Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it lands with someone like you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means scaling ourselves first.
Happy Wednesday, founders,
“You’re so extroverted!” They said.
“You’re definitely introverted…” They also said..
At a talk, a CEO of a 24,000-employee organisation shared his story as an introverted leader. When he was a COO, the board told him they were considering making him a CEO, but he had to accept training to behave more extroverted.
The coach they hired for him handed him a clicker, and five times a day, he had to do an ‘extraverted act’ and count it, like talking to someone in the elevator while waiting.
That story was intriguing because it captures something we‘re all biased toward: in many workplaces, extraversion is treated as an unspoken personality requirement.
In Quite, by Susan Cain, she wrote:
Our lives are shaped as profoundly by personality as by gender or race. And the single most important aspect of personality - the ‘north and south of temperament,’ as one scientist puts it - is where we fall on the introvert-extrovert spectrum. Our place on this continuum influences our choices of friends and mates, and how we make conversation, resolve differences, and show love. It affects the careers we choose and whether we succeed in them. It governs how likely we are to… be a good leader.
Extraversion has traditionally been seen as the more ‘favored’ personality in sales and leadership. But recent research shows a caveat: the point isn’t that leaders should behave like extraverts or introverts; instead, they should incorporate the opposite personality type of their own and adopt traits from both sides depending on the situation.
Most people have never heard of this term, but personality psychologists call this trait ‘ambiversion’.
Perhaps you are already an ambivert, or you’d like to learn how to train yourself to incorporate the best of both introversion and extraversion. Let’s find out.
🤝 This edition is kindly brought to you by HubSpot
The Descript app for HubSpot connects AI-powered video editing with your customer platform. Edit videos through text-based transcripts, auto-generate variations for every distribution channel, and seamlessly sync to HubSpot's CRM. Track engagement by contact, attribute video to pipeline stages, and prove content ROI with unified reporting. Built for teams shipping product-led content at scale.
We partner with a select group of brands we use or admire, which keeps this newsletter free and independent. Reach out for your campaign here.
Most people use introversion/extraversion as social labels; we associate introversion with being quiet and observant, while extraversion with being loud and talkative.
But in personality science, extraversion is broader than sociability. It includes assertiveness, energy, reward sensitivity, and positive emotion. Two people can appear equally “social,” yet differ psychologically in why they’re social and how they recover afterwards.
Extraversion and introversion were first introduced by Carl Jung in his 1921 book, Psychological Types, as attitudes and the directions of psychic energy - outward toward the world, inward toward the inner landscape. And ambiversion, the behavioural flexibility across the introvert–extrovert spectrum, rather than a fixed midpoint.
Put simply, it’s about where your psychological energy naturally goes:
Extraversion: energy and attention tend to move outward, toward people, activity, and the external world.
Introversion: energy and attention tend to move inward, toward thoughts, internal experience, and reflection.
Ambiversion: the capacity to switch between both directions.
Are extraverts better leaders?
There’s a reason Susan Cain’s “extrovert ideal” (in her book Quiet) tells the truth about our biases: organisations often confuse social ease with leadership capacity.
More recent research by organisational psychologist Adam Grant adds a sharp twist: in a sales context, the best performers weren’t the most extroverted. Performance followed an inverted-U shape - ambiverts performed best.
Results from a hierarchical regression analysis showing a predicted curvilinear relationship between extraversion and sales revenue over 3 months
Why would ambiverts win? Because they’re more likely to alternate between asserting (pushing forward) and attuning (reading the other person). Going too far toward either extreme can become rigid: the strong extrovert may keep going even when the other person is pulling back; the strong introvert may hold back when it’s time to push further.
Another fascinating finding by Grant, Gino, and Hofmann changes the way we traditionally think about extraversion as an advantage in leadership: extraverted leadership only produced better performance when employees were passive. When employees were proactive - speaking up, taking initiative, trying to improve how work gets done - the advantage reversed: introverted leaders led to higher group performance.
So the bias toward extraversion isn’t because extroversion is universally superior; it's more about many workplaces still operating on a model where leaders are expected to drive and employees to follow. In modern startups, where we want initiative and dissent, a quieter leader can become powerful - not by performing less leadership, but by creating more space for other people’s leadership to show up.
7 signs you’re neither an extrovert nor an introvert
You can be magnetic socially, but you need recovery time.
You choose social output rather than automatically craving it.
In groups, you oscillate - lead for a while, then go quiet to observe.
You dislike constant stimulation, but you also dislike constant isolation.
You’re good at selling and good at deep work, maybe not on the same day.
Your best thinking often arrives after the conversation, not only during it.
Your social energy is less about “people” and more about meaning: the right people, the right context, the right purpose.
If you say yes to everything, you are an ambivert.
P.S. Personally, I feel both extraversion and introversion in me, as the traits genuinely fluctuate depending on the circumstances, environment, people, my energy, and my intention on the day. Sometimes my intention is to connect. Sometimes it’s to preserve.
How to integrate both traits as a founder
1) We need energy management, not just time management
Separate your calendar into two types of days:
Outward days: meetings, pitching, networking, interviews, and conflict resolution.
Inward days: deep work, strategy, writing, product decisions, processing, and reflecting.
When we live in the outward mode for too long, we become overwhelmed; we say, “I’m tired, irritated, and I hate people.”
When we live in inward mode for too long, we are under-stimulated; we may say, “I’m stuck, and nothing is moving.”
Ambiversion, in practice, is the ability to recognize drift early and adapt based on our needs.
2) See the bias in meetings
Most teams don’t realise they’ve built a culture where speed is prioritised. The confident voice, the fastest speaker, becomes “the answer.” Then quieter people stop trying, because there is no room for them to speak up.
Seeing the bias is the first step to creating a more balanced energy.
3) Build roles around ‘contact load’, not labels
Instead of hiring ‘an extraverted x’, we should see the real requirement: how much human contact and unpredictability the role demands.
Some roles are high-contact by nature - sales, partnerships, community, and recruiting. Some roles need long hours of quiet thinking - product, strategy, engineering, and writing.
The mistake is hiring someone who can do the job but can’t keep up with demand due to a mismatch in required energy. And that’s why the clicker story does not seem sustainable: it trains behaviour, not sustainability.
If I could rewrite that board’s advice into one line, it would be: Don’t train yourself to act extroverted.
Train yourself to know when to go outward to lead - and when to go inward to think.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
P.S. If you want to get a founder feature about your own story, reply to this email. If you’d like to reach our newsletter audience (founders, creators, and marketers), click the button below.
If you’re new here, I’m over the moon you’ve joined us! To help me craft content that’s actually useful (and not just noise in your inbox), I’d love it if you took 1 minute to answer this quick survey below. Your insights help shape everything I write.
✨ Insane Media is more than one voice
Dive into our other newsletters - where psychology meets the creator economy, e-commerce marketing, and Human resources.
