Companies would benefit from helping introverts to thrive
I just got off a call discussing the problems of technical teams where introverts get thrown into the deep end by being promoted to team leads etc. often without <i>any</i> kind of support.<p>I suffered through being in that position myself early in my career, and people under me suffered as a result, and I had no follow up or help whatsoever in terms of obtaining the skills to deal with it. It took a lot of time to recognise the problem and &quot;fix it&quot;.<p>It still saps me of energy to spend time actively reaching out to people, but I&#x27;ve learned strategies to work around it (e.g. setting appointments to talk to people so I can&#x27;t get out of it without being rude prevents me from just indefinitely postponing it), and &quot;compensate&quot; by ensuring I allocate &quot;quiet time&quot; to recharge.<p>There were also a lot of little things I had to learn. E.g. I eventually learned that simply walking around the office now and again and asking people how they were doing got people to report far higher satisfaction with my level of engagement, even if I spent <i>less</i> time actually responding to issues.<p>My managers never engaged with me that way when I started leading teams (I once had a manager that didn&#x27;t actually talk to me for about two years - I passed on status reports once a week and that was pretty much it), so I didn&#x27;t either for a long time. It turned out to be a very &quot;low touch&quot; method of showing interest that didn&#x27;t wear me down but gave very positive results.<p>A lot of teams struggle with bad to non-existent training of people who get promoted into management positions, and that problem gets far worse with people whose &quot;default&quot; is to not spend a lot of time talking to people, and it puts a strain both on the team and the person put into that position that could be reduced very quickly with some basic training and some coaching.<p>I actually occasionally take on contracts to do coaching for technology managers because I love helping people shortcut all the time I wasted on it when I first started managing teams.