Shy locked
Is HR a terrible place to be introvert?We know you’re out there. A hidden world of introverts posing as HR professionals, afraid your cover might get blown any minute.
So far nobody suspects a thing, although people have noticed that faraway look in your eyes when they ask what you did on the weekend.
Just so we’re on the same page: as a personality type, introverts find highly social environments to be mentally draining, and solitary ones to be energising and comforting. They prefer books to ballrooms, and painting to partying.
Susan Cain, author of Quiet: The Power of Introverts, summarises:
Introverts may have strong social skills and enjoy parties and business meetings, but after a while wish they were home in their pajamas. They prefer to devote their social energies to close friends, colleagues, and family. They listen more than they talk, think before they speak, and often feel as if they express themselves better in writing than in conversation. They tend to dislike conflict. Many have a horror of small talk, but enjoy deep discussions.
So when nearly all HR roles call on you to be sociable and friendly, often for a significant portion of your day, that’s bad news for introverts. Networking, meetings, messy human problems — on paper, it sounds a lot like an introvert’s nightmare career.
Even if you can survive, can you flourish? In HR, can introversion ever be anything other than a handicap?
The lowdown on introversion and HR
It’s estimated that one in three people are classifiable as introverted, making it relatively common. So without a doubt, there are introverts in almost every field.
However, they are predominantly drawn to more solitary sorts of work — for example, careers in science, writing, or professional hermitry (probably.) The number that makes it into HR is unknown.
Modern communal working places a premium on extrovert traits. Being gregarious and actively friendly helps your career prospects. Confident, enthusiastic, a team player, charismatic — this is the terminology often used to typify the perfect employee. Rarely will a job advert be found without these words, or similar synonyms.
And that’s for almost any position in an office, let alone HR.
TARGETjobs has revealed a list of top traits for the aspiring HR pro. On it, we see things like collaborative, courageous, a good influencer and strong role model.
While none of these things are the exclusive preserve of extroverts, they aren’t exactly home territory for introverts. Arguably, they wouldn’t be out of place describing a red-blooded American Football team captain.
It’s not hard to imagine why a more reserved person might find this kind of talk off-putting. If you’re more social caterpillar than social butterfly, you might be getting the impression that HR isn’t for you at all.
The perks of being a wallflower
While introversion is commonly mistaken for shyness, one does not necessitate the other. Many introverts are very personable and friendly, the only difference is that socialising is an effort — after a certain amount, an introvert will want some time alone to recharge.
It doesn’t mean they don’t have what it takes to be in the limelight.
Take Audrey Hepburn, known for her extroverted on-screen personality, who said: “I have to be alone very often. I’d be quite happy if I spent from Saturday night until Monday morning alone in my apartment. That’s how I refuel.”
Undeniably though, in business, that’s more of a drawback than a bonus. However, there are upsides.
Introverts tend to be more receptive to the thoughts and feelings of others, plus less likely to speak without thinking. This makes them ideal listeners, a quality you’d imagine a truly successful HR pro would need.
Listening is only the start of it. Introverts offer qualities that make them eminently suitable for working in HR, and these qualities are getting more and more relevant as HR changes.
Introverts are more likely to take on-board a lot of data from many sources and mull it over to come to their own conclusions. In a future of data-driven HR, this more methodical and analytic approach yields better results than, say, acting on personal intuition and experience.
While introverts struggle to form large networks, the connections they make tend to be deeper and more meaningful. So they can be more effective than extroverts when deployed in SMEs, and more likely to be able to influence key figures on big decisions.
There’s also a wealth of research that suggests introverts are more focused, less easily distracted, calmer in a crisis, and have higher emotional intelligence than their extroverted colleagues.
Survival manual
So you’re a card-carrying introvert. You may believe it’s vital to your professional reputation to keep up a more outgoing persona, but there are ways you can play to your strengths.
- Not all HR areas are equal for introverts. Compensation & Benefits, HRIS, HR Business Partner, Health & Safety — these specialisations play to introverted strengths in ways that, perhaps, Training or Employee Relations may not.
- Try to arrange as many of your meetings on a one-to-one basis as possible.
- Attempt to find some downtime between busy, social occasions. That means it may be better to skip out on a working lunch if there’s a meeting both before and after.
- Others will respect your need for personal space and time if you broach the subject casually. Opting out of lots of social events without explanation may confuse people, or worse, be perceived as rude and anti-social.
- Try to score yourself a private office, or at least a more isolated desk. Headphones may be a weapon of last resort, but be aware that using them as a crutch may also be seen as anti-social.
- Try networking online to take the sting out of the tail of meeting people for the first time. When you do eventually meet, you’ll already have a launchpad with which to start a conversation.
A bright future?
It looks like the future is on the side of the introvert.
As face-to-face communication becomes less necessary, and there’s a growing hostility to meeting overly often, getting along in the office is looking more introvert friendly. Even the offices themselves are looking to change. Open-plan offices have come in for a lot of flak, and bellwether offices for the future of workspace, such as Google’s, have moved to a mixed system of open plan and closed, with lots of private areas for more intimate discussion or quiet introspection.
And that’s if we’re even still working in the office. Fast Company has predicted that over one third of the workforce will be working remotely by 2020.
And even that ignores the fact that we’ll probably all be slaves to robot overlords soon enough, and then introverts needn’t worry about office parties anymore.
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