Provide a personal reflection on the Newsbreak below: CAN I BE A LEADER IF I'M MORE OF AN INTROVERT?

Think about a leader. Picture that person in your mind, working with subordinates or walking through a workspace. Is that person outgoing, full of obvious energy, kind of buzzing from person to person? That's probably the image, or close to the image, that most people picturing a leader would conjure up: an extroverted individual, excited to be talking to people, and basically behaving like the life of the work party.

But can you picture an introvert in a leadership role? If you can't, or if you can but think it looks weird, don't worryeven introverts have a hard time picturing themselves as leaders. We do have a pretty strong stereotype that leaders are extroverts. Like a lot of stereotypes, this one contains a nugget of truth in that leaders do need to be engaging and energetic, which are typically qualities of extroverts. Sadly, it seems that our common stereotype might hold some introverts back from trying out leadership roles. One study asked first-year business students to take a personality inventory and then rate how much they would expect to have negative feelings being the leader of a student team. Then the researchers placed the students into teams but did not assign a leader, instead they let leaders emerge naturally from the group processes. Once the project was done, they asked team members to rate each other, including a question about who the real leader of the group ended up being. The results showed that introverts who expected to have negative reactions to being a leader were significantly less likely to emerge as leaders.

These results are kind of too bad because there are plenty of introverted leaders out there, including famous leaders like Jeff Bezos (from Amazon), Oprah Winfrey, and Peter Thiel (PayPal founder). And research is increasingly showing that introverts bring strengths related to that personality trait to the leadership role. For instance, introverts tend to listen closely before chiming in and are less easily distracted. They are less likely to make quick decisions and more likely to value and seek deeper connections with subordinates.

The truth is, most people have at least some qualities of both introversion AND extroversionextreme scores on personality inventories are pretty rare. It would be a good idea to keep that in mind as you encounter new leaders or become a new leader yourself.