Inviting Introverts to Lead

Whenever I teach about leadership the participants and I talk about the value of charisma. Not surprisingly, most of those in the workshop feel that the most effective leaders are these larger-than-life figures. That is, until we start talking about ones that are not (and often one of them is the CEO of their company). So, what gives?

This article delves into the issue. Note that the author sometimes confuses behavior (which can be changed) with personality (which is VERY stable, despite her claim and her link that is not associated with any research). The real issue is what can introverts do to be effective leaders?

For many, what it comes down to is the expectations of the situation. If I think any task is going to be painful, of course I am going to avoid it. This is how introverts feel about an assignment that involves a lot of group interaction.

This study looked at potential barriers to introverts being effective leaders. What they found was that negative thinking about assuming the role inhibited performance (as measured by emergent leadership). However, and this is important, positive thinking did not lead to more emergent leadership. So, in working with high potential introverts, this data (and it is only one study) suggests that removing undesirable thoughts about the role (e.g., your fears are not accurate, you will not be a failure, etc.) will lead to more leadership behaviors than selling the role (e.g., you will be fabulous, there is no doubt that you will be successful, etc.).

This is important because it shows that those who lack the extroversion trait associated with charisma may still be effective leaders. This increases your pool of leadership potential in your company. It also provides a road map for encouraging introverts, who are otherwise qualified, to take on leadership assignments in way that allows them to be successful.

From a selection perspective, understanding this nuance would be valuable to determining who you choose to be leaders. Rather than assessing introversion/extroversion, you can look at a person’s attitudes towards leading groups as potentially a more valued predictor.

Is Seeing Really Believing?

Something I hear frequently from clients is, “I wish I had a day/week/month to see my candidates do the job.  Then I would make fewer hiring mistakes.”  It is, of course, an intriguing idea.  We test drive cars before we buy them.  Why not try out people before we hire them?

There is a long history of sampling work behavior in selection systems, whether it be using Assessment Centers to hire/promote managers and executives or having people make things for craft positions.  The accuracy of these types of assessments is good, falling somewhere between cognitive ability tests and interviews.  For candidates, the appeal is that they feel that they can really show what they can do rather than have their job related skills or personality inferred from a multiple choice test.

The issues in using a job tryout would include:

  • Paying the person for their time. There is an ethical, in some cases legal, issue in having a person work for free.  So, be prepared for your cost per hire to go up significantly.
  • Candidates would either need flexible schedules or plenty of PTO to participate in such a program.
  • Having meaningful work for the candidates to do. If you are going to narrow the gap between what the assessment and the job look like, then you would have to have projects that impact process, customers, etc that you would be willing to have a short-term contractor do.  Or, that you already have them doing.
  • Determining how to score the job tryout. Most organizations do a pretty poor job of measuring job performance over a full year, let a lone a couple of days.  Developing scoring criteria would be key for making good decisions and avoiding bias.
  • Having someone who is not your employee perform work that could affect your customers or the safety of others will make your attorney break out in a cold sweat.  This is should convince you not to do job tryouts, but you will have to sell that person on the idea.

What got me thinking about job tryouts was this article.  I was impressed that the company had thought through the problems in their selection process and came up with a creative way to address them. They certainly handle the pay issue well and they currently have the growth and profitability to make the program worthwhile. What is left unsaid, but communicated through some derisive comments about multiple-choice tests, is that they feel that using tests would not fit their culture well.

My concerns were that they are more worried about “fit” than skills.  This also translates into not having an objective way to evaluate how well a person did.  This leads me to believe that they would run into the problem of only hiring people who are just like them.

Lastly, they have a pretty high pass rate that “feels right.”  If I worked for them, I would be concerned that a lot of time and effort is being spent confirming what was seen in the less valid interview.  This is particularly true in a company where metrics are important for everything else.  Having people work for you for a few days and not having an objective way to measure how well they did is not going to lead to better candidates than a series of interviews.

Advances in selection tools will likely come from start-up companies who are not bound by tradition when it comes to hiring.  The tech sector presents a lot of opportunities to improve valid selection systems by their nature:  They are setup to disrupt and they gather a lot of data.  This presents a great platform for seeing what people do before you hire them to do it.

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