Quiet: The Power Of Introverts In A World That Can't Stop Talking Part 7

Contemporary ads aimed at businesspeople would give the Williams Luxury Shaving Cream ads of yesteryear a run for their money. One line of TV commercials that ran on CNBC, the cable business channel, featured an office worker losing out on a plum a.s.signment.

BOSS TO TED AND ALICE. Ted, I'm sending Alice to the sales conference because she thinks faster on her feet than you.

TED. (speechless) ...

BOSS. So, Alice, we'll send you on Thursday-

TED. She does not!

Other ads explicitly sell their products as extroversion-enhancers. In 2000, Amtrak encouraged travelers to "DEPART FROM YOUR INHIBITIONS." Nike became a prominent brand partly on the strength of its "Just Do It" campaign. And in 1999 and 2000, a series of ads for the psychotropic drug Paxil promised to cure the extreme shyness known as "social anxiety disorder" by offering Cinderella stories of personality transformation. One Paxil ad showed a well-dressed executive shaking hands over a business deal. "I can taste success," read the caption. Another showed what happens without the drug: a businessman alone in his office, his forehead resting dejectedly on a clenched fist. "I should have joined in more often," it read.

Yet even at Harvard Business School there are signs that something might be wrong with a leaders.h.i.+p style that values quick and a.s.sertive answers over quiet, slow decision-making.

Every autumn the incoming cla.s.s partic.i.p.ates in an elaborate role-playing game called the Subarctic Survival Situation. "It is approximately 2:30 p.m., October 5," the students are told, "and you have just crash-landed in a float plane on the east sh.o.r.e of Laura Lake in the subarctic region of the northern Quebec-Newfoundland border." The students are divided into small groups and asked to imagine that their group has salvaged fifteen items from the plane-a compa.s.s, sleeping bag, axe, and so on. Then they're told to rank them in order of importance to the group's survival. First the students rank the items individually; then they do so as a team. Next they score those rankings against an expert's to see how well they did. Finally they watch a videotape of their team's discussions to see what went right-or wrong.

The point of the exercise is to teach group synergy. Successful synergy means a higher ranking for the team than for its individual members. The group fails when any of its members has a better ranking than the overall team. And failure is exactly what can happen when students prize a.s.sertiveness too highly.

One of Don's cla.s.smates was in a group lucky to include a young man with extensive experience in the northern backwoods. He had a lot of good ideas about how to rank the fifteen salvaged items. But his group didn't listen, because he expressed his views too quietly.

"Our action plan hinged on what the most vocal people suggested," recalls the cla.s.smate. "When the less vocal people put out ideas, those ideas were discarded. The ideas that were rejected would have kept us alive and out of trouble, but they were dismissed because of the conviction with which the more vocal people suggested their ideas. Afterwards they played us back the videotape, and it was so embarra.s.sing."

The Subarctic Survival Situation may sound like a harmless game played inside the ivory tower, but if you think of meetings you've attended, you can probably recall a time-plenty of times-when the opinion of the most dynamic or talkative person prevailed to the detriment of all. Perhaps it was a low-stakes situation-your PTA, say, deciding whether to meet on Monday or Tuesday nights. But maybe it was important: an emergency meeting of Enron's top bra.s.s, considering whether or not to disclose questionable accounting practices. (See chapter 7 for more on Enron.) Or a jury deliberating whether or not to send a single mother to jail.

I discussed the Subarctic Survival Situation with HBS professor Quinn Mills, an expert on leaders.h.i.+p styles. Mills is a courteous man dressed, on the day we met, in a pinstriped suit and yellow polka-dot tie. He has a sonorous voice, and uses it skillfully. The HBS method "presumes that leaders should be vocal," he told me flat out, "and in my view that's part of reality."

But Mills also pointed to the common phenomenon known as the "winner's curse," in which two companies bid compet.i.tively to acquire a third, until the price climbs so high that it becomes less an economic activity than a war of egos. The winning bidders will be d.a.m.ned if they'll let their opponents get the prize, so they buy the target company at an inflated price. "It tends to be the a.s.sertive people who carry the day in these kinds of things," says Mills. "You see this all the time. People ask, 'How did this happen, how did we pay so much?' Usually it's said that they were carried away by the situation, but that's not right. Usually they're carried away by people who are a.s.sertive and domineering. The risk with our students is that they're very good at getting their way. But that doesn't mean they're going the right way."

If we a.s.sume that quiet and loud people have roughly the same number of good (and bad) ideas, then we should worry if the louder and more forceful people always carry the day. This would mean that an awful lot of bad ideas prevail while good ones get squashed. Yet studies in group dynamics suggest that this is exactly what happens. We perceive talkers as smarter than quiet types-even though grade-point averages and SAT and intelligence test scores reveal this perception to be inaccurate. In one experiment in which two strangers met over the phone, those who spoke more were considered more intelligent, better looking, and more likable. We also see talkers as leaders. The more a person talks, the more other group members direct their attention to him, which means that he becomes increasingly powerful as a meeting goes on. It also helps to speak fast; we rate quick talkers as more capable and appealing than slow talkers.

All of this would be fine if more talking were correlated with greater insight, but research suggests that there's no such link. In one study, groups of college students were asked to solve math problems together and then to rate one another's intelligence and judgment. The students who spoke first and most often were consistently given the highest ratings, even though their suggestions (and math SAT scores) were no better than those of the less talkative students. These same students were given similarly high ratings for their creativity and a.n.a.lytical powers during a separate exercise to develop a business strategy for a start-up company.

A well-known study out of UC Berkeley by organizational behavior professor Philip Tetlock found that television pundits-that is, people who earn their livings by holding forth confidently on the basis of limited information-make worse predictions about political and economic trends than they would by random chance. And the very worst prognosticators tend to be the most famous and the most confident-the very ones who would be considered natural leaders in an HBS cla.s.sroom.

The U.S. Army has a name for a similar phenomenon: "the Bus to Abilene." "Any army officer can tell you what that means," Colonel (Ret.) Stephen J. Gerras, a professor of behavioral sciences at the U.S. Army War College, told Yale Alumni Magazine in 2008. "It's about a family sitting on a porch in Texas on a hot summer day, and somebody says, 'I'm bored. Why don't we go to Abilene?' When they get to Abilene, somebody says, 'You know, I didn't really want to go.' And the next person says, 'I didn't want to go-I thought you wanted to go,' and so on. Whenever you're in an army group and somebody says, 'I think we're all getting on the bus to Abilene here,' that is a red flag. You can stop a conversation with it. It is a very powerful artifact of our culture."

The "Bus to Abilene" anecdote reveals our tendency to follow those who initiate action-any action. We are similarly inclined to empower dynamic speakers. One highly successful venture capitalist who is regularly pitched by young entrepreneurs told me how frustrated he is by his colleagues' failure to distinguish between good presentation skills and true leaders.h.i.+p ability. "I worry that there are people who are put in positions of authority because they're good talkers, but they don't have good ideas," he said. "It's so easy to confuse schmoozing ability with talent. Someone seems like a good presenter, easy to get along with, and those traits are rewarded. Well, why is that? They're valuable traits, but we put too much of a premium on presenting and not enough on substance and critical thinking."

In his book Iconoclast, the neuroeconomist Gregory Berns explores what happens when companies rely too heavily on presentation skills to weed out good ideas from nonstarters. He describes a software company called Rite-Solutions that successfully asks employees to share ideas through an online "idea market," as a way of focusing on substance rather than style. Joe Marino, president of Rite-Solutions, and Jim Lavoie, CEO of the company, created this system as a reaction to problems they'd experienced elsewhere. "In my old company," Lavoie told Berns, "if you had a great idea, we would tell you, 'OK, we'll make an appointment for you to address the murder board' "-a group of people charged with vetting new ideas. Marino described what happened next:

Some technical guy comes in with a good idea. Of course questions are asked of that person that they don't know. Like, "How big's the market? What's your marketing approach? What's your business plan for this? What's the product going to cost?" It's embarra.s.sing. Most people can't answer those kinds of questions. The people who made it through these boards were not the people with the best ideas. They were the best presenters.

Contrary to the Harvard Business School model of vocal leaders.h.i.+p, the ranks of effective CEOs turn out to be filled with introverts, including Charles Schwab; Bill Gates; Brenda Barnes, CEO of Sara Lee; and James Copeland, former CEO of Deloitte Touche Tohmatsu. "Among the most effective leaders I have encountered and worked with in half a century," the management guru Peter Drucker has written, "some locked themselves into their office and others were ultra-gregarious. Some were quick and impulsive, while others studied the situation and took forever to come to a decision.... The one and only personality trait the effective ones I have encountered did have in common was something they did not have: they had little or no 'charisma' and little use either for the term or what it signifies." Supporting Drucker's claim, Brigham Young University management professor Bradley Agle studied the CEOs of 128 major companies and found that those considered charismatic by their top executives had bigger salaries but not better corporate performance.

We tend to overestimate how outgoing leaders need to be. "Most leading in a corporation is done in small meetings and it's done at a distance, through written and video communications," Professor Mills told me. "It's not done in front of big groups. You have to be able to do some of that; you can't be a leader of a corporation and walk into a room full of a.n.a.lysts and turn white with fear and leave. But you don't have to do a whole lot of it. I've known a lot of leaders of corporations who are highly introspective and who really have to make themselves work to do the public stuff."

Mills points to Lou Gerstner, the legendary chairman of IBM. "He went to school here," he says. "I don't know how he'd characterize himself. He has to give big speeches, and he does, and he looks calm. But my sense is that he's dramatically more comfortable in small groups. Many of these guys are, actually. Not all of them. But an awful lot of them."

Indeed, according to a famous study by the influential management theorist Jim Collins, many of the best-performing companies of the late twentieth century were run by what he calls "Level 5 Leaders." These exceptional CEOs were known not for their flash or charisma but for extreme humility coupled with intense professional will. In his influential book Good to Great, Collins tells the story of Darwin Smith, who in his twenty years as head of Kimberly-Clark turned it into the leading paper company in the world and generated stock returns more than four times higher than the market average.

Smith was a shy and mild-mannered man who wore J.C. Penney suits and nerdy black-rimmed gla.s.ses, and spent his vacations puttering around his Wisconsin farm by himself. Asked by a Wall Street Journal reporter to describe his management style, Smith stared back for an uncomfortably long time and answered with a single word: "Eccentric." But his soft demeanor concealed a fierce resolve. Soon after being appointed CEO, Smith made a dramatic decision to sell the mills that produced the company's core business of coated paper and invest instead in the consumer-paper-products industry, which he believed had better economics and a brighter future. Everyone said this was a huge mistake, and Wall Street downgraded Kimberly-Clark's stock. But Smith, unmoved by the crowd, did what he thought was right. As a result, the company grew stronger and soon outpaced its rivals. Asked later about his strategy, Smith replied that he never stopped trying to become qualified for the job.

Collins hadn't set out to make a point about quiet leaders.h.i.+p. When he started his research, all he wanted to know was what characteristics made a company outperform its compet.i.tion. He selected eleven standout companies to research in depth. Initially he ignored the question of leaders.h.i.+p altogether, because he wanted to avoid simplistic answers. But when he a.n.a.lyzed what the highest-performing companies had in common, the nature of their CEOs jumped out at him. Every single one of them was led by an una.s.suming man like Darwin Smith. Those who worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following words: quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, understated.

The lesson, says Collins, is clear. We don't need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the inst.i.tutions they run.

So what do introverted leaders do differently from-and sometimes better than-extroverts?

One answer comes from the work of Wharton management professor Adam Grant, who has spent considerable time consulting with Fortune 500 executives and military leaders-from Google to the U.S. Army and Navy. When we first spoke, Grant was teaching at the Ross School of Business at the University of Michigan, where he'd become convinced that the existing research, which showed a correlation between extroversion and leaders.h.i.+p, didn't tell the whole story.

Grant told me about a wing commander in the U.S. Air Force-one rank below general, in command of thousands of people, charged with protecting a high-security missile base-who was one of the most cla.s.sically introverted people, as well as one of the finest leaders, Grant had ever met. This man lost focus when he interacted too much with people, so he carved out time for thinking and recharging. He spoke quietly, without much variation in his vocal inflections or facial expressions. He was more interested in listening and gathering information than in a.s.serting his opinion or dominating a conversation.

He was also widely admired; when he spoke, everyone listened. This was not necessarily remarkable-if you're at the top of the military hierarchy, people are supposed to listen to you. But in the case of this commander, says Grant, people respected not just his formal authority, but also the way he led: by supporting his employees' efforts to take the initiative. He gave subordinates input into key decisions, implementing the ideas that made sense, while making it clear that he had the final authority. He wasn't concerned with getting credit or even with being in charge; he simply a.s.signed work to those who could perform it best. This meant delegating some of his most interesting, meaningful, and important tasks-work that other leaders would have kept for themselves.

Why did the research not reflect the talents of people like the wing commander? Grant thought he knew what the problem was. First, when he looked closely at the existing studies on personality and leaders.h.i.+p, he found that the correlation between extroversion and leaders.h.i.+p was modest. Second, these studies were often based on people's perceptions of who made a good leader, as opposed to actual results. And personal opinions are often a simple reflection of cultural bias.

But most intriguing to Grant was that the existing research didn't differentiate among the various kinds of situations a leader might face. It might be that certain organizations or contexts were better suited to introverted leaders.h.i.+p styles, he thought, and others to extroverted approaches, but the studies didn't make such distinctions.

Grant had a theory about which kinds of circ.u.mstances would call for introverted leaders.h.i.+p. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are pa.s.sive, but that introverted leaders are more effective with proactive employees. To test his idea, he and two colleagues, professors Francesca Gino of Harvard Business School and David Hofman of the Kenan-Flagler Business School at the University of North Carolina, carried out a pair of studies of their own.

In the first study, Grant and his colleagues a.n.a.lyzed data from one of the five biggest pizza chains in the United States. They discovered that the weekly profits of the stores managed by extroverts were 16 percent higher than the profits of those led by introverts-but only when the employees were pa.s.sive types who tended to do their job without exercising initiative. Introverted leaders had the exact opposite results. When they worked with employees who actively tried to improve work procedures, their stores outperformed those led by extroverts by more than 14 percent.

In the second study, Grant's team divided 163 college students into competing teams charged with folding as many T-s.h.i.+rts as possible in ten minutes. Unbeknownst to the partic.i.p.ants, each team included two actors. In some teams, the two actors acted pa.s.sively, following the leader's instructions. In other teams, one of the actors said, "I wonder if there's a more efficient way to do this." The other actor replied that he had a friend from j.a.pan who had a faster way to fold s.h.i.+rts. "It might take a minute or two to teach you," the actor told the leader, "but do we want to try it?"

The results were striking. The introverted leaders were 20 percent more likely to follow the suggestion-and their teams had 24 percent better results than the teams of the extroverted leaders. When the followers were not proactive, though-when they simply did as the leader instructed without suggesting their own s.h.i.+rt-folding methods-the teams led by extroverts outperformed those led by the introverts by 22 percent.

Why did these leaders' effectiveness turn on whether their employees were pa.s.sive or proactive? Grant says it makes sense that introverts are uniquely good at leading initiative-takers. Because of their inclination to listen to others and lack of interest in dominating social situations, introverts are more likely to hear and implement suggestions. Having benefited from the talents of their followers, they are then likely to motivate them to be even more proactive. Introverted leaders create a virtuous circle of proactivity, in other words. In the T-s.h.i.+rt-folding study, the team members reported perceiving the introverted leaders as more open and receptive to their ideas, which motivated them to work harder and to fold more s.h.i.+rts.

Extroverts, on the other hand, can be so intent on putting their own stamp on events that they risk losing others' good ideas along the way and allowing workers to lapse into pa.s.sivity. "Often the leaders end up doing a lot of the talking," says Francesca Gino, "and not listening to any of the ideas that the followers are trying to provide." But with their natural ability to inspire, extroverted leaders are better at getting results from more pa.s.sive workers.

This line of research is still in its infancy. But under the auspices of Grant-an especially proactive fellow himself-it may grow quickly. (One of his colleagues has described Grant as the kind of person who "can make things happen twenty-eight minutes before they're scheduled to begin.") Grant is especially excited about the implications of these findings because proactive employees who take advantage of opportunities in a fast-moving, 24/7 business environment, without waiting for a leader to tell them what to do, are increasingly vital to organizational success. To understand how to maximize these employees' contributions is an important tool for all leaders. It's also important for companies to groom listeners as well as talkers for leaders.h.i.+p roles.

The popular press, says Grant, is full of suggestions that introverted leaders practice their public speaking skills and smile more. But Grant's research suggests that in at least one important regard-encouraging employees to take initiative-introverted leaders would do well to go on doing what they do naturally. Extroverted leaders, on the other hand, "may wish to adopt a more reserved, quiet style," Grant writes. They may want to learn to sit down so that others might stand up.

Which is just what a woman named Rosa Parks did naturally.