When it comes to things like career development, personal preferences and personalities can have a strong impact on how you learn, grow, and interact with others. Regardless of your personality type, there will be situations where you need to leverage your strengths for success. This is true for both introverts and extroverts. Here are four career tips for introverts to help you grow and succeed.
Lead By Listening
If you are an introvert, it is highly possible that you’ve found that you seem to have an innate ability to glean information from others. In fact, while no two introverts are truly identical, many share an affinity for being good listeners. Within the workplace, this is a trait that can serve to greatly boost your career success.
Listening is integral for building and maintaining strong relationships. Introverts can leverage their listening skills in this manner, particularly in one-to-one settings. While extroverts may excel in large groups, introverts tend to excel in more intimate settings when it comes to building connections.
In addition to building relationships, listening is key for helping analyze situations. In many organizations, it is the introvert who balances their listening and analytical skills that comes up with successful ideas about how to move forward with a problem or solve conflicts.
Create a Safe Space Before & After Social Interactions
Many people misunderstand what being an introvert means. People often think it means that you are not good with people or do not like interacting with people. However, that is an oversimplification. It means that interacting with people takes energy (as opposed to extroverts who become energized through interactions).
Introverts are perfectly capable of interacting effectively, and many may even enjoy doing so. The issue that introverts need to address is being able to effectively gear up for social situations as well as de-stressing afterwards.
Thus, an excellent career tip for introverts is to create a safe space before and after social interactions. Blocking hour breaks between meetings can be an effective way to do this to prevent having back-to-back ones when possible. Ensuring downtime in your office to focus on work tasks can make you more productive and help you re-energize.
Find Allies
Another career tip for introverts is that businesses succeed when they have people with a diverse array of strengths. Likewise, you will succeed better when you have a diverse group of allies to collaborate with. Thus, it is great for introverts to intentionally seek out these types of relationships.
Work to create teams of resources and colleagues who can help you with your diverse skills. This includes cultivating relationships with a good balance of introverts, extroverts, and ambiverts. This can also help you advance your own ideas in team settings as the people you surround yourself with can help advocate for you and your thoughts.
When you begin to build relationships, identify the people you feel would be useful for you to get to know. Then work on developing those relationships in settings where you find yourself most effective. Feel free to ask colleagues to make introductions for you if you haven’t met someone yet.
Be Upfront about How You Communicate
Sometimes people can get a bit frustrated about how people communicate with them. However, this can be a bit short-sighted for a few reasons. First, people naturally tend to communicate with others how they prefer to be communicated. Secondly, people often don’t let others know how they prefer to communicate.
However, you’ll find that when people understand your communication preferences, they are often happy to adjust their methods to meet them. Thus, it is important to be upfront with others about your preferred communication style as an introvert.
Doing so can help you to take a more active role in facilitating the most productive work environment possible for you. You may even be surprised at how much this simple step can help improve your quality of life at work.
Final Thoughts
For introverts, there are many things you can do to leverage your skills and improve your abilities at work. However, these four career tips for introverts specifically are great things to try to include in your work.
Are there any other strategies that have helped you strive in your career as an introvert? If so, let me know in the comments.
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