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Clancy, A. 2019. The Quiet Ones: Valuing Introverts in Your Business. Sunday Business Post, 3 March, p.19.The Quiet Ones: Valuing Introverts in Your BusinessOffice work favours extroverts and team workers, but don’t dismiss people who are wired to think and work differentlyWhat do former US president Barack Obama, former first lady and activist Eleanor Roosevelt, novelists JK Rowling and JM Barrie, film director Steven Spielberg, and physicists Isaac Newton and Albert Einstein have in common? They are (or were) introverts. Without introverts the world would be without Harry Potter, Peter Pan, Schindler’s list, Close Encounters of the Third Kind, and the theories of gravity and relativity. These achievements were made, not despite their creators’ introversion, butbecause of it. The second thing these introverts have in common is that each of them would have a tough time working in contemporary office environments, most of which are designed around the needs of extroverts. There is no one definition of introverts and extroverts, but there are several areas of agreement among psychologists.Extroverts and introverts differ in relation to how much external stimulation they need in order to function well. For example, extroverts love the buzz of group work. They love being part of a crowd and get incredible amounts of energy from bouncing ideas around. Introverts prefer less external stimulation and work better with quiet concentration. They like to think before they speak and they tend to listen rather than speak in a group. They also have excellent powers of concentration. Very often they will remain silent during a meeting and then at the last minute they will come in with a profound contribution to the discussion.Introverts are not shy (shyness is fear of social judgment, whereas introversion is a preference for less external stimulation). Approximately 30 per cent of people are introverts, another 30 per cent are extraverts and the remainder are somewhere in the middle (ambiverts). Introverts get a bad press. Very often they are considered anti-social, apathetic, too quiet, not a team player. Their solitude and need for quiet is often misunderstood in a workplace that privileges extroverted skills such as public speaking.From childhood to adulthood, most of our institutions are designed to facilitate the needs of extroverts. As children, our classrooms are arranged for group learning; children are encouraged to speak up and to perform; to solve problems togetherand to learn how to collaborate and cooperate. Research tells us that a majority of teachers believe that the ideal student is an extrovert. Of course, all of these skills are useful, but so too is the ability to be alone, to rely on one’s own resources, to read a book cover to cover, to be a self-starter and to work on a solo project. These are the areas in which introverts excel, yet these skills are discouraged from the moment we begin school until we enter the contemporary corporation.Businesses champion open-plan design for the benefits of teamwork and creativity. If you can see your colleagues then you are more likely to pick their brains, share ideas and benefit from the mantra that ‘two heads are better than one’. That may work for extroverts, but for introverts, open-plan offices are simply overwhelming.Introverts need quiet spaces in which to think. Constant noise, chatter, phones and the pinging of email creates distractions that reduce work output and increase stress and burnout in talented people.Introverts are not ill or suffering from some kind of social anxiety; it’s just the way they are wired. Introverts need time away from the busyness - so that solitary lunch you see them taking isn’t an anti-social move. It’s a necessary private decompression from the noise of the workplace.If you are an employer and your business design is primarily organised around the needs of extroverts, you are wasting money, energy and a lot of talent by not tapping into the creativity and resources of the introverts in your company. It may be time to rethink the physical space and the taken-for-granted wisdom that groups are better than individual approaches to learning and working. Doing that means striking at the heart of many taken-for-granted approaches to getting work done in organisations.For example: are meetings really necessary? And are they the best way of making decisions? Introverts are more likely to come back to you after the meeting with their thoughts or responses rather than making them in the meeting. Alternatively, allocate time for people to speak and for people to listen (the listening piece is challenging for extroverts). That way, there is time for everyone and introverts are not spoken over.How many team tasks need to be done by a team? Much of what we allocate as a team task could more easily be done by one person (particularly if that person is an introvert). Create a balance between individually focused tasks and group tasks. That way you are harnessing the strengths of both introverts and extroverts. Unless we move the desks around and stop deluding ourselves that brainstorming is the best way of generating new ideas, we will never have room for the next Al Gore, JK Rowling, Chopin or Einstein. Isn’t it about time that we made space for the 30 per cent? ................
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