Why extroverts fail.

[Deleted]

Good morning to you, all.

It's pretty interesting article that I read this morning.
What do you think, guys, let me hear what you have to say on it.

www.washingtonpost.com/national/on-leadership

The answer, in new research from Adam Grant, the youngest tenured professor at the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School of Management, is far more intriguing. In a study that will be published later this year in the journal Psychological Science, Grant collected data from sales representatives at a software company. He began by giving reps an often-used personality assessment that measures introversion and extroversion on a 1-to-7 scale, with 1 being most introverted and 7 being most extroverted.

Then he tracked their performance over the next three months. The introverts fared worst; they earned average revenue of $120 per hour. The extroverts performed slightly better, pulling in $125 per hour. But neither did nearly as well as a third group: the ambiverts.

Ambi-whats?

Ambiverts, a term coined by social scientists in the 1920s, are people who are neither extremely introverted nor extremely extroverted. Think back to that 1-to-7 scale that Grant used. Ambiverts aren’t 1s or 2s, but they’re not 6s or 7s either. They’re 3s, 4s and 5s. They’re not quiet, but they’re not loud. They know how to assert themselves, but they’re not pushy.

In Grant’s study, ambiverts earned average hourly revenues of $155, beating extroverts by a healthy 24 percent. In fact, the salespeople who did the best of all, earning an average of $208 per hour, had scores of 4.0, smack in the middle of the introversion-extroversion scale.

What’s more, when Grant plotted total sales revenue against the scale, he found that revenue peaked in the center and fell off considerably as personality moved toward either the introverted or extroverted poles. Those high in extroversion fared scarcely better than those high in introversion, and both lagged far behind their counterparts in the moderate middle.

What holds for actual salespeople holds equally for the quasi-salespeople known as leaders. Extroverts can talk too much and listen too little. They can overwhelm others with the force of their personalities. Sometimes they care too deeply about being liked and not enough about getting tough things done.

This is outline's of the article.

[Deleted]

I already posted out line's of the article.

[thyme4change]

That makes sense. I have met so many swarmy extroverts. And now they are taking all the other extroverts down. I don't trust people that are too friendly, that are too confident. They just make me pause and consider that they are full of shit. And once I think that, even a little, I will look for proof that it is true.

I like normal, middle of the road people. I suspect many do.

[Deleted]

No reason.

[weltschmerz]

They needed a study for that? People prefer reasonable salespeople rather than in-your-face or shy and insipid?
Who knew?

[Deleted]

Jan 29, 2013 15:22:05 GMT -5 weltschmerz said:

They needed a study for that? People prefer reasonable salespeople rather than in-your-face or shy and insipid?
Who knew?

welts,

Some of us thought it was worthy, it wasn't for the salespeople.  The article use them as an exemple for the study.