How Introverts Build Real Influence Without Authority or Hierarchy

The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA is heating up, March Bandit’s here, and MLB is almost back. Every day there’s a new headline, a new highlight, a new moment you’ve got to see for yourself. That’s why I stay locked in with the Bleacher Report app. For me, it’s about staying connected to my sports. I could follow the teams I care about, get real-time scores, breaking news, and highlights all in one place. Dallow the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment. Let me ask you a question. Have you ever felt like you’re buried under layers of management or bureaucracy? And your decisions move slowly, your ideas get watered down, and influence seems reserved for the loudest voice in the room? In this episode, we’re going to learn what happens when that model is flipped on its head. Welcome to the Introverted Leader. It’s a podcast helping introverted leaders embrace your underrated, quiet strengths, so you can get promoted and start earning what you deserve. I’m Greg Wanger. I have over 25 years of leadership experience, and yes, I am an introvert. I’m joined here today by Matt Spore. He’s an organizational design practitioner with the TEL team, and we’ll explore what happens when companies flatten their hierarchy. Zoom should already down to the teams and start organizing the workplace around trust instead of control. What makes this conversation especially interesting for introverts is this. In a self-managing organization, influence really doesn’t come from your title or charisma or dominance. It comes from your clarity, your contribution, your ability to elevate the output of the team. So what we’re going to cover here is number one. Why introverts gain more influence in self-managing, trust-based cultures? Number two, how you can lead and shape your environment, even if your company isn’t already flattened. And number three, how to think about your voice as a tool for influence. So you can communicate with authority without faking extraversion. This conversation is practical, grounded, and full of real world examples. Let’s dive in. Here’s my conversation with Matt. As a side note, Matt happens to be an audiobook narrator, which is one of the more interesting side gigs I’ve ever come across. So note the dulcet tones of his voice. Matt, welcome to the show. Greg, that was an awesome intro. Thank you. I’ve never had my tones described as dulcet before. So I appreciate that. Yeah, well, the listeners can judge for themselves, but yeah, that’s a really, really great gig. So we were introduced by Ed Frownheim, who was on my show. I interviewed him. Fantastic. I had a lot of people listen to that episode. Ed’s Men’s Health Advocate and Journalist and Advocate in general for men who are not jerks. Could you tell us where you two met? Yeah. So what’s upon a time I needed a job. And I saw this job listing for a place called Great Place to Work, which sounded like a great mission just right there in the brand. And so I applied and it was one of those weird things where you apply and you actually like get into the system and you get an interview and you actually get the job. That’s like, that’s maybe the only time that’s ever happened for me. Usually it’s networking, right? And I ended up sitting next to Ed at Great Place to Work. And we worked on similar projects, Great Place to Work, promotes literally great places to work. They do research into that and they help companies improve their workplace culture because that has all sorts of benefits for not only employees, but perform and customers, stakeholders, the whole, the whole nine yards. And while we were there, Ed started a book club around this book called Reinventing Organizations, which is really what codified the teal approach. So that’s how I got roped into this whole world. It’s all Ed’s fault. All right. I’m glad we have it this on record. So Ed stands accused properly. Before we get into all that, I did want to ask you. Also for the record, are you an introvert or extrovert? I am. It’s a scale, right? With Ambervert in the middle. And I’m certainly on the introvert side of Ambervert. I can certainly be Gabby and social when I need to be, but it’s draining too. And I’m also perfectly happy sitting here in my own little corner office and doing my thing. And if I don’t have any meetings, is that day? That’s probably a good day for me, actually. So yeah, I definitely identify with the inward driven need to recharge aspects of being an introvert. And what I’m hearing in that is that you also have quite a bit of comfort being social, maybe being in big groups, leading, speaking some of the things that are not stereotypically introvert. Right. Right. So like I’m a little closer to that Ambervert middle than some people. But for instance, a couple days ago, I live in the Bay Area, I had to drive down to San Jose for an all day on-site customer meeting with people. Sometimes see online, but this was a much bigger group. It was fun to be around. And then I kind of needed a day to unwind from that. So yeah, that’s where I follow that spectrum. That’s great. You’re in good company here. Yeah. So you’re at great places to work. Could you describe that business a little bit? So they actually started as a journalism project a long time ago. Fortune asked a labor writer to write an article on great places to work. And he said, it would be easier to write a story on horrible places to work. I know there’s a lot of them and I can find them easily. But he stuck with the assignment. Took him a year to go find places that he could really say were great places to work. From that, grew this whole dig to driven research model. They used that research in a couple of ways. One, to certify companies on whether they’re a great place to work or not. And then also reporting on places that are great places to work. If you’ve seen the Fortune 100 best list, which a lot of people have, that work is not done by fortune. It’s actually done by great places to work. So let’s talk about the book that you read in your book club, the reinventing organizations. What are some of the key principles? Yeah. So that book came about, it came out 11 years ago, 2014. The man who wrote it, Frederick O’Lew, had spends at least a decade being a management consultant. And he came to a point where he had to admit, we’re not really moving the needle for people doing what we do. We’re not making a difference. As consultants, we’re not helping places get better. There’s got to be a better way to do it. And so he went out to try and find places that were completely different. Are there places that are more soulful, that are more accommodating, that give people more autonomy and purpose? And what he found was a group of companies that worked on self-managing teams, so very flat organization, not chaos, not anarchy. There is structure, but there just wasn’t a lot of coercive hierarchy. So that was one principle. Another one is evolving purpose. Like how does the organization sense its purpose in the world and respond to that over time? Because we have to be adaptive, as opposed to being rigid. And then the third principle was personal wholeness. How do we let people be who they are, live their lives, and still have employment? I think a lot of people find those things are in conflict with them. I can’t be myself all the time when I go to work. Or I work all the time and then I can’t be myself. Right? There needs to be some sort of, as he put it, wholeness. It’s an interesting take on work-life balance. That’s usually what we talk about. But just because you have balance, your work, and life doesn’t mean there is that feeling of wholeness. Maybe there’s still something missing from that, which it sounds like the purpose plays into that as well. Right. Yeah. And so you read this book, you’re in the book club, and was it just revelation that it clicked immediately, or did you feel some resistance, or did you have skepticism about it? Well, the book does a great job of showing actual companies in the real world across industries, across geographies, across organizations and sizes that either started out this way because of their founders or had some sort of transitional moment. And for me, I was intrigued. I’d worked in a lot of places before I came to great place to work. I’d seen good managers, bad managers, good culture, bad culture. But I always felt like there’s got to be a better way for me to contribute, especially being on that somewhat introverted side. That doesn’t look like the normal leader in a lot of places. And so I think a lot of introverts feel like I have a lot of ideas. I have a lot to communicate and contribute. But how do I get through all the other noise that’s going on? And I saw in these teal organizations that were described a way for more people who feel like that to actually be part of the organization that they can belong in several senses. So I was intrigued by that. And I was thought like, that would be a great place to work, pardon the pun. But it would be nice to find places like that where more people could be part of driving the organization basically. Because I think some people think introverts don’t have ambition. That I think is a myth that people say. I think that’s completely false. They’re often very driven people. They’re just not loud about it. This is certainly something that I am and also describes a lot of people that I know as well. So yeah, they’re going about it in different ways. Exactly. And then I don’t know that we’ve explained here yet teal. There’s a color scheme in the book. Right. So what Lillou pointed out was there’s this notion and personal dynamics that he took into organizational dynamics that has a color coded scheme. And so that color coded spectrum basically maps evolution from very much powerful, almost dictatorial cultures and people towards more distributed power and authority than to more shared power. One way I’ve heard it explain is at the very bottom at the red end of the scale, there’s like one person in charge, they have the whole vision, they have all the power. If you move up one level, then maybe they have some trusted lieutenants basically or vice presidents or something like that, but they’ve shared a little bit of the power. You move up to another level and the power gets more diffuse until you hit teal where there is self-managing teams. The power is actually in the teams as opposed into some sort of upper echelon leadership group. As you’re describing this, this has some echoes of agile development in the software space. And I don’t think that’s generally extended to the entire company. So this is applying some of these principles to the entire company or even lean. It’s about pushing decision making power to the front line to where people have the most and the best information as much as possible. Instead of this command and control, you know, these structures break down at a certain point or given the complexity of the work that we do in technology or in the information economy today, you just can’t possibly master the details when you’re several layers up. This is an evolution out of this sort of industrial model where things weren’t that complex. And here, you know, today they’re just far too complex for that to work. Exactly. And changing rapidly, right? Being able to sense and respond is a major thing too. Yeah, when we’re looking at companies and trying to decide, you know, they think they’re teal or they want to be teal or we’re trying to build our report, agile is a strong signal for us that this organization believes in self-managing teams. For us, that’s kind of the first among equals when we’re looking at teal culture among the self-management evolving purpose and wholeness. Lots of people can do purpose and wholeness, right? That’s there’s a lot of good culture sort of movements that promote that. But that self-managing piece is the distinguishing piece and probably the hardest piece. Yeah, I think from an executive perspective, having the trust is probably one of the biggest barriers. So, how does that conversation go? How do you foster trust in this kind of approach? Yeah, that’s tough. And we’ve definitely seen that you have to have buy-in from the people who are in positional power in an organization that wants to change before change can happen, right? And whether that’s teal or agile or whatever, that’s true. I think part of it is appealing to their sense of something’s wrong, right? They wouldn’t be talking to us. We wouldn’t have encountered them if they thought that everything was hunky-dory in their organization. And it could be that either organizations falling behind the competition or the market and something needs to change. Or I personally have finally admitted that as a leader, I can’t have all the answers. And I can’t take all the initiative and I can’t fix all the problems. I have an organization for a reason I need to trust that organization. If I could do it as a solo entrepreneur, I would do it. But you can’t run a major organization like Bear, with out the 90,000 people around you. That’s just you can’t go make all the drugs and package them and ship them and research them. You can’t do that as the CEO. So you’re going to have to trust people. And you’re going to have to admit that trying to be everything to everybody and every situation. It’s not only impossible, it’s exhausting. Lots of leaders feel like they’re alone, right? They are walled off because of these expectations, often that they put on themselves. Yeah. And you mentioned Bear. Maybe we could name a few other prominent examples because everyone has seen at least Bear Aspirin and their European company. Is that right? Yeah. They’re based in Germany. A worldwide company, right? Everybody’s heard of Bear Aspirin by now. They have a fairly large facility here in the San Francisco area. They’re kind of the story of the moment right now. Over the past two years, they’ve been pursuing what they call dynamic shared ownership. There was an article two weeks ago, well, within the last two weeks on CNBC that described this transition that they’re going through. But their CEO came to this point where we are just not being innovative enough, fast enough to keep up with what our customers and our shareholders need. Something’s got to change. And people in his organization told him, I have to go through eight different layers of decisions to try and get anything done. If I wanted to be an innovator, I’d just get stifled. Whether I’m an introvert, an extrovert, whatever. The bureaucracy is just killing us. And so they went all the way into this self-managing model. So now at Bear, you have teams that self-organize every quarter and self-manage what they’re going to do. It doesn’t mean they’re completely in isolation from everybody else, but they are very driven within themselves. People can move around every quarter. You can go recruit people to your project if you want. They also have a notion of your home team, which is interesting. It’s very sports metaphor, which I found kind of surprising. But almost like in school, you had home room, right? People used to all every day. It’s kind of like that, even though you may not, you may all have the same function. Like you may all be researchers or marketers or accountants. You may not sit in the same office, but you have a shared purpose in the organization. So that’s your team that doesn’t change. Those are your comrades that you can turn to for advice, for development, for just having a sense of familiarity as all your other teams change around you. How do these companies achieve accountability? Because I think that’s going to be one of the objections that would come up with. Teams are just running themselves. How do we make sure stuff is getting done and keep them accountable for things? You can still have things like KPIs and goals. All that stuff still applies. But instead of having one person, the manager who has some sort of positional power to hand out feedback and evaluations, you teach the team to do it. People give each other feedback. People give each other advice. It’s a much more democratic thing. It’s not that much different from organizations that do 360 reviews, where your manager’s one of your reviewers, but you also have your internal and external stakeholders, your teammates also contribute to that. It’s pretty close to that. It’s just nobody’s voice is larger than anybody else’s in that process. I can imagine that with any change, there’s fear. People fear change and people who feel like they have something to lose may resist that change. How do these roll outs go without or how do they deal with a revolt from middle management layer? It feels like, okay, then it seems like I don’t have a place in this. Yeah, that can be tough, especially for people who have invested their identity in their professional role. That’s often a trap people get into. It can be tough. Bears got rid of a lot of people who’ve had that middle manager role. That was actually one of their goals from the start is we need to remove these layers of hierarchy. There’s still room for people in the organization who maybe they feel like I’m not a researcher, but I bring other things to bear, for instance, like I’m a good project manager or I am a good coach of people. There are roles for those sorts of coordination and support jobs inside a self-managing organization. It just looks different. I think the main thing is you lose the sense of having any sort of coercive power. You don’t have power over people. You can’t tell them what to do. Which is frustrating for some people who’ve been in management, especially the higher up you go, I’m used to being that command and control person. Do you find these organizations get warm merit or critic? I think that’s a good question. I didn’t really look at it in that lens before. The thing that popped in my mind is there’s fewer places for people to hide. If you’re on a self-managing team where the team is deciding what they’re going to do, deciding who they need and giving each other feedback, you can’t be a slacker. You got to pull your weight. You have to be responsible. Whether that’s meritocratic or not, I don’t know. The sense of meritocracy, just like hierarchy or aristocracy, is that there’s level. That’s not really the case in a teal organization. You’re not going to get to be over people or exalted because you’re better at something. You may be acknowledged as an expert. You may grow into being more of a team leader, a visionary. You may be able to step into power that you’ve always wanted to step into on personal power that you now can because there’s not a hierarchy telling you what to do or thinking you’re not the right personality type for that. But I don’t think it’s the same thing as meritocracy. It’s not reflected in rank or title, but you may actually rise a lot in terms of influence and leadership. Your peers may recognize you differently. If the team is driving things like compensation, which a lot of self-managing teams do, they can decide, wow, Greg has really become a leader in this area. Greg drove a lot of this business for us when we’re talking about how we share our compensation pool for the coming year. I think I vote that Greg gets a big slice because Greg’s been a big part. People have that say, but that doesn’t mean you’re now the commander. I have seen this in smaller agile teams. Junior engineers can come in with an idea and there’s a lot of openness to where ideas come from. Of course, then they get shot down by senior people and they might be quiet for a while. But when they do contribute, that’s recognized and you can see people rise in influence in this group. Influence is a good term. You’re able to have a lot more influence regardless of how long you’ve been there or where you came from or who you are in a self-managing organization. You have more chance to have that influence. Let’s talk a little bit about the purpose or the evolving purpose. How have you seen that show up in companies? Let’s say you’re an executive and you have the purpose you’ve defined for your company. How is this different from that? Well, I’ll pull one example from Frederick Lawos book, which I think is a fabulous example of that. One of the companies he found was a French brass foundry called Favii and they had pioneered a lot of these teal tactics, basically. But they were very much a mainline manufacturing company. If you need brass fittings, doorknobs or hinges or whatever, that’s what they made. But an interesting thing about copper, which is part of brass, is copper is naturally antiseptic. And so one of the people in the company said, you know, copper has this amazing property and if we could figure out how to manufacture it so it’s durable because it’s kind of soft. That’s why you don’t find a lot of purely copper things aside from copper wire. If we can manufacture items out of copper, we might be able to move into the medical devices field, which is a field we’ve never moved into. And this wasn’t some top-down marketing person going out and doing research. This was somebody who was familiar with the company and the materials they used and saw an opportunity. And so he brought that idea forward using what teal people call the advice process. You can do almost anything in a teal company, but you have to go get advice from people who are going to be impacted. And the bigger the change, the more people you have to go get advice from and try and influence that basically. And it took them years to try and figure out how can we make things that are sufficiently copper enough to be antiseptic. But they pioneered this whole new line of medical tools that they never would have done if they hadn’t listened to this one person with this one property about the material they already have. That’s an example where the fact that it was self-managed evolved the purpose of the company, the exact branched out into the medical field. Right. A lot of this is with the executive team. I’ve seen firsthand how much executive team, certainly CEO, is dictating the way their organization is run, the culture, the values. So much is derived from that. So are we really talking about that kind of top down decision? Is there anyone else outside of that that tear can do to try to influence this kind of change? Yeah. Great question. We’re working with a Japanese software company now where the management team thinks they want to be more teal, but they’re having a hard time just getting all the way there. This basically are our effort with them. Yeah. I would point to another book, a woman Samantha Slade has a book called Going Horizontal, in which she talks about we all in our daily lives are very self-managed people, right? Most people manage to pay the rent and buy groceries and make decisions and lead projects at home and all this other stuff. We’re very capable in our personal lives, but somehow we have to check that at the door because we’ve stepped into this hierarchy where we don’t have that sort of power. She would say that you can bring horizontal practices, which look a lot like teal practices, into your everyday work on your own. You can start it by yourself. You can bring it into your team in the way that your team shows up for meetings, how they make decisions, how they give each other feedback. These are all things that you can do inside your team culture, regardless of what’s going on in the official organizational hierarchy and culture of where you work. You certainly can have influence on this. Is that going to change your entire company? It could, right? Revolutions have to start somewhere, but there’s no guarantee of that. It could still make your team a more enjoyable and more effective place to work. Yeah, it could have an enormous impact on your life proper and your day-to-day experience. You become an example to other teams. Maybe that’s Fred’s. It doesn’t, but at least you’re experiencing some of these benefits within your atmosphere. I would like to think that even marketing, my background is more in marketing. If marketing teams are paying attention to what software development teams are doing with Agile, you can do a lot of marketing stuff with an Agile mindset. You can still have the notion of epics and stories and sprints and backlogs and retrospectives and all that works great in marketing. That’s one example of how team culture can spread within a larger culture. I think all the other teal practices follow the same path or can. Your advice is really good. I have to give similar advice with respect to introversion. As a leader, no matter what level you’re at, even if you’re an individual contributor, you have the opportunity to lead and point out in any setting, like in a meeting or to your manager, hey, it would be really great if we had an agenda beforehand. That the people who are quieter can prepare, hey, we really need a break here. Some of us need to take a few minutes to recharge and this type of thing. Everyone has this opportunity to lead and it sounds even if it was an opportunity, hey, maybe we can self-organize this one project and try that out and see how that goes. Yeah. Absolutely. One of the philosophies of teal is experimentation and specifically what is safe to try right now. What can we do that’s just a little different? See what happens. There’s so much that we just do by road or default or that’s why it’s always been or that’s how the way the boss wants it. But let’s just tweak it a little bit. What’s safe enough to try? Some, I don’t want to shift gears almost entirely. I don’t hope I don’t rip up the gearbox. I want to ask about your audiobook reading. What are some books that you are able to talk about that you’ve narrated? First of all, the voice acting world is a huge world. There’s everything from commercials to animated movies to voice tree, phone systems to audiobooks. It is a large field. There’s a lot of people in it, a lot of competition, but there’s a lot of ways to do that. I just happen to gravitate towards narration and audiobooks in particular. That’s what fits me. I’m okay standing in my booth, talking to myself for an hour at a time. The books I’ve done, I call them the M’s. Most of my topics have been management books, memoir, money and finance or mystery. I would love to throw in meditation. That’s another M I would like to do. But even in the land of audiobooks, I’m not doing romance, I’m not doing horror, I’m not doing a lot of things. Those are the things where I’ve seemed to have found traction and people think my voice works for those sorts of things. I recently took about six weeks off over the summer to get this teal landscape report out. I just had too much to do. I finished one book, which was a profile of an architecture practice. That was a management book in some ways. I just took six weeks off. I didn’t audition. I just didn’t do it. Getting back on that horse after six weeks, it’s like, do I remember how to do this still? I found some more additions and I can say that right now I’m prepping a classic sci-fi novel that I’m going to be working on next. After that is a family holocaust and more. Those are the next two things coming up. Yeah, some weighty stuff. You studied a little bit for this. You got the idea to do this and then you had to do some study. Yeah. People think that you just have to be a natural at this and you have to have the right voice. Some of the best advice I’ve gotten from this, which I think applies in a lot of life is your voice is not a jewel. It doesn’t have to be shiny and perfect in order to be a voice actor. It’s a tool that you use. It’s not a jewel. It’s a tool. I think we can take that to a lot of places in the world. If I want to be an actor, my face doesn’t have to be perfect. My face is not a jewel. I know I’m particularly not fortunate that way. It’s a tool that I can use, right? To convey emotion and to help communicate. Same thing with my writing. I don’t have to be Hemingway. I don’t have to be perfect, but I do need to communicate. So it needs to be a tool. I think this is an approach we can take. But yes, there is a lot of training to be done. My wife actually said, oh, you’ve got a nice voice. You should have a podcast or be on the radio. We found a like a Perkson wreck one night class on Introduction to Voice Acting. So I said, let’s go. Come on. This was your idea. And that’s where I got the curtain pulled back and saw what it was. It’s like, oh, this seems like fun. And I found out that there’s a very well-established voice acting school here in the Bay area that I can just go to and start taking classes. So that’s what I did back in 2019. And I took classes pretty regularly for about two and a half, almost three years before I actually started auditioning and recording audiobooks. But actors, one thing I have to say is the acting community has a great ethos of lifelong learning. You are always taking classes, getting feedback from a coach, learning new techniques, moving in of opportunity. You’re always evolving. That’s one thing I really like about that whole pursuit. That’s great. There’s a lot of lessons in here. I know that one of the things when I started getting more into leadership and needing to speak in front of audiences, your voice really is a toy. And there are ways that you can lean into different registers in your voice and hold space in the room with pauses, adding different emotional tones. There’s sort of like an amateur thing that I’ve done, but I know a lot of public speakers will go into classes and do something on similar lines of what you do as a voice actor to train. But you think about it. We all have different roles every day. Actors have roles. We have roles. We need to step in as a parent, as a worker, as a friend, as a family member. So just thinking about the notion of roles is a useful exercise, no matter who you are. I think specifically for introverts, you know, what can you learn from acting? There’s classic questions that you ask yourself in preparation as an actor before you go into any role or scene. And so one of them is, who am I? Like who am I in this scene? You can answer that in any way you want. Who am I talking to? You can usually do audience analysis. Why am I talking to them? Like what do I want to say? What do they need to hear sort of thing? And what was I doing just before? Like what energy am I bringing into this interaction? But if you’re an introvert and you need to go make a presentation to pitch your project, you can approach it as an actor. Like who am I in this particular situation? I may not be Matt or Anne or whoever. I’m actually going to go into this as I’m a PhD researcher. Even if you don’t have a PhD, that’s the persona you want to take on when you go and make this presentation. Who am I talking to? Well, I know who I’m talking to. You know, these are my colleagues. I’m pitching them an idea. Why am I talking to them? Well, you can give yourself whatever motivation you want in that. It could be, you know, a very personal focused motivation. And that will give you a different sort of energy. That’s a really useful framing. I’ve given advice that, you know, as an introvert, taking on the role of the leader of the meeting can be very empowering because then you have a specific set of expectations that you need to fulfill. It’s like putting something on that maybe you wouldn’t naturally, maybe your natural inclination is to sit back and listen more. But no, you’re leading the meeting. So you’ve got it, you just kind of, it happens more naturally than you think it would be just by giving yourself that job, taking, accepting that role. I mean, introverts, a lot of them have a great imagination, right? We get accused of living in our head. Well, our head’s a nice place, right? And imagination’s a big part of that. And if you can bring that into situations where it’s a little outside your comfort room, but that imagination will help you feel more comfortable there, I think that’s a great tool to use. Awesome. This has been really fun talking about all this stuff. If the audience wants to learn more about you and your work, where should they go? You can certainly find me on LinkedIn under Matthewsport. That’s an easy place to find me. If you want to learn more about Teal, you can go to the tealteam.com and download our report and contact us there to find out more. I will also say there’s a new organization in the US starting out called Self-Management USA, which is meeting every month. It’s a nice growing community. You can find them on LinkedIn as well and meet up with other people who are exploring this concept. Awesome. Thanks for being on the show. Greg, this was fabulous. I can’t believe we’re done. The time is just flown by. Literally. This is fabulous. Awesome. All right. I had such a great conversation with Matt. Let’s take a moment to recap. A couple of themes really stood out for me. Number one, influence doesn’t require a title. It doesn’t rest on hierarchy. When an authority is distributed like in the examples we talked about, and trust replaces control, introverted leaders can really rise in that situation and become more visible and not less because they’re thinking, they’re judgment, they’re clarity of mind and they’re follow through really carries the day and elevates the team. Number two, you don’t need permission to lead differently. Even if your organization isn’t flatter, self-managing, like these exotic examples in our episode, you can start introducing better ways of working inside your own team, let your clear decision-making, your ownership, your willingness to experiment and advocate for new ideas. The surface just like you were a different kind of organization. Number three, your voice is a tool for influence. You don’t need to sound like someone else to be effective. With intention and with preparation, a little practice, maybe a few lessons, introverts can communicate with authority and meetings and presentations and in high stakes moments without being somebody else. If this episode resonates with you, here’s one simple step. Subscribe to the podcast so you don’t miss any future episodes. I’m Greg Wanger. Keep leading quietly and I’ll see you next time.