To get ahead in business you need to be loud, brash and have an overwhelming confidence in your own, often slim, talents. That, at least, is the message of The Apprentice.
But its message causes many experts to despair. "I think it personifies that cut-throat, succeed-at-all-costs [idea] that you have to be bigger, better, faster than your colleagues to succeed," says Beth Buelow, an American author, life coach and self-confessed introvert, whose new book The Introvert Entrepreneur is published this week. "If some people think this is what entrepreneurship is about, they're getting a very small side of the story," she says of The Apprentice.
We should spend less time admiring the bluster of Lord Sugar or Richard Branson, she argues, and invest a little more energy into analysing why Bill Gates, Warren Buffet and JK Rowling have become far wealthier and far more successful - while often working on their own and rarely raising their voices.
Her book is an attempt to help introverts in the increasingly noisy business world. Because if you are someone who struggles to cope in large groups, how do you get your ideas across in a meeting? How do you network with enthusiasm and confidence?
At times, the book - which promises you can “create success on your own terms in 10 steps” - reads like a self-help manual, complete with inspirational quotations from Herodotus and Japanese proverbs. But in America, the power of introverts is gaining increasing air-time. There are countless introvert life coaches, academic studies into introversion, even introvert dating advisors. And some of it is cropping up in the United Kingdom too, with a number of introvert coaches setting up business here in recent years.
Susan Cain, a former New York corporate lawyer, is partly responsible for igniting that interest. Her book Quiet, written in 2012, became an international best-seller, and her TED talk of the same year has been watched more than 12 million times. In it, she made an impassioned plea for the world to take notice of the estimated one third of the population who are introverts. These people are often more creative, more thoughtful and make far better bosses and political leaders, she argued. It struck a nerve.
Yet introversion is not the same as shyness. “Introversion and extroversion have to do with energy,” says Buelow. “It’s really about how we gain and drain energy. An introvert will gain energy through quiet and solitude and lower stimulation environments, and drain energy during social interaction and higher stimulation environments. Shyness is about social anxiety. You can have a shy extrovert who needs people, but it might be the same people all the time.”
In simple terms, introverts work best in quiet environments, which is difficult in an increasingly shouty world. Most modern offices tend to be open-plan, and even schools now encourage children to work in groups.
Indeed the world, as Buelow sees it, favours extroverts from the very start. “We are looking for our kids - from the moment they can walk and talk - to be social. If they are quiet, we are worried about them. And as we grow up, we prize people who seem open and friendly and [who] talk,” she says. “They are more transparent. We know what we are getting.“
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Advertise with NZME.We view people who are quieter, or silent, with a little bit of suspicion. Silence is not comfortable for most people, but for us introverts it’s our preferred state. It’s our natural habitat.”
Quietness and solitude are not natural bedfellows of entrepreneurship. Nearly all the advice given to aspiring entrepreneurs is aimed at confident extroverts, as good at selling their idea as coming up with the idea in the first place, says Buelow. “But if I don’t want to be out networking every week, if I don’t see myself as that traditional, super-outgoing sales person, what’s left? How do I approach it in a way that doesn’t make me feel gross?”
The worst thing an introvert can do is to fake it, she warns. But she insists you can learn these skills. “Part of it is practice, part of it is really being clear on the why of what you are doing. So, when I pick up the phone to call, say, a potential investor, I have to keep in mind it’s about the business. It’s not about me,” she says.
Cold-calling is a common fear shared by introverts. So, too, networking. Many people who set up a business find that attending conferences or trade fairs are an indispensable activity to market their fledgling ideas. But for an introvert, this is like walking into Hades.
Buelow advises: “Go in with real low expectations. Having one good conversation can be a success. Oftentimes it’s good to say you are going to go into an event for just 20 minutes. And if you feel like leaving after 20 minutes, leave. But often after 20 minutes you have warmed up to the room, and you often end up staying, thinking ‘this isn’t so bad’. It’s a mixture of planning, the right mindset, and practising.”
It can be tricky, however, when the most famous businessmen and entrepreneurs tend to be the loudest, brashest ones.
Julia Barnickle, from Surrey, who runs the Quiet Entrepreneur business coaching company, says: “It’s very difficult to find role models. One of the best examples is Warren Buffett. He’s one of the richest men in the world, but he’s very much in the background.” The 85-year-old American investor, whose nickname is the Sage of Omaha, became the world’s third richest man after making a series of counter-intuitive bets on the stock markets.
“If you are successful as an introvert entrepreneur, you are not the sort of person to stand on the street corner shouting about it,”says Barnickle.
But Buelow points out that alongside Buffett, there are plenty of other highly successful introverts: Bill Gates, Mark Zuckerberg of Facebook and Larry Page of Google, to name but a few.
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Advertise with NZME.Anne Lewis, a British leadership coach who specialises in introverts, adds: "If you look at companies like Apple then you have Steve Jobs, who was the face of the organisation, but you also have Steve Wozniak, who was the brains behind the scenes, and he was a deep introvert." Wozniak, played to great reviews by Seth Rogen in the Steve Jobs film, is now acknowledged to be the real genius behind Apple's early computers.
It is not just introverted entrepreneurs who struggle in such a noisy world. Office workers, too, can find it hard to succeed in a culture of group brainstorming activities and endless self-promotion. Buelow articulates all that introverts hate about so much of modern office life: “The open office plans, the no-doors, the endless meetings, the idea that talking equals participation or contribution.”
Office meetings, in particular, can disadvantage introverts. “Introverts tend to analyse things. We like to think about things before committing to commenting,” says Barnickle. “In team meetings, or group situations, introverts think, ‘I’d love to say something, but I can’t get a word in edgeways’. If people are not aware of this dimension to introverts, they get overlooked.”
Susan Cain, who is now a full-time speaker and consultant, has recently designed a series of office furniture to solve this problem. Reminiscent of the era of Mad Men, it injects a little privacy into otherwise very public spaces. The different glass boxes include details such as dimmable lights, sofas and meeting rooms for just two people.
Buelow insists she, and the other introvert experts, are not calling for special treatment. But an office that takes into account the introverts will be a happier and more productive one.
She says: “It’s about creating an environment for sharing ideas that is not all about who can talk first, who can talk loudest, who can talk fastest.”
The Daily Telegraph
