Management Perspectives

There are many complex reasons for burnout, and we all feel stress from time to time, to varying degrees. You might have tried a number of different strategies to manage this; perhaps saying, “no” more often; perhaps you have tried different productivity hacks; or perhaps you have gone for a massage or started to meditate. All of these are useful. However, a possible source for burnout and stress is an unusual one that you might not have considered already: Your introversion might be demanding that you listen to it. The reasons are simple: One of the main causes of burnout is when we don’t feel like we are in control, and we can feel stress when we are continuously acting in a way that’s not congruent with who we really are.

There is only so much we can adjust and adapt before it affects our day-to-day energy and zest, and if we don’t listen to our minds and bodies telling us when we’re reaching that point, they will find a way to make us listen regardless. In a lot of corporate environments, introverts are doing a lot of this adapting and adjusting, so it’s no wonder you might be feeling exhausted. Adapting on the part of the introvert happens because introverts are still seen as ‘different’ from the standard, and this standard is generally considered to be extroversion. Therefore, as introverts, we end up ‘masking’ to pretend to be something we are not and to display behaviours that are not in our natural style. This requires energy, is not sustainable, and will eventually come to a head—either in the form of burnout, other forms of stress, or simply that your career doesn’t have the trajectory it had the potential to.

There are several reasons why extroversion has been seen as the standard, some of which has to do with very primal biases we all hold, but there is also the fact that extroversion is easier to see: One of the core building blocks of introversion is to have a preference for thinking things through before talking. When an introvert is highly active, this activity therefore starts out on the inside. An extrovert might say something immediately in a meeting, which can be seen and heard, whereas an introvert might prefer to mull things over before speaking and is therefore less visible. The thinking the introvert does is no less of an activity than the extrovert’s immediate talking, but it’s not an activity that others can easily see, and it therefore has the potential to more easily be misunderstood. That’s not to say that introverts never talk, but we tend to add a pause before we do so (which has lots of benefits for organisations—not least of which is that scientific research has shown us that decisions are more robust when we don’t make them impulsively). and in most corporate environments you can still see this in examples such as group exercises on away-days, team bonding activities, group lunches, free-form brainstorming sessions, and not to mention that most recognition and credit still goes to the people talking the loudest about their accomplishments (instead of asking managers to get better at identifying high performers).

This tailoring to extroversion is also reflected in how we organise our teams and our working days, and given how introverts are wired it affects us fundamentally: since introverts prefer reflection before speaking, it might be frustrating to feel like we can never get a word in to make our point in a discussion, or that others are not seeing the same connections that we are. Similarly, it can often be an exercise in patience to attend meetings without agendas and sit through what feels like talking with no clear purpose. It can be overwhelming to be misunderstood by those around us when they think we’re shy (we are not—or if we are, it has nothing to do with our introversion); we might be accused of being stuck-up or aloof when we are probably just thinking deeply about the conversation we are in; or we might be told we need to be more like extroverts and not accepted for the contributions we bring.

Our need to recharge energy alone is hard to achieve if our days are full of back to back meetings, or if our training courses are full of group exercises. On and on it goes, where eventually your whole week is tailored to other people’s needs. All of these taken together mean a working week that’s full of adjustments, and of not being entirely ourselves, not being able to relax or to focus on the job at hand—which means we’re not performing consistently at our best. All this energy to be spent on being someone we’re not, to mask our true style, and adjusting to a working culture that doesn’t tailor to our needs, can accumulate and cause us to feel like something is wrong but not being able to entirely identify what that is. So, if you have a rumbling that you’re not optimising your performance or aligning your working week with your personality, perhaps it’s time to take a step back and identify what you can do about it. The two core building blocks of introversion, reflection and recharging solo, affect us all to different degrees.

Therefore, understand what your own unique preferences are to be able to organise a working week that fits you better. Listen to how you feel after particular days—do you feel better after a day in the office or after a day of working from home? Do you look forward to a week when you have lots of meetings or more so with a week that has built-in thinking time? Once you know what you like and what works for you, you can adjust accordingly. If you are in control of your own diary, you can move meetings to make them more spaced out. If you organise a discussion, you can book it for 45 minutes instead of 60, to give you time in between sessions (this is also useful for everyone else, as it means their next meeting is more likely to start on time and avoid delays).

If you are at the mercy of other people, try telling them what your preferences are and what the benefits could be for everyone in the group, e.g. brainstorming session, a notorious problem for introverts, have also been scientifically proven to not generate better ideas than other approaches, so suggest that you re-do how you run the session. You can ask everyone to think about the topic beforehand or allow feedback afterwards in writing. This will improve the end result and make you less stressed. If you are attending training sessions where you have no control over the structure, enquire about how inclusive their training design is—and take a few coffee breaks alone. As introverts, we have been told for a long time that in order to get ahead, we need to be more like extroverts. But to an introvert, all of this is draining and taking away energy from where you need it to be—in being the high-achiever you really are.