoring, projects, smaller groups or simply working alongside people over time can do the same job.
So somebody who’s “bad at networking” might actually be brilliant at building relationships.
They might just hate networking.
Quiet isn’t a problem to fix
I’m not suggesting Introverts should spend their careers avoiding anything that makes them uncomfortable. Speaking on stages didn’t come naturally to me. Neither did walking into rooms full of senior people. There have been plenty of times when I needed to speak up more or push myself into situations I’d rather have avoided.
That’s part of having a career.
But there’s a difference between developing a skill because it will help you and spending your career believing your basic personality is a problem.
That’s what I wish I’d understood when I was 11.
Those teachers weren’t wrong that speaking more might sometimes have helped me. But what an 11-year-old takes from that feedback is that being quiet is wrong.
Then work reinforced that message.
Speak more. Be more visible. Show more enthusiasm.
Sometimes that’s useful advice. I’ve given some of it myself during my career. But after more than 20 years working in recruitment and with people, I think we’re too quick to judge the behaviour without understanding what’s behind it.
Most importantly, get curious before you decide somebody needs fixing.
The thing that struck me when I found that old school report wasn’t really that four teachers had called me quiet. It was that more than 30 years later, I’m still quiet.
A day full of meetings still wipes me out. I still prefer having time to think before I give you an answer. And given the choice between working a room full of 100 people and having a proper conversation with one person, I’ll take the one person every time.
Yet none of it has stopped me from having a successful career.
I spent far too much of that career thinking I needed to become more outgoing before eventually realising I was solving a problem that didn’t really exist.
There were skills I needed to develop. There were uncomfortable things I needed to get better at. There still are.
Being an Introvert wasn’t one of them.
I wish I’d worked that out earlier. And if you lead Introverted people, perhaps you can help them work it out a little sooner than I did.
P.S. Want the other side of this conversation? Carly from 16Personalities recently wrote a guest article for The Introverted Recruiter on the hidden advantages Introverts can bring to an Extraverted job market – from how we prepare for interviews to the impression our work can leave long after we’ve moved on. You can read it here.
