Authors: Susan Cain
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, âI'm bored. Why don't we go to Abilene?' When they get to Abilene, somebody says, âYou know, I didn't really want to go.' And the next person says, âI didn't want to goâI thought you wanted to go,' and so on. Whenever you're in an army group and somebody says, âI 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 actionâany 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 leadership 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, âOK, we'll make an appointment for you to address the murder board' ”âa 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 embarrassing. 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 leadership, 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 âcharisma' 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 analysts 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 glasses, 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 leadership. When he started his research, all he wanted to know was what characteristics made a company outperform its competition. He selected eleven standout companies to research in depth. Initially he ignored the question of
leadership altogether, because he wanted to avoid simplistic answers. But when he analyzed 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 unassuming 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 institutions they run.
So what do introverted leaders do differently fromâand sometimes better thanâextroverts?
One answer comes from the work of Wharton management professor Adam Grant, who has spent considerable time consulting with Fortune 500 executives and military leadersâfrom 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 leadership, didn't tell the whole story.
Grant told me about a wing commander in the U.S. Air Forceâone rank below general, in command of thousands of people, charged with protecting a high-security missile baseâwho was one of the most classically 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 asserting his opinion or dominating a conversation.
He was also widely admired; when he spoke, everyone listened. This was not necessarily remarkableâif 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 assigned work to those who could perform it best. This meant delegating some of his most interesting, meaningful, and important tasksâwork 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 leadership, he found that the
correlation between extroversion and leadership 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 leadership styles, he thought, and others to extroverted approaches, but the studies didn't make such distinctions.
Grant had a theory about which kinds of circumstances would call for introverted leadership. His hypothesis was that extroverted leaders enhance group performance when employees are passive, 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 analyzed 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 introvertsâbut only when the employees were passive 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-shirts as possible in ten minutes. Unbeknownst to the participants, each team included two actors. In some teams, the two actors acted passively, 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 Japan who had a faster way to fold shirts. “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 suggestionâand their teams had 24 percent better results than the teams of the extroverted leaders. When the followers were not proactive, thoughâwhen they simply did as the leader instructed without suggesting their own shirt-folding methodsâthe teams led by extroverts outperformed those led by the introverts by 22 percent.
Why
did these leaders' effectiveness turn on whether their employees were passive 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-shirt-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 shirts.
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 passivity. “
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 passive workers.