#403 Introversion and Extraversion in Business
Introversion and Extraversion in Business
an article by Niels Brabandt
People are introverted or extroverted.
Many people are familiar with these aspects or terms. Are you right with these expressions? Unfortunately, you are wrong. Even though the prefix 'extro' is now accepted in spelling, the scientifically correct term is extraversion. With this binary model, however, you are once again not up to date. There are more than two dimensions; it is not a binary model. Secondly, incorrect conclusions are drawn too quickly: extraversion for managers and introversion for specialists. Such decisions are also scientifically untenable. We need more foundation in the discussion and the answer to an important question.
What do introversion and extraversion mean for the organisation?
Foundation
The research here goes back to the first mentions by Carl Jung (1921) in his publications on psychological types. Research by Eyseneck (1967) and DeYoung (2010) provided a good foundation via the Big Five Personality Model, which is still often used today. Studies by Fleeson and Gallagher (2009) and Adam Grant (2013) have shown that there are not only two binary options. Ambiversion refers to people who can display different behaviours depending on the situation. Omniversion has not yet been fully researched. This term represents people who can act across the entire spectrum in any context.
Significance for the organisation
With extraversion, pay particular attention to your communication style. The room can quickly be taken over, and some people don't get a chance to speak at all or too little. Collaboration and cooperation should also be taken into account and should not be seen as a necessary evil. People with extraversion are often strong in customer contact and networking. On the other hand, practising patience is often still more of a learning field here.
For people with high introversion, psychological safety must first be ensured. The concept of psychological safety has emerged in recent years, as introverted people, in particular, have often been the victims of assaults. Allow written input for these people. Whilst training and coaching can significantly improve skills, you don't need to force introverts unnecessarily in front of groups. Above all, grant introverts the Deep Work Needs, the need for focused, concentrated work. It is also important to ensure that people with introversion are also recognised appropriately for success.
In the case of ambiversion, you will often find outstanding mediators. These people also appreciate flexible working structures. As they are often active in many fields, it is important to prevent overload. In organisations, word gets around very quickly when work can be unloaded in one place. Protection is needed here. Finding their natural strengths is often a long journey for people with ambiversion, as they cannot find the right orientation in structures that are often still based on the binary model.
For people with omniversion, allow autonomy above all. Also, self-reflection needs to be strengthened here, as people with omniversion can quickly believe they are good at everything, even if this is false. Dynamic roles are in good hands here, and mentoring programmes can also help, both giving and taking.
You can learn more about these aspects in this week's podcast; see the links below.
Implementation
One question always arises at this point: which positions are particularly suitable for which personality type? I anticipate this question, but I also want to point out that the list only offers a small selection.
People with extraversion are often successful in roles in sales, PR, consulting, event management, often in leadership roles and with a strong customer focus. You will also find them in politics, media, or entertainment.
People with introversion, on the other hand, are often found in research roles where writing down results with a high level of detail plays a role. Data science, engineering professions, often also in the field of strategy and planning show many successful models of these people.
In ambiversion, you will often see roles such as interim and project management, HR, marketing, strategy, teaching, management consulting, PR, coaching or mentoring.
Omniversion is often found in creative fields, consulting, journalism, or roles that strongly focus on innovation.
Conclusion: all roles are valuable. The important aspect is not to copy the wishes of managers or leaders but to appoint the most suitable person for the role, the position, and the job.
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More on this topic in this week's podcast: Apple Podcasts / Spotify
For the podcast transcript, read below.
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Contact: Niels Brabandt on LinkedIn
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Niels Brabandt is an expert in sustainable leadership with more than 20 years of experience in practice and science.
Niels Brabandt: Professional Training, Speaking, Coaching, Consulting, Mentoring, Project & Interim Management. Event host, MC, moderator.
Podcast Transcript
Niels Brabandt
Some people are quite easy when they chat with others and others are not. And Paul, you now think of two terms.
You think of, oh, yeah. Some people are more introverts and others are more extroverts. And this is what we're going to talk about today. However, before we talk about this, I have to I have to get to one point. You probably saw on our social media that for whatever reason, you probably know that I did an MBA, an executive MBA with the University of East London, forty thousand people studying there, and 12 people who 12 people of all the people there are the alumni of the month of all the people who graduated. They are probably a five to six digit amount of people. And for whatever reason, someone put me forward and I became the alumni of the month of February 2025.
I got the news just last week. It all went it went all over social media. So thank you very much for all the congratulations. But also thank you very much for all the support I got from you.
Really appreciate it. So thank you for making this happening. But now let's get back to the topic. We have to talk about the usual terms, you know, here, introverts and extroverts. So first, is this the right term?
And that's the start. No. It is not. We talk about extravorion. I know that extroverts mean well accepted.
Even in writing, you can use that. However, in psychology it's the wrong term. You talk about introversion or extraversion. We're going to use the correct scientific terms here. So is it just introvert, extrovert? No. Wrong. It's extroversion or introversion.
Do we only have these two dimensions? No. We do not. We have more than that. Unfortunately, often people just see two dimensions and then they come to very quick conclusions. Usually you hear, yeah people with extraversion, these are usually leaders. People with introversion are more the people who are better on the subject matter research, more sitting in their office doing the background work and that's also a generalization which is simply wrong.
We need more substantiation. We need more substantiated knowledge, more facts, proof, evidence, science in this discussion. And we also need to know what do these categories mean for business and there are more than two dimensions. So we need to know how many dimensions are there and what they mean for organizations. When we talk about when did this all start, because you might wonder, is this just the thing which was always there or who started with the whole extra intro thing? And it was Carl Jung in 1921 when he wrote about the psychological types. He was the first one publishing about this.
Today, of course, we have more modern approaches. There's a Big Five personality model, which is still often used in assessments and is in different other contexts. Very important here. Not a single psychological test can show you the full personality of a person. You need professionals for that. So be aware that you you cannot choose the right people for the next promotion just by simply making them do a test. When we look into science, how things develop, we have Eisenach's theory of personality in 1967, even strengthening by de Young in 02/2010.
The Fleece and Gallagher band in 02/2009 were the ones who talked about that there are more than two versions, to more than two dimensions. So 02/2009 is pretty pretty young science that we have here. Ellen Grant in 2013 put strong substantiation to that strong scientific backing to MB version. MB version is that people flip between and switch to switch in between the spectrum. So very important is it's not extroverted or introverted and it's switch on off either one or the other.
First, it's a spectrum. And second, ambiversion means that in different contexts, you might behave differently. And that is for but but when I heard that term a bit more than ten years ago, probably fifty, rough roughly twelve, thirteen years ago when it got published, That was the first time where I really found myself finding a home in this model. Because when people told me, oh, you're rather extroverted because you work in consultancy, business management, and you are an interim manager, you also train on a coach, so you're extrovert? No. This is not always correct. In some situations, yes.
But put put me in a room with strangers in a networking event. I know that the answer in The UK to that is, oh, you're a bit shy. The answer is alcohol in The UK. No. Alcohol is not a solution. So I really have different situations where I work differently and many people can relate to that. So for example, if you put me in a room with people who say, oh, we're all speakers.
Speakers, as you know, when someone says I'm a keynote only speaker, the usual person is big ego, very little scientific substantiation to what they claim, big claim with no evidence, usually straightforward nonsense, overpriced service that no one needs. And speaking associations are the epitome of all of that. I don't wanna generalize here. There are some exceptions, but, however, not many. I've been a member of the association. Not many are, and, not not many are an exception to the rule here, especially when it comes to substantiating the knowledge many people have have not a single bit of scientific backing to their name or to their claims. So ambiversion then became one term, which became the third dimension, and omniversion was the fourth dimension.
Omniversion means that you are on the whole spectrum. However, the scientific backing for that is not very strong for it. However, it's a quite young term so there's not much scientific work going on at the moment or has been done in the past so it doesn't mean it doesn't exist. It's just the one with the least amount of scientific backing because some people claim omniversion is just an extreme case of ambivergent. You just switch very quickly on the whole spectrum. So what does that mean for organizations? We need to know when we go into these four categories, extroversion, introversion, ambiversion, omniversion, what does that mean for your organization when you deal with people?
Extroversion probably you know in your organization a couple of people who are quite extroverted. Check your communication style. You very clearly, very quickly can claim the whole room for you and silence others even without you really seeing that you actually do that. Be aware that collaboration is important and that you that you need collaboration when you want to achieve goals together. You're very good at growing your network. You're very good with clients usually due to your extroversion. However, also when you have extroversion, learn patience.
And believe me, that is something which really hit way too close to home for me. I know how impatient I often am regarding certain decision making processes. And learning that kind of patience is enriching my life. The more life experience I have, in other words, the older I get, I I am dealing better with this. So learning how to be patient is a very important part here. When it comes to introversion, the very first thing you have to make sure is psychological safety. It's an important term which was pretty much coined a couple of years ago because now we're delivering ongoing training on it.
So a couple of years ago, no one to talk about it, and then way too many things happen, especially in free enterprise and leadership positions. And then suddenly with all over the place psychological safety and you have to deliver on the promise and of course you have to because when people are introverted very quickly, especially people with extroverted character traits, just walk over them and do worst things sometimes without even recognizing them or without knowing that they did that. Psychological safety is key with introversion. Of course, you have to allow people to put written input in. When you force people and say, well, you are introverted. However, you need to present in front of other people. I force you to do so.
You need to go to that meeting. You need to stand up in front of people. Of course, with training and coaching, you can help people a lot to go from catastrophic to probably acceptable or even good. But when it's deeply ingrained in someone's personality, you will not make someone who is a complete introvert suddenly being the rock star on a stage. That simply does not happen. Also take care with introverts about the deep work needs. When they want to have deep work, allow them to do so.
When you say, sorry, we just had one big office. It's noisy, but you have to deal with it. No. They don't have to. They simply perform worse than it's not their fault. Then it's the leaders' fault not granting their not not not not serving their deep work needs. And very important as well, and I've been there on the lucky side, but that's not the point here.
Fair recognition for introverts. I can tell you as someone who works in sales for a couple of decades now, very often the extroverted people. I was on the lucky side of that. I, as a salesperson, as a trainer, and coach, when I got client business done, you often get a ton of recognition for that from leaders, while everyone in the office doesn't get any of the recognition. So be aware that introverts need the same amount of recognition, maybe in a different way, maybe on the stage, maybe in a personal way, maybe a bit more detailed, but they need a fair amount of recognition. Anything else is not fair game. When we talk about ambiversion, that's the place where I feel home, you often have people who work in mediation.
That's basically people call me in because something went wrong. So mediation is probably something I do all the day, all day long. You need flexible working structures, also that is what my business does. Very important when you have ambiverts and now we have something here which doesn't apply to me fortunately. But ambiverts are often the people who can help in many different situations and you probably know in your organization as well the people who always love to help. And what happens is anyone takes their help. So be aware that ambiverts have a higher risk of burnout.
And of course, you need to prevent that. Because very quickly, an organization, it makes the round when people say, hey, you can go to that person. They never say no. And that's where the burnout can quickly happen. So burnout prevention here is very important. Allow ambiverts to find their natural skills, and that is the term in science where I really thought bang on the money. That is exactly what I felt when I heard the term ambivert.
When I grew up, there were two terms, either introversion or extroversion. And then then you get put into these categories one or the other, and I never felt at home with any of these. I mean, I couldn't because the the term probably came up in 02/2009 and then was substantiated in 2013 with the ambiversion so I was way over 30 years old. If anyone had told me that I will run a business working internationally, leaving my home country, living in different other countries, I would have laughed at their faces. At the age of 10, I come from a very small village in Northern Germany. I was born in Hamburg, but then my parents lived further north. Baamsteed, Schliesfich Holstein, Northern Germany, small village.
8,000 people living there or live there. Now I think way less when I lived there and grew up there. So when I told my parents at the age of 10 I'm going to become a teacher and a public servant with a lifetime assignment as you have it in Germany, everyone was happy. Oh, the boy said something and now he will have a job, which he probably does for the rest of his life. And then when studying teaching, I figured out that's not what I wanna do. And then I went into free enterprise and then suddenly things started to evolve. When you're an ambivert, finding your core strength is really is a journey, and support is much needed here.
I think if I had known the term ambivert at the age of 15, my life would have been easier, and I probably could have made a couple of better choices, especially job wise and what I wanted to study. However, it wasn't there and there's no reason to look back now. So it's very important that when you know the term right now and you have people where you think they're ambiverts, it's important to support them on their journey. When you have omniverted people, the omniversion, these often are people who lead autonomy. They need to be, on they they they need to be able to design their workspace. Very important is with omniverts, you need to help them to find their self awareness because often omniverts think they're good at everything, which is often not true because no one is good at everything. So strengthen their self awareness.
They often need dynamic roles and they are often very good at mentoring programs, taking them and also giving them because that delivers guidance and when they live through a couple of roles, they probably can give very good feedback on that as well. And before now we come to the point where anyone is now sitting there, oh, I'm going to write me some email after this because I know what questions in there. The usual questions at the end of this is always, so which are the best and worst jobs for the different categories? Very importantly I'm going to give you a guideline however this is just a short list of what options are on the table. It is not a definite list and not the only list available. So So when we look into the four categories, extraversion. The best jobs you usually find when they work in sales, public relations, often consulting, event management.
They often are leaders, team leadership. They often are very good with clients or customer service or anything connected with that. You often find these people in politics, also in media or the entertainment industry. When you want to make an extroverted person's life really difficult, then give them a deep research role hidden away somewhere in the door locked with lots of data science on their own. Maybe tell them to be a librarian or maybe do solo programming or maybe a bit of remote work with no interaction with others. That is probably the worst thing you can give to an extroverted person and the person will leave reasonably quickly or just perform horribly. Very different with introverted person.
Introversion in introvert means the best is when they can, for example, do research or writing. Often you find people in software developing very detailed work. Accounting or data analysis, engineering, you have a lot of introverts there. Graphic design also, especially when it comes to very specific details and when you have something like editing or strategy planning where tiny, tiny details need to be considered, introversion introverts are often the ones doing these jobs. I don't wanna generalize here. However, often introverts prefer to do these jobs over, and now we can talk of, of course, talk about how to make an introvert stay really bad. When you want to make people with high introversion really leave your organization or not perform well, tell them they have to work in sales with daily public speaking gigs.
Then you have to go to customer service. After that, you do event planning and, of course, conduct the event and go there and speak at the event. Put them into network heavy roles with high pressure leadership, and they would probably say, this is not for me. So very important here with introversion, give them roles that fit best. And now with the MB version, you have roles, and that is these are roles where I really thought, well, if I only had known this term earlier. So best for ambivergent, often project management, interim management.
You have HR roles or marketing. You often also have business strategy, teaching, consulting, management, training, public relations, coaching, mentoring. Basically, everything I do is in the ambivergent space. I really, really could have used this term earlier. However, when you know now when you now know people and they are in this space, help them on their way. The really worst jobs for an ambivert is highly repetitive tasks, extreme solitude rules, anything, data entry, night security, unstructured freelancing, do something with no clear goal in mind, absolutely hopeless. And I can tell you that is really hopeless then.
When we go into omniversion, so you have the full spectrum here. You often have something like entrepreneurship, creative fields, from music to writing, film making, but also consulting or journalism, crisis management, innovation focused roles often. Startups often. Having a couple of startups and then losing interest in them also is a bit of an omniversion point here. The worst for an omniversion person is when you have highly rigid corporate roles with lots of regulatory compliance, routine heavy jobs, accounting factory work, legal compliance, regulatory, or jobs requiring extreme and highest amount of consistency. For example, pilots or surgeons. And when I read into a when I read one study where it said surgeon, I thought surgeon isn't really extreme consistency.
You always have a couple of surgeries going on a week. And then I talked to surgeon, and I didn't know how many surgeries they did that were standard procedure. Boy, these are lots of jobs which they well, basically, they turn up eight in the morning and they stand in the surgeon's room doing surgeries for twelve hours straight and then leaving home, and 90% of that is standard procedure. And with with 10% saving people's lives or even more. So these jobs are not someone not for someone on an omnivision on an omnivision spectrum point here. Very important now is if we now come to a conclusion, it is very important to state that all of these roles are valuable. It is not the point, and again, it is not the point that you need to serve the wishes of so called leaders who say copy who I am and then you will be successful.
Every time you hear someone telling you oh, you should be the next Steve Jobs or the next Tim Cook or the next whatever CEO someone throws around. No. This is never, again, never the answer. And by the way, that is one of the reasons why you never see anyone succeeding when they go to these $400 per event kind of keynote speaking style events where they listen to that person and keynote here and keynote there. You never see any one of these people succeeding anywhere for a reason because they try to copy others, and that is never a successful approach. Every single role, every single aspect I mentioned here is valuable for the for the organization. It's not the point to simply serve leaders who say copy me.
It is important for every role, every position, every job to find the best suitable person from a qualification point of view, but also from a personality type point of view including of course the cultural fit. Please do so and I wish you all the best doing so. And when you now say woah that's difficult I think it is. Otherwise it will be a job that anyone could do and of course that's not possible. It is challenging, of course. When you now like to discuss something, feel free to send me an email, nbnb networks dot com. In the show notes of this podcast, I will put my email address.
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