Look After Your Team's Introverts And Extroverts

Welcome to the second in our series of #5toptips on how to keep your business running remotely during the coronavirus outbreak, this time focusing on your team’s introverts and extroverts ensuring they’re all included and valued.

Today, our Managing Director, John Moss, passes on some simple ideas to help us navigate the new normal.

For many years those confident extroverts have been the ones getting all the airtime. Remote working is changing that and the introverts might now get their opportunity.

This will all mean you need to think about and review the potential impact on your team’s dynamics, cohesiveness and effectiveness. In our view people used to being ‘out in the field’ are going to find this new world especially challenging so here are JA Consulting’s #5toptips for this new era:

1. Make sure team social check ins happen

Focus them on the informal (that’s not ignoring the tactical things you need to do). We must not forget that for many, whatever their psychological preferences, this is going to be an incredibly stressful time and managers, and especially those in sales, need to put in extraordinary effort to check in with their team members.

A glib “how is morale” is not enough. We need to focus people onto the positive things that have happened.

Five minutes on a thirty-minute call smiling together, and asking about the best things that have happened today can make a massive difference.

2. Give people structure

Help those whose normal world is characterised by lots of interaction and activity by giving them a routine and help them develop clear objectives within the new world.

Recognise that that routine may need to change as we get used to this new way of working so keep checking in about whether it’s working.

3. Recognise different individual needs

The introverts in your team will be shining through in this new world – they are likely to feel less pressured to immediately react and they are more likely to have done the preparation.

Make sure you give them time to prepare – send out the objectives and any reading in plenty of time.

The extroverts might not have done the preparation so when you run team sessions work really hard to give space for them to express how they are reacting to ideas and proposals.

4. Be clear about your role on any calls

Realise that your job, even more than before, is not giving answers but helping the team come to consensus.

If you are an introvert then prepare a few questions about next steps, if you are an extrovert mute your microphone!

5. Build resilience in this new world

This new way of working will mean different things to different people – our psychological preferences coupled with our work and life experiences and ambitions drive how we behave.

But during the current crisis most of us don’t have life or work experiences to fall back on. This means that, broadly, the more reflective people are likely to be more resilient – they will probably be more analytical about the risks and likely outcomes.

But for a few that inward focus could be quite damaging so look out for those, and gauge how stressed they are getting (this graphic much-shared on Social Media is a good reminder for us all – from https://www.facebook.com/drvanessalapointe/). Also watch your own team conversations and make sure you keep them focused on the things you can control.

Beyond all, the most important role you have as a leader in these times is to actively consider yourself as the monitor of team health – force yourself to think through how the team is working, pull out any previous team psychometrics you’ve had done, consider the different types you have in the team, and make sure you’re making it work for them.

Investments in your people – be they introvert or extrovert – now will pay dividends through this period, and into team cohesion in the future, so it’s worth the effort!

John Moss
Managing Director

LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/johnmoss1

And a final thought

At JA Consulting, we specialise in not just any change – we engineer transformations that truly resonate with your organisation. Those elusive changes that you’ve known you needed, but somehow always slipped through the cracks. The kind of change that once implemented, leaves you wondering how you ever managed without it.

Why wait? Reach out to us today, and we can show you how to deliver lasting change that sticks.