The Power of Quiet: ?4 leadership tools for introverts

I am an introvert. I am also an entrepreneur, public speaker, and co-leader of a fast-growing start-up. Conventional wisdom would state that I am a leader in spite of being an introvert, but I think I’ve gotten to this point in my career because I use my introversion as an asset rather than hiding it as a liability. This blog lays out some practical strategies that I have found most handy for leveraging introversion into effective leadership. From tactical shower rehearsals to maximizing “return on social energy,” it’s a mini-manifesto and a collection of tips, tricks, and tools I use everyday to survive and thrive as an introverted leader.

First, let’s clear up a few things. It’s estimated that between 1/3 and 1/2 of all people are introverts. The word “introvert” is often casually used as a synonym for “shy” or “anti-social.” That is not at all what it means. Where you fall on the introvert <> extrovert spectrum reflects one simple thing: where you get social energy. Extroverts build up energy by being with people. They feed off the buzz of social interaction, but their energy depletes when alone. Introverts generate energy by quiet reflection in either solitude or with a small group of trusted friends. They spend it at parties, conferences, and busy subway cars. Extroverts do their best thinking amidst a flurry of ideas from others. Introverts have their insights by kicking around ideas in their own head.

This is a very different thing than “shyness” or “sociability.” Many extroverts are terrified before speaking publicly, and many introverts are the life of the party. Abandoning these misconceptions is the first and most important step to capitalize on being an introvert. Want to read up on this? Susan Caine has emerged as a sort of queen of introverts. Her excellent book and TED talk on the subject are a great place to start. Not sure if you’re an introvert? The Myers-Briggs personality type test is one way to find out. If you’re still reading at this point, I’ll assume you’re an introvert, you’ve accepted it, and you’re interested in being an effective leader.

The mantra of introverts everywhere (Photo credit here)

One thing before we jump in. All this touchy-feely talk of universal acceptance is great, but there is still a harsh reality at its core: leading as an introvert is hard. You could make a strong case that it’s harder than leading as an extrovert. Why? Leadership is a big drain on your energy input/output budget. Leaders are asked to do many things that require energy expenditure—things like running meetings, pitching to investors, enforcing performance, and being the center of attention. Energy-generative activities like quiet reflection often take a backseat. There’s also an element of social pressure: we expect our leaders to be dynamic fast-talking big-idea people, and we often have less tolerance for slower, quieter modes of leadership. That is of course an incorrect assumption, but one that we all face.

The ideas below are all about taking advantage of our unique capabilities as introverts to overcome these barriers and be better leaders.

1. Manage your energy budget

As with all things in business, you can’t manage what you don’t measure. As introverts, whether we like it or not, we have a finite energy budget. Why not be as systematic about managing our personal energy budget as we are about managing finances?

To coin a new term, what we’re really talking about here is maximizing your “ROSE:” return on social energy. When I say “energy,” I’m not talking about

some metaphysical one-ness with the universe. I’m talking about a much more practical kind of energy—the excitement, desire, and happiness required to engage with the world and solve problems. Like capital, we have a finite amount of energy, and it can be invested in high-return, productive uses or squandered on inefficient, draining activities.

You can think of your personal energy budget as a flow diagram like the one below. If outputs exceed inputs, you have a deficit and performance will start to suffer. If inputs exceed outputs, time to look for productive uses for that excess energy. Finding a balance is key to maximizing ROSE.

Personal energy budget as a flow diagram.

But we can’t really quantify social energy, so how can we think about investing it smartly? Unlike collecting hard data on investment performance, ROSE management is more about knowing your limits so that you can maximize the results when you do spend energy. Here are some examples of ROSE management I use every day:

• Move flexible meetings to give yourself gaps in the schedule to gather your thoughts.
• Plan travel to give yourself time to settle in. Giving a morning presentation in San Francisco? Fly there the night before so you can get comfortable, rehearse a few times in the shower, and arrive early. As a related side-note, long shower rehearsals are my secret weapon. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve delivered a deal-sealing pitch because I ran through it in the shower a dozen times between belting out renditions of the Aladdin soundtrack that I assume no one can hear.
• Cancel low-priority meetings at times when you know your energy stores will be low. You won’t be maximizing your impact when you’re running on fumes anyway, so better to regroup and replenish.
• If you have a packed schedule with no flexibility, just suck it up and do it. But be sure to spend your next Saturday in introvert-friendly activities to rejuvenate. My girlfriend (also an introvert) and I have a system for this—on Friday afternoon, we flag Saturday as an “introvert day” or a “people day.” If it’s the former, baton down the hatches and get ready for cuddling, Lost marathons, and sushi.
• Speaking of the above, surround yourself with people who get that you have an energy budget. True friends will understand and support—but how can you expect them to understand if you don’t explain? That’s where #4 below comes in.

As a leader, there will sometimes be tension between performance and personal energy management. In the short term, performance has to come first. But remember that by making the time to rejuvenate, you are sacrificing things that matter little in favor of regaining energy to be productive at the things that matter most. That’s what maximizing ROSE is all about.

2) Turn presentations into campfire stories

People are usually surprised when I tell them I’m an introvert. The usual retort is something along the lines of “But you’re not bad at talking to people!” or “What about that presentation you gave in front of like 200 people? You didn’t seem that nervous.” First off, I was probably way more nervous than you think. Second, as mentioned above, the idea that introverts are bad at public speaking is a fallacy. Many of them—including famous introverts like Bill Gates, Barack Obama, and Mahatma Gandhi—are quite good at it. But that doesn’t mean being the center of attention in front of hundreds of people isn’t damn difficult for us!

Bill Gates is both an introvert and respected public speaker (photo credit here)

The biggest risk when presenting as an introvert is retreating into your internal world of ideas. We introverts often want to solidify our ideas inside our own heads before presenting them to the world. This can sometimes lead us to over-prepare and over-formalize our presentations, making the delivery sound robotic, stale, and pre-fabricated. Audiences react to this, and we—having a high propensity for empathy—pick up on it, which makes us more nervous and creates a spiral. And may the gods help us if we lose our place mid-way through a carefully prepared speech.

I plodded along with this approach to public speaking for a couple years before I realized I was thinking about it all wrong. Think back to the most compelling speeches you’ve ever given, and don’t restrict yourself to formal talks. Think of a time that you really got an audience excited about something. Maybe it was telling your favorite pun to a bunch of friends over a beer? Or perhaps telling ghost stories sitting around the campfire? Or convincing a friend to take a class with an amazing professor at college? I’d be willing to bet that your most successful pitches in life happened naturally, with no script, no pre-arranged presentation, and no self-consciousness from you.

For me, I think back to a time in high school when I was a huge ancient history nerd. Before I pivoted in college and decided to spend my life working on clean energy, I knew everything there was to know about ancient Greek military history in the 5th Century BCE. The tactics, weapons, and human drama of the period enthralled me. (Turns out they provide some useful management lessons too.) I used to stick my head in a book for hours, then emerge excited to tell the first person I saw all about it. Unfortunately for her, that was usually my mother. My mom is a very smart lady, but she is neither an academic nor much of a history buff, and we used to sit around the fire pit back in Iowa on summer nights with me prattling on about hoplites and phalanx formations and the Battle of Thermopylae. Here’s the kicker: I actually got her excited about it. She couldn’t care less about how the rise of the Athenian agrarian class affected infantry tactics, but she says to this day that the passion and energy with which the ideas would pour out of me made her want to live in that world and hear those stories for a while. That is the essence of presenting successfully as an introvert.

These situations aren’t so different when you adjust your mindset (photo credits here and here)

Whenever I give a formal talk, I pretend I’m sitting around a campfire with friends sharing something that I’m passionate about. The old trick of imagining your audience in their underwear gets it all wrong: your goal isn’t to de-humanize your listeners, it’s to relate to them on a personal level without formality getting in the way. In other words, don’t retreat into your internal world of ideas—tap into that world and share it naturally and conversationally with your audience using genuine excitement. There are three specific ways we can do this:

1. Structure and content: Don’t think about the presentation as “something I just have to get through.” Think of it as an opportunity to share with smart people something that you are passionate about. Your internal thesis statement should be something like “Here is this thing that excites me. I know quite a bit about it, so I’m going to share it with you and see what you think.” Stay away from thoughts about what could go wrong or what happens if an audience member knows more than you. The goal here isn’t perfection, it’s audience engagement. You’d be surprised how thinking this way changes the way you build presentations.
2. Preparation: There is such a thing as over-preparing. It’s usually better to resist the urge to use a script. Instead, I run through the presentation in full 3-6 times before presenting, ideally at least a couple of times in front of a friendly audience. If any parts trip me up, I run through them several more times. I remember how I worded things and pick the renditions that I liked, then keep those in my back pocket. If I’ve practiced enough, my mind will access them automatically without sounding stale.
3. Tone: Not everyone can deliver a rousing soliloquy in the vein of Obama or MLK. My experience with introverts is that we are more at home speaking candidly about our interests than trying to charm the audience into applause. In other words, our passion is our charisma. In practice, this means it’s okay to adopt an informal, conversational tone. Be honest, upfront, and humble in how you present. You may not win any Oscars, but you will often build more trust and confidence than more melodramatic orators this way. As introverts, perhaps our greatest strength is being genuine, so we should use it to our advantage.

A good (though nowhere near the best) example of putting these pieces together is this talk I gave about SparkFund at Yale. You can be your own judge of how successful it was, but empirically at least, it has generated significant interest from potential customers, partners, and job applicants.

Some of the principles I apply here are:

In terms of structure, the whole presentation is built around sharing things I’m excited about with the audience. Whether it’s specific software we’ve built or anecdotes from my past jobs, the main thrust is “hey, look at all this cool stuff we built!” rather than a more aggressive “here’s why we’re awesome and why you should care.” I focus on showing rather than telling, which lets the audience draw their own conclusions about whether SparkFund is awesome.

The talk is largely unscripted and conversational. Note also that I avoid using text-heavy slides so that I don’t give into the temptation to simply read from the slide (and also because text-heavy slides are an eyesore and almost universally make presentations worse, regardless of your personality type). I practiced this presentation about 5 times, including once immediately beforehand.

As a formal talk at a business school, this talk ran the risk of becoming too stuffy in tone, so I tried to take immediate steps to connect with the audience. One or two jokes or funny anecdotes can do wonders to that end (bear hugging the introducer doesn’t hurt either). But one thing I’ve learned the hard way: regardless of personality type, half of your jokes will bomb. As introverts, we take it harder than your average extrovert. So if you’re going to try the humor route, structure the jokes in such a way that you don’t have a chance to flail. Instead of building up to a punch line and then waiting awkwardly for some laughter, just tell a funny story and let the laughs come if they may. Self-deprecating humor is a solid choice too. At best, it gets some chuckles. At worst, and contrary to how it may appear on the surface, it helps establish your credibility by convincing the audience that you have no intention of putting up any facades of exaggerated expertise.

3) Quiet is a resource

Silence is powerful. As introverts, we realize this naturally where others may not. That makes our introversion not just a personal attribute to be managed, but a resource to be harnessed.

I have a theory that silence is like darkness. A woman walking through the jungle with a torch can bring light into a dark place, but she can’t bring dark into a light place. The only way to return the darkness is to turn down the light. And sometimes—like in the darkness of the jungle—the really interesting things only come out in the calm of silence.

One of our skills as introverted leaders is to make room for that silence. There is very practical reason why this is powerful: it provides space for ideas to emerge. It creates an incentive to speak up only when we have a meaningful contribution,

and to listen quietly if we don’t. It encourages people to digest what is being said before responding, instead of issuing an immediate retort for the sake of argument. Most importantly, it creates a gap in the conversation where everyone is equal—where, regardless of seniority level or personality type, everyone is free to express an idea. What’s the point of having a team if leaders spend the bulk of their time filling the silence with their own thoughts? As a leader, I make it a goal to spend 20% of my time talking and 80% of my time cultivating silence so that the best ideas of my team can rise to the top.

My co-founder and partner at SparkFund and I have had some great conversations about this. He is so extraverted that, in his own words, “it’s like someone pushed my personality lever so far toward ‘extravert’ that it broke off and got stuck.” In fact, most of our management team is extraverted. But we also recognize the power of a balanced team that can approach problems with different backgrounds, skills, and emotional profiles. We build consideration for where each person falls in the introvert <> extrovert spectrum into many of our internal conversations and hiring decisions. It’s like the team of rivals concept extended to personality type, with a focus on achieving team diversity on a much deeper personal level. You might call it “worldview diversity,” and it’s been a major force in shaping how we build cohesive teams.

4) Naming it is half the battle

We introverts have brains that place a large premium on quiet contemplation, intimate one-on-one or one-on-few interactions, and “free time” that is free in the truest sense. It’s when we do our best thinking. It’s important to our general sense of well-being and, even more so, our professional success. We’re fortunate to live in a world that is starting to ask interesting question about the introvert/extrovert dynamic—particularly questions around how we structure work, school, and play environments to provide opportunities tailored to each group. The most exciting trend to emerge is an increasing acceptance and appreciation for the introverted mode of thinking in group settings.

I think the most important thing we can do as introverted leaders is to own our personality type. I’ve run an interesting experiment in my own life recently. I’ve started discussing my introversion more openly with family and some close friends

and colleagues, and I’ve found the results to be universally fantastic. I find the occasional acquaintance who doesn’t get it or thinks I’m just making excuses for being “shy,” but a bit of education usually does the trick. It’s liberating and empowering to acknowledge your nature in that way. It helps others understand your behaviors, and it frees you up to be who you actually are, which I find infinitely more enjoyable and effective than burying it.

It seems to me we are entering an era of introverted leaders, both in the literal sense of more leadership types finding a foothold in board rooms, but also in terms of social acceptance. Now is a better time than any for us to own who we are and leverage it for the better.

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Joe Indvik is Co-Founder, President, & COO of SparkFund, an energy efficiency finance company that provides streamlined financing for small and medium size projects. The company launched in February 2014 and has grown rapidly to a team of 15. Somewhat unusually for the finance world, Joe has an INFP personality type.