Drawing out dormant capabilities

The introvert-extrovert divide is the most fundamental dimension of a personality. In this book, Susan Cain, a corporate lawyer, who specialises in psychological non-fiction, confronts the truths about introverts.

She begins with an incident that took place on December 1, 1955, at Montgomery, Alabama. Rosa Parks, in her forties, refused to give her seat to a white passenger in a bus. The incident ignited one of the most important civil rights protests of the twentieth century, led by Reverend Martin Luther King Jr. The Montgomery Improvement Association launched a city-wide bus boycott that lasted 381 days.

This changed the course of American History. When she died in 2005 at the age of 92, Parks' obituaries said she was “timid and shy” but had “the courage of a lion”.

Rosa Parks and Martin Luther King Jr. portrayed the contrast between an introvert and an extrovert.

Poets and philosophers have been thinking about introverts and extroverts for long. In 1921, psychologist Carl Jung published a book, Psychological Types, popularising the terms ‘introvert' and ‘extrovert' as the central building blocks of a personality.

Introverts are drawn to the inner world of thought and feelings, said Jung, while extroverts to the external life of people and activities. Introverts focus on the meaning they make of the events swirling around them; extroverts plunge into the events themselves.

The Extrovert Ideal

Cain narrates how the brain chemistry of introverts and extroverts differ and how society misunderstands and undervalues introverts. She gives introverts the tools to understand themselves and to take full advantage of their strengths, citing from her experiences as an introvert.

Taking the reader on a journey from Dale Carnegie's birthplace to Harvard Business School, from a Tony Robbins seminar to an evangelical mega church, Cain charts the rise of the Extrovert Ideal in the twentieth century and explores its far-reaching effects. The book breaks the myth that the most successful personalities are extroverts. The Extrovert Ideal has been documented in many studies. Talkative people, for example, are rated as smarter, better-looking, more interesting and more desirable as friends. Velocity of speech counts as well as volume; we rank fast talkers as more competent and likable than slow ones.

Cain points out that we make a grave mistake to embrace the Extrovert Ideal so unthinkingly. Without introverts, the world would be devoid of the theory of gravity, the theory of relativity, W.B.Yeats' The Second Coming , Chopin's Nocturnes , Proust's In Search of Lost Time , Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four and Animal Farm , Charlie Brown, Google, Harry Potter, among others.

The book is also a treasure trove of information of various scientific facts related to psychology and neuroscience to reveal the differences between extroverts and introverts.

The heritability factor

For instance, the heritability statistics derived from twin studies show that introversion-extroversion is only 40-50 per cent heritable.

According to the theory of gene-environment interaction, people who inherit certain traits tend to seek out life experiences that reinforce those characteristics. High-reactive children are more likely to develop into artists, writers, scientists and thinkers because their aversion to novelty causes them to spend time inside the familiar-and intellectually fertile-environment of their own heads.

Low-reactive, extroverted children, if raised by attentive families in a safe environment, can grow up to be energetic achievers with big personalities — the Richard Bransons and Oprah Winfreys of this world. If the same children are given negligent caregivers or a bad neighbourhood, they turn into bullies, juvenile delinquents or criminals.

Free will can take us far, suggests a research, but it cannot carry us infinitely beyond our genetic limits. Bill Gates is never going to be Bill Clinton, no matter how much he polishes his social skills, and Bill Clinton can never be Bill Gates, no matter how much time he spends alone with a computer.

There are interesting insights in the chapter titled ‘Why did Wall Street Crash and Warren Buffett Prosper?'

The most interesting one is where the author relates her correspondence with Jack Welch, the former chairman of General Electric, who had published a BusinessWeek online column called “Release Your Inner Extrovert”, in which he asked the introverts to act as extroverts on the job.

Cain suggested that extroverts sometimes need to act as introverts, too. Welch countered that “the extroverts would argue that they never heard from the introverts”.

Introverts need to trust their gut and share their ideas as powerfully as they can. This does not mean aping extroverts; ideas can be shared quietly, they can be communicated in writing, or packaged into highly produced lectures or even advanced by allies. The trick for introverts is to honour their own styles instead of allowing themselves to be swept by prevailing norms.

The Charisma Myth

According to a study by management theorist, Jim Collins, many 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. When Collins began his research, all he wanted to know was what characteristics made a company outperform its competition.

He selected 11 companies. The highest-performing among these had in common the nature of their CEO. Those who worked with these leaders tended to describe them with the following words: Quiet, humble, modest, reserved, shy, gracious, mild-mannered, self-effacing, and understated.

The conclusion by Collins is clear. “We don't need giant personalities to transform companies. We need leaders who build not their own egos but the institutions they run”.

(The writer is Manager-Human Resources, The Hindu Group of Publications, Chennai)

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