Extroverts - how art thou?

The world of business and leadership has always been the world of dominant extraversion – ‘charismatic’ ‘go getter’, ‘impactful’, ‘passionate’ are the language used to describe the traits that are valued and have had easy currency to date, and with good reason. Even with such acclaimed works as Jim Collin’s ‘Good to Great’ and ‘Quiet’ by Susan Cain challenging this paradigm, it has by and large remained solidly dominant, though with more understanding and appreciation of the other energetic position.

In conversations with clients over the last month I have been struck by an emerging theme. It has been expressed as ‘how do I work like this?'. 'I am a team player, I get my ideas and am at my best when working closely with others’ and ‘ I’m struggling to find my creativity and my energy stuck at home all day’ ‘I sorely miss the spontaneity of the office, I’m just not at my best’.

In exploring these positions and realities more it becomes apparent that although time (in fact often more time) is being spent communication with colleagues - the flat screen, the lack of spontaneous connection and the energy and sparking that happens face to face is diminishing for those with extroverted preferences - they are left feeling and fearing being less in the virtual world.

The environment is not going to change for many for a while to come.

Once we name something, we immediately have more control, more freedom to explore, more possibilities. Perhaps those of us who are extraverted (I raise my hand), who are now in a world that saps rather than feeds our energy should take stock, rather than wistfully take for granted a workplace and ways of working suited to our nature. Time to get to grips with what we have, our new and extending reality. Our wit, creativity and intelligence remains intact even if frustratingly harder to draw upon; we just need to get smarter about finding new ways of accessing our considerable internal resources even without the usual ease of an unlocked down world.

So how do we create spontaneous sparking and energising connections and conversations, throughout the working day not just through our ‘virtual coffee corners’ and ‘Friday Fun Covidtails’ ? How do we build more action and movement into a world of static screens? How do we build our own energy reserves so we don’t have to be plugged in to others to be switched on?

We might even reflect on the experience that our introverted preference colleagues have of being in a potentially energy draining system dominating in many pre-Covid environments?

Mind you, the current un-boundaried virtual space might be not healthy for our introverted colleagues either……