#24. Do you have to be an extrovert to be inspirational?

Society has a strong and limiting tendency to connect inspirational leadership with extrovert personalities.

Yet throughout history leaders such as Ghandi, Lincoln, and Aung San Suu Kyi have all demonstrated that introversion is no barrier to a capacity to inspire an entire nation.

Nevertheless, the perception that to be inspiring is the exclusive preserve of the extrovert is still remarkably strong.

One of the leadership characteristics identified within the Ceannas Leadership Index is the extent to which people would ascribe themselves to be ‘inspiring’. Perhaps it should come as no surprise that more introverted individuals mark themselves much lower than their more extrovert colleagues.

However, although uncomfortable with the ‘inspiring’ tag they quite obviously inspire others in their day-to-day responsibilities.

The definition of the act of ‘inspiring’ is to influence someone to want to do something. Note here the importance of the word ‘want’ – not force or instruct.

Once again we have a tendency associate this capacity to inspire with rhetoric and charisma. Think how often we have sat during our lives in an audience and been inspired by a speaker.

I used to be very pleased when I received feedback from an audience that they had found my speech to be ‘inspirational’. Yet on reflection I often felt people had missed the key points I’d been trying to make and had simply been moved by my passion and enthusiasm for the topic in question.

In that sense the ‘inspirational’ speaker can be like a comedian, i.e. the audience has a great time but the next day they can’t remember any of the jokes.

For me, real ‘inspirational’ leadership comes back to the capacity to ‘influence’ others to want to do something. The most powerful form of that influence is behaviour that demonstrates an honest connection between word and deed.

It was Robert Browning who proposed that “a man’s reach should exceed his grasp”. Aside from the gender specification surely such a sentiment lies the very heart of what it is to be ‘inspiring’.

For regardless of who we are we can find ourselves closed in by self-limiting boundaries to our ambition and abilities. Exposure to an ‘inspiring’ person reduces or removes those barriers and enables us to reach ‘beyond our grasp’.

Throughout my career in education I watched in wonder as a huge number of quiet, understated yet hugely focused teachers would ‘inspire’ generation after generation of young people. None of these individuals would have scored highly on any scale of ‘extroversion’. In fact if I go even further back in my experience I can think of one of my old teachers ‘Curly Bill’ who would have barely registered on such a scale yet we would hang upon his every word.

My intuitive understanding that leaders don’t need to be extroverts is now being confirmed through my day to day work with senior leaders – yet even they (who have reached some of the very highest levels of responsibility) don’t see themselves to be inspirational for the very reason that they don’t fulfil the extroversion stereotype.

So why, you may ask, is this self-recognition so important?

I believe that without an appreciation (uncomfortable as it may be) of our own capacity to inspire others we miss out on an enormous chance to have a positive impact upon other people. For if we can recognise the power of our example, the importance of our words, and above all the authentic connection between those words and deeds – we can begin to consciously use our capacity to ‘inspire’ as an alternative to instructing or directing others.

For, to return to the definition of what it is to be ‘inspiring’, we shift from trying to get people to do what we ‘want’ them to do, to getting them to ‘want’ to do what we do. Think back to your best teachers and remember that feeling of how they helped you to reach beyond your grasp – as opposed to simply telling you to work harder.

As a final contribution to this debate I wrote a poem last year that attempted to capture the essence of the act of inspiration:

INSPIRATION