If you’re like me, at some point you’ve looked at the charismatic person in the room and assumed that’s what leadership is supposed to look like.
And your bosses told you to be more confident. Speak up more. Push yourself out of your comfort zone.
If you’re an introvert, you know what that advice usually means: be more extroverted.
My guest this week, Joanna Rawbone, followed that advice for almost two decades.
She worked in learning and development, training and coaching inside organizations around the world. The people who seemed most successful were often the big-personality extroverts. So she studied them and copied them.
It worked — until it didn’t.
Burnout eventually brought her to the point where she couldn’t keep compromising who she was. That’s when she started looking at authentic leadership as a real way to lead, rather than just another phrase people use.
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The moment that set her current work in motion happened in a training room in Doha.
She was helping a group of Qatari professionals learn to work as a team, and she saw the same pattern she’d seen almost everywhere else.
The quiet people with their heads down, doing great work, were the ones who kept getting overlooked and undervalued.
Joanna got mad. She told me it was about as angry as she’d ever let herself get in a public setting.
Then she went away and started thinking about what it would take for introverts to get a fair shot without having to pretend to be someone else.
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A director of communications once said something to her that stayed with her:
“It seems that the extroversion bias is the last acceptable bias.”
Joanna’s answer to that bias isn’t to get louder. It’s to put things in a different order:
Credibility first. Visibility second.
Years ago, she was building an influencing-skills game with a colleague. He assumed you’d go for visibility first and worry about credibility later.
She was horrified.
For her, it’s the other way around. Build trust. Know your material. Prepare. Then step into the spotlight.
I suspect a lot of introverts will recognize that order immediately.
Credibility only helps if people can see it, though.
Joanna calls this showcasing, not showing off.
If you wrote the paper, your name goes on it, and you present it. You don’t hand it to the colleague who likes being up front.
She also uses a small pre-frame that I really liked:
“One of the things I found when working on this piece was…”
It makes clear that you did the work. It moves the conversation forward. And it puts the focus on what you found or changed, rather than simply announcing that you did something.
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There’s another change she’s made that I’ve been thinking about.
She used to apologize for being quiet. Now, when someone points it out, she says:
“Thank you for noticing. One of my real strengths is noticing what’s not being said, and I do that much better when I’m quiet.”
I like that because she isn’t trying to defend being quiet. She’s naming something she’s good at.
Joanna is careful about that word, too. A strength isn’t just something you’re good at. It’s something you’re good at and enjoy doing.
She remembers a boss at British Telecom who would list her “strengths” in performance reviews and then move straight on to her weaknesses.
What he was actually listing were her competencies.
He never asked what she loved.
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She also changed how I think about the comfort zone.
“Nothing good happens in your comfort zone” isn’t really true.
That’s where you’re competent without having to think too hard about it. There’s value in that.
Just past it is the competency zone, where you have to concentrate. Past that is what she calls the learning edge. It’s uncomfortable, but you can stay there and keep working. Over time, that can widen your comfort zone.
You don’t need to throw yourself into fear and anxiety to grow.
We also talked about energy management in a back-to-back meeting culture, including her “brilliant battery boosters” and why some of her clients now start meetings at ten past the hour.
We talked about why psychological safety has to be built together with each person on your team rather than simply handed out.
And we talked about how to get executives to pay attention to extroversion bias by talking about ROI and attrition.
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One of the things I appreciated about this conversation is that Joanna isn’t asking introverts to become better at pretending to be extroverts.
She’s asking a different question: How do you make sure the way you naturally operate doesn’t prevent other people from seeing what you’re capable of?
If you’ve been quietly doing excellent work and wondering why no one notices, I think you’ll get a lot out of this episode.
Give it a listen.
Connect with Joanna:
Website
YouTube (Business)
YouTube (Becoming)
Resources for Audience
Children’s Book for Introverts