Introvert Leadership in Fast Rooms — Manage Your Energy and Respond with Confidence

Have you ever walked out of a meeting thinking, did I really just say that? You know it’s not your best response. And then you just replay the episode in your head again and again for the next day or week. If you’re an introverted leader, that moment stings because you know you make your best contributions when you have time to pause and think deeply. But these high speed overstimulating office environments are basically designed to pull you out of your sweet spot and not make your best contributions. Welcome to the Introverted Leader. It’s a podcast helping introverted leaders embrace your underrated quiet strengths to 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. And today is episode I’m joined by Lisa O’Born in Christopher Edy. It’s for a conversation about leadership, your nervous system, and practical tips that you can start using today. We’ll dig into why so many leaders get stuck repeating the same patterns over their career, especially as they get into middle management. How control shows up when trust is low and what it actually looks like to train your mind to stay present as you lead. You’ll discover number one, how to interrupt autopilot. So you can lead with intention. Number two, a simple way to create more time in the moment. So you can respond rather than just react. And number three, why trust beats control in the modern workplace. All right, let’s dive in. Here’s my conversation with Lisa and Christopher. It’s a real pleasure to have both of you, Christopher and Lisa. Welcome. Thanks to Rick. It’s great to be here. Thanks for having us. Yeah. Well, this is actually a first for this podcast for me. It’s just having multiple guests. So I’m excited about that. And I do start off all of my conversations by asking each of you an introvert or extrovert. Let’s start with Christopher. Introvert by preference. Extrovert by career choices. I would say yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Good answer, Lisa. Definitely introvert. Comfort level extrovert is not there. Yeah. Well, I think a lot of us who are drawn into leadership are drawn into professions which tend to favor people who are extroverts. And there’s expectations and biases that the way extroverts operate is how you should operate in that career. And of course, we know that there are other ways to be and that introverts can participate and thrive in those situations as well. We just have to operate a little bit differently. But it is a challenge for a lot of introverts. Let me jump in and ask about your personal journeys. How did you end up doing the type of work you’re doing? We should maybe touch on what’s an agile coach and how did you fall into that? Sure. I can get us started. So for me, it’s sort of an odd journey. I went to school for finance, which is really funny. Didn’t end up there. Then also did a lot of kind of courses on being a vet. Didn’t end up there. Found out I didn’t like blood. That didn’t go well. And really just fell into where I ended up being because I needed work. Great encounter. Okay. That’s something that fits that scenario. It’s something that I can do. And it really ended up being the fact that in the job I ended up with, I was in small groups. So more of that introvert right small teams. So I could relate more to people, maybe one on one, two on one. And it gave me the opportunity. I think that’s the biggest thing that drew me to it is to not have to put on a mask. And we all know that to try to be somebody that we’re not. And that’s really what drew me to doing the leadership and getting into that role, not just agile, but leadership manager in general. And I was able to help my team members, the people in the group also do that same thing. Don’t put on a mask. Let’s be frank. Let’s be honest. Let’s share. And I’ll figure out how to deal with it. Sounds like you through participating in small groups, you found a path to lead authentically in that situation. Yeah. Exactly. All right. I was very fortunate coming out of college to end up in a lot of leadership roles. And most of them I stayed in for about three years and then would find another challenge and moved through politics and government. And say politics first because fortunately there it was politic laid and didn’t like that very much. And when I got out of it, I went into HR and did some sales mostly at leadership levels. And then went into nursing because the previous work I felt like I had lost my empathy and nursing gave that back to me after leaving the hospital. However, I had a minor in engineering and I thought, well, you know what? This will be fun. I’m going to go out there and learn construction. So I went out and work in pipeline and the introverts dream because you’re out in the middle of nowhere. You’re isolated. And as an inspector, my inspected coding on gas line and oil pipelines, I inspected wells and I inspected safety as well as environment. And nobody bothered me. I showed up at the beginning of the day. I walked around, did my job, you know, had that little superior hard hat on. Like everybody knows that’s a leader over there. The little check marks have conversation with people. And then I’d go back to the office. I’d send reports in and nobody bothered me. Well, my challenge was the weather. I’d grown up in the Northeast and did not like the cold. Mootered the south for about 25 years and thought, this is great. Well, I had said I would never move back to the Northeast unless something was so powerful that it just kind of rocked my world and the engineering stuff did it. When I got into technology where I met Lisa as well, this because I was looking to come back to doors. I didn’t want to be outdoors anymore. I thought, well, is there another way to use this engineering stuff and loves technology started off with it in college and went back to it. And so we ended up in again, some pretty high level positions leading companies that really needed to transform. That’s great. I love the diversity of the background in there. Maybe we can start talking about middle managers and how do you define what a middle manager is? I’ll give you one point. Lisa and I discussed this the other day. I’ll let her take on some of the maybe technical and I’ll just put this out there for the record because Lisa would if I didn’t, by the way. One of the things that she and I have taken a keen liking to is fighting isms. And in all honesty, if most of us are really honest, there is an ism attached to what we call middle manager and typically the middle managers are in fact those who translate what comes from that top brass in higher article businesses to people who are engrossed in the work that if something up here in a very abstract way was said in terms of the plans, might not be understood at the lower levels of work. And so there needs to be that translation to me. That’s what a middle manager is. But it’s also having moved through those levels. Those are years of experience. And so as we develop those years of experience, we’re able to translate what that really means up here down to those who are actually doing the work and those years of experience oftentimes becomes that fight that ism because it takes a number of decades to get to that point where you understand the concept of how the business is run. But also because you remember where you’ve grown through how to help those who are actually working at those working levels. So that’s one thing is the ism. Yeah. And can you expand a little bit of someone has an encounter that it term is it like a belief system or is it the attitude that the manager itself has or is it an attitude that other people have about the manager? I would say it’s probably more the attitude that people have about the manager because that particular ism is a gism that I’m speaking of. Okay. Middle managers typically are people who are in their late 40s definitely into their 50s. And they understand the business. You know, most of them have been around in careers, maybe not the same company, but in a line of business where they’ve grown to understand certain things. You know, at least I talked about this last week in one company that we worked with in the higher arki they took out because they just thought that they wanted to flatten the organization. They took out the managerial level that was the thinking level, the cereal thinking level. If this happens, then this when they had a weakened emergency chemical leak, the layer that they had there was a doing level, the layer that was not fair was the next level that actually was over multiple groups. And what happened by the time they figured out at that lower level that something was major wrong and a goth that information outside of the plant, it cost them a shutdown and $18 million for every hour that they had to remove people from that area, very, very costly mistake. They removed their middle managers. So for the characteristics of experience and some of those technical things at least they might speak about, there is this experience that goes along with middle management. It’s the perception that people have. Oh, they’re going to end their career. All they’re on the downside of their career, those kinds of terms. So we fight that by helping middle managers typically in that range reset. What does it mean not to have to go through the same repetitive cycles of, yeah, you did great this year. Here’s your bonus. What if I want to really become a great leader? So it’s more than just the, I won’t say the individual, but one of the things we’re fighting is to help people get out of that stockness that happens when people get towards that partner career. Should we jump into the framework? So I’ll say this first. One of the things that we believe is that if we’re going to impact people’s central nervous system, the biggest thing that we have to do is we have to give them an experience because I can tell you all day long about something, but if you can’t feel it, it’s, you can’t understand it at an internal level, you won’t do it. So here’s what I would ask you to do. I’m going to ask you and watch. I want you to note what happens to you when you do this. Follow your own eyes. You do that for me. Okay. Because we’re watching and everybody else is watching. I want you to think about a time when you saw something in your house and you were like, Oh my gosh, that’s perfect. That’s exactly where that goes. Or you saw something that wasn’t there and you thought that’s where I wanted to go. I got a spot for that. Now what you didn’t see was where your eyes went. We did. Now here’s my question. Do you know where you are? Yes. They went up until a visual place. So we walked people through those kinds of experiences so they get to understand here’s what your central nervous system is doing. Here’s an experience of it because we just want to tell you some kind of, well, remember a kind of factoid. Now we want you to have the experience. Once you have the experience, then we can begin showing you the other parts of your central nervous system. We teach people how to use things like that purposefully. Auditory is out here. You need to, if you are having an emotional moment, it’s probably because your eyes are down here either in internal dialogue or self, it’s a self emotional supporting dialogue. It’s all down here. Auditory is straight out here. Like if I said to you, Greg, what’s the sound of the cowbell and a siren and a dog barking all together? See what your eyes went? Do you see that? Rest of the world is his eyes would access that information. So once we get managers to understand that, we teach them their central nervous system. They can respond rather than react, which means now they’re back in thinking mode. Sometimes that means slowing down time, little kind of stores. So things happen. They see things happening a little slower. It’s in real time, but they get to think ahead of what they’re seeing. And then we want them to understand the signals. What does this mean with somebody saying this? Because we teach them how to actually build rapport, rapport is about empathy. It means I can stand in your shoes and as you’re expressing, I can begin to feel there is a way to do that. I don’t teach people how to do that just in conversation. Lastly, we want them to embrace leadership. So we don’t just say, Hey, be a great leader. You know, rah, rah, rah. What we do, Greg, is we ask them the question, who are the great? There’s a lot of great leadership models. And John Maxwell has one that he’s been doing for decades. I think Anthony Robbins has some great stuff. Stephen Covey, Lachstein Covey has a great model for that. There’s a lot of social activists who have been great leaders, Martin Luther King, Mahatma Gandhi and other Theresa. So there are leaders in a lot of different ways. We ask people, who’s the great leader and who’s that model for you? And then we extract out those leadership skills. And that’s what we have them embrace. Go be that leader. Go be who it is. You say is the greatest leader. Be that leader that you would want if you were on your team. Now we have them embrace because now they have the skill set. They understand how to interpret the signals and they can manage their own mental nervous system so they’re responding versus reacting. That is one of the things that takes away fear. Lisa likes to talk about the foulness. It takes in every piece of information that comes in through the eyes, ears, nose, et cetera, and process it all through your sense of nervous system. What we want people to do is to be in touch with that. And what I mean by that, we simply want people to understand that it’s your central nervous system. By the time you get to the age when you know, you’re 30, 40, 50, there’s a lot of things that are on autopilot and Lisa is the queen of stop the autopilot interrupted. Let’s do something different. I’ll all didn’t face something on that. Christopher, you know that. So what is being said there? Once we hit 35, that’s the sweet spot. 95% of our nervous system runs on autopilot. 95%. So we’re living in, I like to use ground on day because so many people have watched that movie and they laugh and say, Oh my gosh, that’s crazy. But reality is what happens? You wake up at the same time. You do the same habits first. Maybe it’s go to the washroom. Maybe it’s get a coffee. Maybe it’s whatever. You have the same schedule for making breakfast, having a shower, getting ready, getting dress for work, the same preference for clothes. What do you do? You drive or take the same public transit along the same route, arriving at the same time, running into the exact same people along the route. Nothing changes. And then you sit there and you arrive at the office kind of stress because you’re already in this pattern. And the first thing you do is you run into somebody and say, I want something different and innovative. And what have you done? You’ve spent the entire hours getting ready for work, doing the exact same thing, the exact same way, nonstop. And even yourself, you’re going, why do I do nothing different? Switch it. And sometimes it’s as simple and people go, how do you do it? And with nervous system, we have trillions of nerves in our nervous system, trillions. And what do you do? The exact same thing. So some days I will rate with my left hand. Some days I will write with my right hand. Why? Because it allows me to rewire and process information different just by changing the hand I use. Or even things that are simple. If you watch when you walk, you usually always start with one foot first. Doesn’t matter if it’s a right or left. Consciously, which watch how different you process information just by switching which leg you start with. Do you have the average age of the CEOs and or the sea level sweet slash leaders are in some of the Eastern Asian countries? You probably do. Probably 70 plus 80. Wow. 80 to 85 on average because they understand what Lisa’s talking about brain plasticity. When you start rewiring your range, you actually develop new brain cells. White Sun staves off all the problems that we have with age, but you become sharper. Now, their respect for age and wisdom and that kind of thing is a little bit different culturally, but the truth of the matter is we all age the same. There’s only 0.001% that has a different wiring in the brain. Everybody else, we’re all saying right. Is there belief that these cultures have developed ways of continuing that neuroplasticity in a more beneficial way? I think they just embraced it. We systemically, whether it’s because of the revolution of work or the ideology behind some of the earlier work in the 20th century, whether it’s shift work, etc. I’m not sure what the reason is, but there is a reason why at some age, we have decided in our culture, particularly in the Western hemisphere, that we want you out of the workforce. I don’t even know if it’s a matter of you can’t do the work anymore. It’s we want you out of the workforce. So we prepare all these things to get you a workforce. Yeah. You’re peaking. You’re getting better. So what do you see happening in businesses now? Is there anything different now than say 10 years ago? I’m going to say one word and I’m going to let these subriber or this one. I don’t think it’s different. I think it’s more pronounced because of the mediums that we have. Trust, simply trust. The whole return, the office thing, the whether we should be an office thing, how teams are led, quite quitting all that stuff. Trust. You mean there’s less trust. I see right now a lot of businesses, businesses were moving forward and getting more trust. There was much more allowing people to be accountable for their actions. I fell in a lot of that happening even during the pandemic that that was actually going up. As soon as quote unquote, people saw the pandemic as over. And I’m saying quote, that trust started to leave because then what happened? You had more companies doing layoffs. You had forced approaches as to how you’re supposed to do your work. Not necessarily that meant that that’s when you were productive. There are so many force things. Nail productivity and a lot of companies has gone down. The threat of AI has caused people to lose trust because Nail, they don’t know if they’re valued anymore. That open transparency communication trust actually is less snail with people being back in the office than it was with people not being in the office. It’s decreased. And it’s decreased even from when people were in the office 20 years ago. It’s gone the opposite way. I think we’re measuring the wrong thing. I think we’re measuring attendance because we don’t know how to measure productivity. We’ve struggled. I mean, he’s saying, no, this as actual coaches, that’s the biggest thing that we fought. It was almost as if people equated in an hour, you should be able to do this amount of work. And so the number of hours then became what you were responsible for. Somebody equated that to this amount of work, like a cup full of work or something, which made no sense in an agile world because everything was just not predictable. You didn’t even know what your costs were going to be. And at the same time, it was like we had to think about how to get people out of that cookie cutter mode of this is the way we have to do it when it just didn’t work that way. Right. So it’s it’s applying to sort of interchangeable parts, ideas, very, very industrial. That’s kind of retrograde. It’s like a military model where, you know, replace the body and the rank. And that’s how the machine works. It’s pretty primitive. Right. There is no tree that ever cuts off one of its own limbs. For its own growth. Now, if it’s disease and it dies yet, it seals it up and says, by it, it falls off eventually, but there’s no living entity that cuts off its limb and says, okay, you know what, we’re going to totally get rid of that as opposed to, hey, what are you all doing down there? You got a little infection. Let’s fight everybody in top. We ready? Let’s go as opposed to, I don’t know. Hey, we were just start looking at trying to get rid of that leg. Um, comes wrong with that. Nobody does nobody separate words does that to itself. There is no living entity and businesses are in fact living entities. And that’s part of the problem. They’re being treated like machines. I want to talk a little bit about agile. That’s a shared background that we both have. I grew up in software and it was part of agile transformations. Do you have a two sentence or a paragraph description, what that might be for people who are unfamiliar with it? Well, at least to describe the realism of it, but I’m going to step over here and go, agile is great because it has the potential to include everyone. They introvert, they extrovert and the ultravert. And me, agile works when you do it right. What the problem is a lot of people put the agile word as a band aid and continue to follow the processes I’ve always done for and they just say, let’s change the words that we use and we’ll be agile. Not the way that we engage, not the way that we talk, not the way that we deliver it just puts change the words. And that’s where it goes. Arrive because you haven’t changed anything. All you’ve done is put lipstick on a peak. Yeah. And I think if I could describe it, it’s a set of practices used in software engineering, which is knowledge work. It’s creative work essentially. It came out as a reaction to Anna and an alternative to command and control central planning, very linear planning, which, you know, all of history shows is just incredibly ineffective at predicting costs, predicting outcomes, ensuring good outcomes. So it’s, you know, when done well, can actually produce much better outcomes at the cost of predictability, I think. And there are some ways it provides visibility into it. That’s my best effort. I think that’s a great idea. You know, agile had the right intent when it was created from the manifesto. The truth is the concepts of agility have been around. I mean, Henry Ford, the Ford motor company used agile principles. Because if you remember how they were making cars, it took them a very long time to make one car. And they were able to get what was done in 93 days, done in three days by doing things in iterative work. So agile principles in general work, to at least his point, and to yours, when done well, it is inclusive. It can be fun. It allows people to actually commune at a level of the work as opposed to I don’t get to ever talk to somebody about what they’re doing. And I don’t understand the bigger project. All that goes away with transparency. It’s really working. Transparency is phenomenal. People have an understanding of what I’m working towards. Why I’m working because of this. And it begins to, they begin to take on ownership. Leadership becomes easier too. Now, does that work in every environment? No. I don’t lot waterfall if you’re building my house. Please pour my foundation first and then next waterfall me some walls and certain things and really let themselves as well to waterfall planning. Yeah. But it’s again, it’s a great approach, particularly if companies are stuck. It’s something that they can experiment with, extract what they can use from it and keep rolling has a lot of benefits. And again, I think it’s great because it includes the introverts, the people who are interested on the fringes have great ideas and don’t want to be involved. I wanted to ask if there’s something that you wanted to share with people who are in the middle right now, what’s a message you’d like to share with them? I think for me, what it really is is it’s okay to take time to slow down. And that’s a big message. We don’t have to be living in that chaos and running 24, 7, 365 days of the year. Stop. Slow down. And even if it means you know what’s going to make you be able to what you talked about earlier, Greg, to think and process. If that means go sit outside and just listen and just be there or I know why I’ve worked with some people and they get really in out of that chaos by playing music or playing an instrument, go for it. Me, I like to color and Chris knows that it’s everywhere right here. But do something that really disconnects you that allows you to stop that and then come back and you’ll see this big difference. And I would say in addition to that, look, Lisa and I have a lot of clients, they’re high ticket clients and not everybody gets to be a client because and I don’t say that because we’re some able to go monster. I say that because a lot of times we can have a conversation with someone and just the simple conversation whether it’s 5, 10 minutes, they can redirect and move past that stock. You don’t have to be stuck. There’s people like myself, there’s people like Lisa who have traveled the route that you’re probably traveling and have done it in such an expedited manner that we can look back real quick and probably help walk you through a solution. There’s people like Greg that can help you walk through a solution, not because we’ve learned everything, but the combination of the experiences, listening to other people’s experiences, combining them with our own and then having the experience of the years and the situations I think is just put us in a position where we can really help people not be stuck, slow down, process, jump back in the game. If that’s what you’re wanting to do and tear it apart for most people early in the careers are like, yeah, hey, no, it’s a woo, and then they get to the top of the roller coaster. It’s like, oh my gosh, and we’re like, buckle up, make sure you’re in there good. We’ll do the testing on the machinery for you. You’re ready. Okay, let’s go. We enjoy it. Enjoy it. Right. I love that for people to find out more about your work. Where should they go? First cues for leadership. That’s the home. That’s where we have the majority of the information. Certainly you can reach out by email info at cues for leadership.com. You can find us on YouTube. You can find us with the behavioral echoes podcast. We now have something called insight in minutes where it’s just two, three minute clips where we take great podcasts with great leaders and we abstract out a question and an answer to that and just give it to people so they can listen and you know, I’m going to go into this meeting. Bam, here’s an answer. Here’s something I can take in here that fortifies me that helps me. Look, I’m going to get through this and yeah, I’m going to be a great leader in this meeting and respond and not react. Thanks so much for being on the show. This has been a wonderful conversation. I really enjoyed it. Thank you. It’s been great. I love the way that you think, Greg. Please continue the work that you do. And I would also say you’ve done it. You’ve had multiple guests on. I think it’s gone well. All right. All right. It’s been achieved for my show. Thank you both for being the first Gidey pigs with it. Quite welcome. Thank you, Ravens. All right. Let’s take a moment to recap what Lisa and Christopher shared here today. Because this is the kind of episode that’s meant to be practiced and lived. First, remember to notice when you go into autopilot. When you days start feeling like Groundhog day, it’s not a character flaw. It’s a cue. Leadership growth starts when you can interrupt that default pattern. Second, start training to develop that gap between stimulus and response. The goal isn’t to become faster or louder. It’s to create enough internal space to be able to stay present. Read what’s going on around you and within you and then choose to respond with intention. And third, focus on building trust over control, especially right now with hybrid work, the anxiety, the uncertainty, and you know, with AI, people don’t need more monitoring. They need leaders who can stay regulated, clear and human. If this episode resonated with you, here’s one next step. You can subscribe. So you don’t miss the next conversation. I’m here to help introverted leaders who want more influence, more confidence and to really develop the momentum in their careers. I’m Greg Wanger. Keep leading with quiet confidence and I’ll see you next time. The Bleacher Report app is your destination for sports. Right now, the NBA is heating up, March Bandis is 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. Download the Bleacher Report app today so you never miss a moment.