You can be shy and still be a CEO
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Honestly it is a relief when the CEO isn't trying to sell me on some vision (with the exception of one CEO who was a legit magical salesman) or whatever it is. Just give me my orders so I can get on with it, I don't need a show / extrovert at the helm.
Maybe other people do and maybe the article is wrong, but at least for leadership, I don't need a super outgoing guy. I just want to know what he needs done / and let's go make the thing.
Now if the CEO is a guy who is gonna come running out onto a stage screamming at a presentation, like that is who he is ... that's cool too.
There is also a valuable spot in some parts of the business world for the Barnum & Bailey promoter. It can be extraordinarily difficult to stand out from the crowd, often while competing against far larger companies, even if you have a superior product. If you can't be outgoing and draw attention to your superior product (get in front of a major tv audience and nail it, present effectively to audiences on stage at COMDEX, etc), perhaps against far larger ad budgets, your great product may be doomed.
It doesn't mean you are a bad leader if you do it, merely that a better leader might have seen a different path and gotten a better result.
You're going to have to do that yourself at times. You can't build an army without your troops knowing who you are, you have to instruct them at some point, and they have to believe you for some reason. You have to inspire them at some juncture just to get the organization rolling. You can't sufficiently motivate them if they don't know you exist at some point in the chain of events. What are they motivated by, inspired by, if they don't know you exist? You have to actively win them over, they have to believe in you for a good reason. You can't do that by always being the quiet person they don't know exists, they will not believe in you if that's all you have ever been to them. Which goes to the point that there's a time and place - likely many times and places - where even an introvert CEO will be called to inspire actively, to be outgoing for necessary effect. There is no scenario where that won't be the case if you're leading over the long-term. And that's the point and why it is a counterexample. There are times you'll have to be the charismatic outgoing leader that inspires the troops to charge over the hill. Times when the business is against the wall and you have to inspire everyone to fight for survival, believe that it's possible to succeed in a dire context. Or times when you need a massive sea change in the business, and you have to actively get everyone on-board the new direction (otherwise it'll be a disaster). It's the exceptionally rare business scenario where that never needs to happen across years, much less decades. Businesses are made by such moments, just as they also are made by the day to day monotonous work.
In general there are lots of alternatives. Pay, objective, even lower level subordinates that are personally motivating, etc. There are many ways to motivate people that does not involve being the single shining star for everybody.
Is it realistic to never personally take a visible and active role in running an army? Probably not. I'm not trying to argue that. But - in theory - if you could do it, you'd build a stronger army. Otherwise it will all fall apart the moment you forget to drink enough water and faint on a hot day in the middle of a battle. The more support structures are in place that don't require your visible and active participation, the stronger the organization is.
Remember, we're talking about a one-liner here. It's not going to capture all sorts of realities and exceptions and little details. Just because you can point out that reality is not the ideal does not invalidate a small saying about the ideal.
I think this is the problem. It's really really hard to do that at scale. Different people require different types of messages in order to get it. You need to repeat your vision of what needs to get done again and again and again. That can be hard for an introvert. It doesn't mean you can't be shy, but I think that's why it can be a challenge.
When Welch took the helm of GE in 1981, he built the company’s own pit — a large lecture hall with a pitched floor — at GE’s corporate learning campus in Crotonville, New York, and made it the beating heart of the place. He would hold court there every other week and use it to foster a generation of managers who, in turn, helped him grow GE into the most valuable company in the world.
So it was the constant education and re-iterating goals of the company.
"You tell grunts what to do. You tell special forces the objective."
This is entirely based on my personal dislike for being micro-managed.
I've certainly worked with a lot of folks who detailed "do this" and when done we discovered it is "to achieve this goal" ... that late bit of info proved the thing we did was not as useful or would need more work later.
I only met him a few times but he was one of those guys who seemed to be able to figure you out from the start and knew how to connect with you just instinctively. It probably helped that his early history was engineering, then sales, then up the executive chain. He understood the 'types' of folks who did those jobs and how to work with them.
Sounds like an interesting character either way. You already need to possess a lot of mental flexibility and social intelligence to thrive inside both engineering culture AND marketing culture.
I was the CEO a startup which I had to close due to my health issues 2 years ago. Since then my social behavior has changed polarity, I have nearly stopped any real-time communication(live meeting, call, chat).
I think it was caused by the trauma from events associated with having to explain the health scenario to half-dozen visitors every day over a year(social construct in India), then going through the pain of closing the startup of 5 years(in which I was on phone every hour) and again having to explain it to everyone I know.
This might sound extreme it is, but I've never felt peace like this before. The obvious victim is my business ambitions, There's only few things you can do as an indie who communicates only via email.
Since I've been at the both end of the spectrum, I would say if you're an introvert CEO then you need to have someone else i.e. 'a people person' to do all the extrovert things required for a business. I believe many successful business are run like this because the CEO can put their energy where it matters the most i.e. making money.
Scheduled too many jobs this week? Friggen boss is overworking me again. New business cards have too small of a font? Ugh, I need to have a talk with my designer.
An extrovert can manifest himself in video/voice calls and even email. He will be the one to contact people, plan meetings, ask how everyone is doing,... An introvert can be on site and not leave his office except to walk around see how things are going, not talking to anyone.
There was a study that extroverts actually did better under lockdown than introverts, because extroverts quickly found alternative ways of socializing. Introverts still needed to socialize, even if not as much, but after lockdowns cut the few ties they had, they had more trouble remaking them, being less experienced with social tools.
Edit: here’s the study: https://www.frontiersin.org/articles/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.5616...
On a somehwat related note, you can find introverted people in many professions, in roles which might be associated with being extroverted e.g. acting or a movie director.
An example: here's an informative video from introvert movie director David Sandberg (director of Shazam!, Lights Out and Annabelle Creation).
Can You Be An Introvert Director? Note: there's a very brief horror clip featuring a bit of gore in the following video:
Or maybe a better way to put it is "seeming shy" or "coming across as reserved" is something you can absolutely change with practice.
Add social anxiety into that mix as well. People tend to use all three interchangeably, and while there is overlap, they are all different things
https://verilymag.com/2018/12/signs-of-social-anxiety-social...
* Jim Whitehurst (RedHat)
* Andy Grove (Intel)
* David Packard and Bill Hewlett (HP)
There are many more but they don't tend to show up in the news. They are people you meet or work for.
The question is whether people want to be CEO, and is that what their life's calling is.
One of the superpowers of not talking all the time is that you’re listening more often than not. And if you can be judicious with what you say, and confident & persuasive when you do need to use your influence, it can be very effective.
This is a silly notion that ignores the fact that there are plenty of people who are both capable and want to work for leaders like Jobs/Musk. Nobody forces anyone to work the hard hours at these companies, and the complainers who don't make it are usually all you hear about since the individuals driving toward the mission are busy doing just that.
It's like Navy SEALS, you take any random selection of 1000 people, ask them how much they believe in the mission, and then put them into the sieve and see which ones have the chops to make it. Drill instructors would be called "toxic" too, but that's the entire point of the filtering function.
All I could think of at the time was "wow, sounds like a mission oriented place, I would love to work there."
Of course Amazon has made it their mission to not hire me, but still.
I guess this has less to do with the culture (the culture was more or less the same in the 80s and 90s in many countries when I did work for hard ass drill sergeant shouters as CEOs in both NL and DE: I even was one for 5 years until I noticed that it pained me as much as it did the people working for me) than with the realization, which seems to be in a large part of the EU now, that you basically do not have to do any of it: the social net allows to do mostly whatever you want. Sure you will not be able to drive lambos, but that is also considered silly (and a bit sad) in most places here anyway. But you won't starve here if you do not bend over and take it.
Covid sped up this realization again: what are you doing it all for if you lose your good years working like an animal and take abuse to boot?
I worked with some folks who were notorious at companies for challenging people, speaking forcefully and so on. More subdued folks like myself and others really hated them.
But most if I got to know weren't jerks, they weren't challenging you personally as a person. They were trying to push you, see if you'd push back, professionally. The folks I worked with would take it very personally, and understandably a lot of people do. Yet the other folks who excelled under those leaders, they let it roll off their back and just got back to it.
I've had more than one conversation of "He didn't say you suck... he didn't like where you put a button."
Some of those guys who challenged people WANTED push back, they wanted to see the other person really disagreed and had their own vision. When that would happen, often they would get the go ahead to do that thing...
One day I was honestly just tired and said something that sounded like I was pushing back pretty hard and the response "Ok then we'll go that route.". That was it, conversation over . To that individual willingness to push back in the face of opposition up the food chain meant you really believed / knew what you were doing.
Musk or Jobs, I've no idea, but in a world where I agree there's way too much toxicity, sometimes I see folks label any challenge as toxic and they don't realize that it's ok to disagree, and sometimes those folks want that.
I never worked with Jobs or Musk, but from stories I read about them, they are straight up bullies and sociopaths. Musk told a guy who took one day off to attend birth of his first born to get his priorities straight. That is not normal.
Pushy people probably all lack a little empathy because we only care about the topic at hand. In your example - it doesn't occur to many people (me..) that saying "i don't like where that button is" suggests anything more than that specific thing.
One incident in isolation is forgivable, but once it becomes a pattern, it's time to go.
Have you considered that you’re not explaining it well enough?
For this particular example, it's not the information uptake that's the problem, it's the obvious unwillingness to put any effort into even hearing it out.
And, yes, I still consider that I could be the problem, but upon many a midnight consideration, I've decided that I have to break this particular egg in order to find that out.
unrelated to the article, but im curious if this business can sustain itself to another round of funding. it has been tried before and does not work.
ecommerce stores do well when they run an ad or email promoting a product that they can sell 1k/10k/100k times over.
a market place like this has no such inventory.
The psychological reaction to the power of hierarchy and the difficulty in questioning that power and the inherent internal-monologue questioning of 'what could I have done better?' to satisfy those to whom I report.
Sometimes it's you, sometimes it's them, but like with domestic violence, the victims sometimes / often will, confusingly, go back to their aggressors, further enabling the toxic, and sometimes criminal, behaviour.
There's a fine line between being a 'snowflake' and allowing yourself to be repeatedly victimised, and it's entirely dependent on each individuals "transaction value". Where the economy comes into it is in the lifestyle impact of changing jobs: in an employers market, ruthless behaviour probably has fewer repercussions.
The ticket out of this - in an individual sense - mostly comes through following well-worn ancient wisdom around virtue - humility, integrity, diligence, etc. That gives you an edge over the long run because the virtuous stuff enables sharing and therefore access to a trusted network studying the most interesting problems available(and from there, higher-profile life opportunities), while someone who is out to "make a name for themselves" is spending all their time looking over their shoulder trying to push down the competition and toot the horn on their own work(which is tailored to min/max credibility, not to study anything in particular).
Our economy is perpetually in a state of having the two outlooks overlap each other which accounts for the mixed messages - as soon as a good idea gets popular it gets gamed and gatekept. Keep in mind that we have only grudgingly managed to accept - within the last few centuries - that good economies are not premised on simple conquest and exploitation. We still have a long way to go.
But as I grew older, the system beat shyness out of me by revealing the ugliness in people. Now I don't care about what people think. I even swore and shouted at my boss when quitting my last job.
Eventually, I realized that most people are selfish idiots so it doesn't matter what they think.
That'd be going too far, and is an indication of emotional immaturity. Just leaving the job, and giving a clear indication of the reasons in an exit interview, should be far more of a stab in the guts to your boss.
Shouting and swearing allows them to blame your emotional state and justifying a stance of 'better off without you', thus enabling a (potentially) toxic boss to continue to treat the next person the same way.
Always consider how to make the greatest positive impact. It can actually be far more long-term therapeutic than shouting and swearing.
It was a mostly normal workplace before that. The stakes were high I guess.
Seems like you've went too far in the other direction.