Do Introverts or Extroverts Make Better Leaders? Wally Bock

This resource first appeared in issue #4 on 31 Jan 2020 and has tags Becoming A Manager: Other

I don’t think it’s controversial to suggest that the population of people who have chosen (a) research and (b) computing for a career tend to be introverts, and that can make the transition to managing other human beings a jarring transition. But managing well is a set of skills, and there is no one who finds all of those behaviours - seeing the big picture, sweating the details, working closely with people, working closely with abstractions (and all simultaneously!) - immediately natural.

“When looking at CEOs who met expectations, we found no statistically significant difference between introverts and extroverts. High confidence more than doubles a candidate’s chances of being chosen as CEO but provides no advantage in performance on the job.”

While that’s very nice to hear, there’s something else here - those of us in the research computing field probably aren’t aware of studies like where that came from:

It’s based on their review of 17,000 leadership assessments.

There is actually a lot of data on the basics of good management, lots of which comes from quantitative studies at single large organizations (so where a lot of other variables are held constant). It’s noisier data than in say astronomy, because between-people variability is larger than that between stars, but that just means that you need large N. The basic low-hanging fruit of things people can do to manage well are not controversial or in serious question; people use (and argue over) different techniques to do the same basic things, but in the end you need to build good, trusting, working relationships with and between your team members, set consistent expectations and give constant feedback against those, help team members develop needed and desired skills, and give them increasing responsibilities. Our context may differ from manufacturing jobs, which matters, but the basics remain.