Surviving And Succeeding: Introverts In Extroverted Offices With Julianna Yau Yorgan

According to a Harvard Business Review Study, 40% of executives and leaders are introverted. Korn Ferry completed a similar study, and in their study, they found that 40-50% of leaders are introverted.

So, what does this mean? It means that it is important to talk about this because if you are an introverted employee or people leader at work, the chances are that someone you work with is as well.

Just like many of us land in leadership roles without training and fake it until we make it, it can be similar to an introvert. In a working world that is designed for extroverts, it can be difficult for introverts to navigate. My guest today, Julianna Yau Yorgan, a self-proclaimed introvert, former corporate leader, and career strategist and coach, provides us with guidance on how to do just that.

During our conversation, Julianna and I discussed:

1. The difference between a career strategist and a career coach.
2. Her journey to a director-level role while being an introverted leader.
3. The difference between introversion and shyness.
4. How to network successfully as an introvert.
5. How we can get to a place where we are unapologetically introverted.
6. Navigating various difficult personalities at work as an introvert. We chat about narcissists, backstabbers, and more.
7. Julianna also shares what her Introverted Leader Community is all about.

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Listen to the podcast here

Surviving And Succeeding: Introverts In Extroverted Offices With Julianna Yau Yorgan

Introduction

How are you doing out there? According to a Harvard Business Review study, 40% of executives and leaders are introverted. Korn Ferry completed a similar study, and in their study, they found that 40% to 50% of leaders are introverted. What is this name? It is important to talk about this topic because if you are an introverted employee, an aspiring manager, an existing people leader, or an executive at work, the chances are that someone you work with is as well. Many of us land in leadership roles without training, and we take more of a philosophy of, “Fake it until we make it.” It can be similar to working in the world as an introvert. In a working world that is designed for extroverts, it can be difficult for introverts to navigate.

My guest is Julianna Yau Yorgan, a self-proclaimed introvert, former corporate leader, and career strategist and coach, who provides us with guidance on how to do that. During our conversation, Juliana and I discussed the difference between a career strategist and a career coach, her journey to a director-level role while being an introverted person and leader, the difference between introversion and shyness, how to network successfully as an introvert, how we can get to a place where we are unapologetically introverted, navigating various difficult personalities at work as an introvert. We chat about them all, and we focus most heavily on narcissists, backstabers, and more. Julianna shares what her introverted leader community is all about.

Here is more about Julianna. Julianna Yau Yorgan is a professional coach and career strategist for introverts ready to thrive in an extrovert’s workplace without being more extroverted. As a former manager and director at one of Canada’s largest property and casualty insurers, she helps you figure out exactly which job is the right one for you, and make sure you do everything in your control to get it. As an introvert herself, she knows how difficult it is to land the right role.

Her only goal is to help you get the right job within a reasonable amount of time of working together while you’re doing that, you can earn back your investment in the process. She’s helped people like you land a job they love doing with people they are comfortable with. If this show has made an impact on you, please make sure to share it with a family member, friend, or colleague. Your ratings and reviews help the show continue to gain traction and grow. If you’ve recently left a review, thank you so much. Your encouragement means the world to me. If you have any suggestions on guests or topics you would like me to cover in the future, please don’t hesitate to send me a DM on social media or at Hello@BraveWomenAtWork.com.

A couple of other updates is if you haven’t yet downloaded one or all the freebies from my website, check them out on my site at BraveWomenAtWork.com. The three are 24 Career And Leadership Affirmations, 5 Steps To Managing Imposter Syndrome, and Get Paid: 10 Negotiation Tips. I created these pieces for these freebies because these are the topics that a lot of my coaching clients struggle with. Mindset, needing affirmations on other tools, and the idea of asking for what you want, whether it’s money or any type of promotional changes. In this freebie, I focus on negotiation because I want you to get paid. You can go to my website to learn more.

One last thing, my latest book, Brave Women At Work: Lessons In Leadership, is available for pre-order in hardcover. I’m excited for you guys to get your hands on a copy of this great book. This is a women’s anthology. The author team and I have a big audacious goal to reach the New York Times bestseller. We’ve already reached Amazon Bestseller and now we’re shooting for the Moon New York Times bestseller. I would very much appreciate it if you could pre-order a copy before it comes out in late September 2024. This book and the entire series have been a labor of love and healing for me. Walk with the author team and me as we lead out loud with this important book. Pre-order a copy today of the book on Amazon, Barnes & Noble, Books-A-Million, or wherever books are sold. Let’s welcome Julianna to the show.

Julianna, welcome to the show. How are you?

I’m so good. Thanks for having me on your show.

I’ve had someone from Portugal. I’ve had guests from all over the world, but I think you might be my first guest from Spain. I’ve never asked you this, but how did you end up in Spain?

It ties in with how I started my coaching practice as well. I had been in corporate for about twenty years, and I was in a place where I wasn’t really challenged anymore in the right way my husband was also looking for a new opportunity. He was offered a role in Madrid. Because we don’t have any ties that we can’t move with us, he agreed to the role and we ended up moving from Vancouver, Canada to Madrid in about 2023.

How do you like out there?

The people are amazing. They are friendly, even though I speak almost no Spanish.

There’s a story of bravery right there.

Learning a new language as an adult has been rough. The heat here is something that I did not expect would be as severe as it is. I don’t remember the conversion to Fahrenheit, but last summer it was about 43 degrees Celsius, which is well over 100 degrees Fahrenheit, I’m sure.

I’ve visited, but I’ve never lived. I’m sure it’s beautiful.

They do such a great job with the parks and fountains on the streets.

Career Background

I ran ahead here, but let’s circle back on a little bit more about your background story. I know how you’ve gotten to Spain. Tell us a little bit more about you and the work you do and how you’ve gotten to this moment.

I spent about twenty years in corporate. That included six years in leadership. When we moved here to Spain, I knew that it would take me some time to find work. We had to wait for our work visas to come through. I decided while I waited, “What is it that I can do to bridge that gap? What skillset do I have that I can repurpose for myself while I wait for that work visa?” Career coaching seemed to be a natural fit for me because I’ve worked with many people in corporate already, whether it’s moving them into leadership the developing in their own careers. It was a passion project that turned into a calling.

On your site, because I do interview a lot of authors, entrepreneurs, coaches, and things like that, but you’ve labeled your title on your website as a personal career strategist. I was wondering what is the difference in our mind between that title from coaching.

A lot of coaches that I’ve met since I started this focus on the internal element of career development and getting ahead with work, whether it’s finding a way to be braver and more confident or one of my good friends and fellow coaches is a licensed hypnotherapist who also works with people to work through past traumas so that they can show up as their true self, as their larger self in a leadership position where I’m more focused on tactically, how do you meet your goals with actions that you can take towards those goals.

It’s a little less about the internal exploration and more about I have a specific goal, let’s say, with a client that I’m working with right now who wants to be CEO before he retires. He has got a reasonable timeline. He has got about 26 years between now and then. What we’re doing is plotting that out on a roadmap for him to say, “You need to get back into a leadership position because you stepped away from that for a while. How do we get you into your next leadership position? What companies are you going to target for the CEO position that you want to have by the time you are 60? How do we get those interim roles to show that you have the expertise you need to run a company?”

You’re not focusing more on internal mindset and that kind of stuff. It’s more about, from a tactical perspective, how we make this happen. It’s more accountable, and action-oriented. That makes total sense. I’m going to switch gears because we were introduced originally, and I know there’s still a part of your site that focuses in this area on introversion or introverted leaders. I’m reflecting back at you. You’ll have to share, you’ve changed since the last time we talked, but you said you were a self-proclaimed introvert. I’m curious about how you started from the found level to become a director of a large team. What kind of a lift was that for you? That had to be quite the lift as an introvert.

One of the things I’ve discovered since talking about introversion a lot in the past months is that introversion comes with many different combinations of personality styles and needs, where the core of my introversion has to do with the fact that I need my own quiet time to recharge, but a lot of time to think through decisions that need to be made where I’m quite outgoing. I’m sociable. I don’t mind speaking in front of a large group. My introversion is about my own internal energies and how I manage that energy as well as the decision-making process that I take as an individual. The lift was not as challenging as some people would think because many people think that introverts primarily are shy, antisocial people, which we aren’t always.

There are of course introverts who are shy, but because I was comfortable with speaking in front of a large group and dealing with all these complex political situations at work, the lift wasn’t a lot. For some people even that have come to me and said, “I want to get into leadership, but I’m an introvert. I’m not sure if that’s going to work for me,” we’ve always been able to find a way to bring out their skillset and leadership strengths to show that they can be in leadership without being the loudest person or in the room or having to make this huge sales pitch to everyone.

Introversion And Shyness

I did cover this in an episode. I have talked about introverted leadership. You can go back in the way back. I don’t know the episode because they keep stacking up. I keep getting more. It’s been a long time since we’ve talked about this. I’m glad we’re revisiting it. Can you, in your own words, before we keep moving on, some people get confused, shyness with introversion, what, in your own words are the differences between the two? I think that people do need to hear like, “It’s not this, it’s this. It’s not one. It’s synonymous with the other.

I’ll start with shyness, where it’s more about being comfortable with new situations and new people, which definitely is an element or can be an element of introversion. There are what’s labeled as social introverts who are strongly uncomfortable when they have to meet new people. It’s not because they don’t want to interact with them, but they have a bit of anxiety with, “How do I interact with this person? How do I read them and their body signals? What might happen if I say the wrong thing to them?” That to me isn’t shyness. Shyness is more about almost an internal fear of reaching out to people and initiating conversation.

I’ve come across quite a few extroverts who are shy and it’s very unusual, but not outside of the realm of reality because they may want to speak all the time, but they’ve got that internal fear of, “What if I say the wrong thing? What if they don’t accept me? What if I’m not able to make that connection with someone?” Just because they’re more extroverted and they think out loud doesn’t necessarily mean that they’re very confident in relationship building.

That’s got to be very painful for an extrovert that they want to talk and connect, but then they’re shy or they have self-doubt about what they’re saying, which does come into the internal piece that you talked about with other coaches, but still that has to be very painful to be an extrovert that is shy.

I’ve seen it, I think a little bit more when they’re presenting, because you can hear that little bit of a crack in their voice. They want so badly to be on stage and have that presence because it’s a natural need that they have. They want to interact with people, but there’s something internal that’s blocking them from stepping into it.

Networking Like An Introvert

One of the things I’ve been talking a lot about with guests is it’s not that you can’t, but it’s difficult to get promoted or reach the next level of your career if you aren’t visible, if you aren’t networking, if you don’t have the right sponsor and things like that. One of the things you talk about in your materials and the work you do is networking like an introvert. For my introverts out there who are reading, read. How do we network like an introvert?

To me, networking like an introvert is throwing out the classic rule book that we’ve always bee given, which is showing up at events, get in people’s faces, talk to as many people as possible, and lean into our introverted energies and focusing on just a few people, maybe even one person at a time, to build that relationship because you may have thousands of people that you’re connected to or that you know, but how many of them will help you when you’re in a time of need when you’re ready for that promotion or you’ve been laid off and you need to find another job, the people in your network who are the ones who can help you and offer you something are the ones that you’ve spent a lot of time building a relationship with who knows and trusts you, who want to be there for you, not just some person that you met at a networking event five years ago and we’ve never spoken to again. all you introverts out there, focus a little bit less or a lot less on the number of connections you have and more on the depth of the relationship and connection that you have with people?

Was that something that was trial and error for you that you had to learn over time or is that something you’ve known innately to how to do?

I think probably a bit of both. I’ve always been drawn to having more meaningful, deeper conversations with people rather than meeting a whole bunch of people. I did push myself to go to networking events when I was early in my career because I was told that’s something to do or going to situations where I’d ask questions at the meeting at work. It always felt so unnatural and never got me the results I needed anyway, but then when I focused on developing those personal relationships, I found that I got much more out of that.

I am an ambivert, which I learned is a natural introvert who can flex extroverted. I can swing from one to the other, but I would say that I am more naturally introverted or I need breaks, which I think that’s what you’re talking about. When I’m in people in that extroverted mode, I like to be alone after. I don’t know if you can resonate with that.

Even when I was in leadership, I don’t know if you’ve had the same where you go to a leadership conference with work and you’re all stuck in a room together and you’re having breakfast, lunch, and dinner together. After dinner stuff, I would always structure it so that I didn’t go to every single social event, but pace them out so that it still felt like I was engaging with people, but I always had my own quiet time. Maybe one day I would skip out on lunch and say, “I’ve got to catch up on work. I need to call my husband to check in.” People would always, “That’s great,” whatever and they wouldn’t think much of it. That gave me my excuse to step away from the group and sit in my room for a moment and get that little bit of peace and recharge before going back into things.

Unapologetically Introverted

No problem. That is something there in terms of the recharge. I had lots f problems with that in terms of being on and then shutting it off. Do you know what I mean? In terms of how we get unapologetically introverted, I felt for the longest time that I was apologetic, that I felt bad about my introverted period. Can you tell me about how we got to that unapologetically introverted piece and place?

Some of it is understanding that most people misunderstand introversion. A lot of the things that they associate with you being an introvert, whether it’s being shy or maybe being slow with making decisions or what have you, aren’t the true needs that you need to be met as an introvert. It’s putting aside for a moment what people are thinking of you because it’s all wrong anyway, dulling the advice that we’re always given on how to get ahead in our career, which I’m sure all of us introverts are used to hearing, speak up more, ask more questions, participate more, go to more events. All of these sound like great advice, but what I’ve always wondered with that is to what end? Even with saying, “Introverts and leaders need to get more visibility so they can get promoted,” what do we mean by visibility and what is the purpose of that visibility towards our specific career goals?

I’ll give you an example. I’ve worked with somebody who wants to be a specialist in her field, and her visibility is very specific, “How do I position myself as someone who is one of the top voices, not on LinkedIn or anything, but in the industry on that specific topic?” Her visibility isn’t necessarily asking those questions at the big meetings, but finding the opportunities where she’s comfortable with either writing articles or attending industry events where she can showcase her knowledge and experience. That’s all she needs to meet that goal where I think a lot of people would be like, “I need to be visible all the time. I need to make sure people know that I’m valuable and self-promote all the time.” That can get exhausting, especially for an introvert.

Isn’t it also coming down, and this is going to the internal place a little bit, but it’s talking about self-worth, self-knowledge, and self-trust to say, “I’m worthy, even if I’m introverted.” That can be a huge benefit to me. There are leaders who are introverted and succeed, “I am not alone.” There is some internal stuff going on where if you can accept and trust that you were made this way for a reason and that this is a gift and not your Achilles heel, couldn’t that also help in this like reframing more towards, “I’m unapologetic about my introversion?”

I think if you think of all the movies and stories that we hear about, whether it’s in real life or fiction, the heroes of those stories are always people who are fully themselves, even if it’s very different than the norm. I watched the biopic for Amy Winehouse and then also watched the documentary. Although their story was tragic, one of the things that I think drew people to her is how unapologetic she was ab being a modern female artist in jazz. She didn’t become a pop star. She didn’t do all these things that were expected of her, and people loved her anyway.

How was the latest movie?

I think the movie was about how her father wanted her to be remembered more than a full reflection of her life.

She had real introversion. We’re talking about leadership, career and things like that, but you can weave her in here. She had problems. She had deep problems and addictions and things like that. There’s an example that probably wasn’t unapologetically introverted, struggled with the poll, with fame, with being an introvert.

In the documentary, I remember there was some discussion about how, especially with a lot of jazz singers, they want to be in smaller clubs. She even talked about wanting to be in front of smaller audiences. That push for her to be in front of these massive stadiums of people was too much for her. I don’t know her personally but imagine the situation where you’re propelled from being fairly unknown, playing in small clubs, to having to perform on a huge stage with thousands of people, that is out of alignment with an introverted energy that it’s going to have crippling effects on your performance.

With that, you’ve mentioned a couple of things that I wanted to pull out here. If someone is introverted or they lean in that direction, or they’re looking for things. One of the things you mentioned earlier was, “I’m at a conference and maybe it’s planned downtime. I’ve had a big meeting and I have planned downtime.” That is a tool or a resource for people because when you’re apologizing about being introverted, you may be like, “I’ve got to go with the best of them and schedule meeting after meeting, and then dinner after the conference,” and stuff like that.

Maybe you look at your calendar differently, and if you’re going to have a lot of people or employee interaction, you say, “How am I going to take care of myself? How am I going to give myself a break so that I can recharge, I can be ready tomorrow?” I don’t know if all introverts do that. Is that something that you have gotten to a place where you do, where you purposely schedule or put well-timed breaks in when you do have a lot of engagement with others?

I do. Whether it’s now as a coach and appearing on podcasts, meeting with my clients, or when I was in corporate and having to go, as I’m sure you’re aware of, back-to-back meetings with barely a minute in between for like a bio break, it’s looking at my calendar and knowing, “How much time do I need to recharge. I think some extroverts think that introverts could hop into the bathroom for five minutes and magically we come out all refreshed?” I knew for myself that after three hours of intense interaction, I needed at minimum an hour of quiet time to properly be recharged to perform. What I would do is make sure that every time I started to see meetings stack up, block off time in my calendar to get done so that people can’t sneak in there, or at least if they try to, I can say, “That time is blocked. We’re going to have to find another time.”

Dealing With Difficult People

As an introvert and a leader, what are the strategies that you’ve had to deal with difficult people at work? Maybe it was a micromanager an absentee boss, or someone who’s backstabbing or narcissistic, I’m wondering how an introvert or an introverted leader or both deal with these difficult people.

I think a lot of introverted leaders worry that they’re going to get stepped all over because they tend to be quieter. They tend to need a little bit more space to be able to respond to someone. In most of those circumstances that you mentioned, let’s take a micromanaging boss, typically they’re behaving that way because they’re not getting their needs met. If you think of a micromanaging boss who’s like, “I need you to do this, and it needs to be done this way exactly by this time, or I’m going to lose it on you,” typically they’re behaving that way because they’re not getting their needs met. Let’s take the example of someone I used to work with who wasn’t a leader. She was a senior on the team, but she bossed everyone around in a very micromanaging way.

Something she’d often say is, “I need you to do this,” and she’d disappear. You deliver it, and she would beam you out because it’s not what she wanted. What I learned was that people like that, they’re mad because they’ve been told that they need to trust delegating work to others. They’re doing it, but they’re not getting back the type of work that they expected. Oftentimes, they’re also not great at explaining what they need.

They’re lashing out because they haven’t explained at they need. They’re getting this result back and they lost all this time. They can’t take the work that you’ve done and incorporate it into their own work. It’s all about asking a lot of questions to make sure that you understand what they need and how they need to be delivered. If you can meet their need, usually all those behaviors melt away because they’re focused on the deliverable.

How do you not take all that personally? They’re lashing out. there it is. How do you not take it personally though, as a person, period, or as an introverted person, how do you do that?

It’s hard, but I think one thing to remind yourself of their behaviors usually are less about you and more about themselves. Even though they’re saying, “You did something wrong. This is terrible work. I can’t trust you,” it’s translated to, “This isn’t what I expected. This isn’t what I needed. I can’t trust you, not because you’re not trustworthy, but because this relationship isn’t working.”

Who is that feedback coming from? Is that coming from you or from that person? It sounds like that person you’re engaging with, I don’t want to say can’t communicate, but is struggling to clearly articulate.

The translation is coming in my own mind where taking that example of, “Here’s something I need from you,” they’ll typically say, “I need this situation summarized by tomorrow.” Let’s say you summarize it into a few bullet points in an email, send it off to them and they freak out. It could be because the summary wasn’t the type of summary they needed, or the focus was wrong, or they expected it to be formatted in a certain way. I had a boss who always preferred things in PowerPoint, but she would always verbally say to people when she asked for things to be done that they could do it however they wanted.

She’d be like, “I need you to summarize the number of projects that we delivered last quarter.” That would be all she’d say, where, because I knew she was a micromanager, I would ask her, “How do you need this delivered? Is an email okay, or a Word document? Do you want it in Excel or PowerPoint?” Her response was always, “However you like, PowerPoint is fine.” I think someone who’s hearing that and focused on the, “However you like part,” they’ll more likely get into trouble with that micromanager because they’re hearing what they want to hear and what that person wants you to hear, which is, “It’s fine. I will give you free rein on at you want to do,” but the reality is when she tacked on the PowerPoint is fine. She’s saying, “I need this in PowerPoint format.”

I’m not a perfect communicator, but I would say that I over time have become an assertive communicator. I’m always like, “Why can’t you just tell me that?” I guess not everybody thinks like me.

People are so complex. I knew this bo well enough to know that she thought that she was a different person than who she was. It was a little bit easier for me to force myself to read between the lines every time she gave me instructions and start to learn what type of questioning I could do to make sure that she had the opportunity to explain what he needed, even though she struggled with communicating that herself.

Communication with a micromanager and the best you can as that introverted employee or leader, not taking it personally so that’s the first one. Let’s revisit our good old narcissists and our backstabbers. Can we go to those folks?

Yes. narcissists are difficult. I’d say they’re similar to a micromanager where you need to remind yourself that you can’t change them as much as you want to. Their narcissism is beyond something that you can help them with. The real focus is to deescalate them so that they feel their needs are being met, which I find for a lot of people is hard with a narcissist because a narcissistic personality is someone who comes across as very confident and has it all together, but probably isn’t under the surface. They need a lot of that reinforcement that they’re doing okay, that they’re the best, and all those things. Not because they know that they’re the best, but because they need to hear it. A lot of people I work with feel like, “The only way to deal with a narcissist is to call them out on their behavior and correct it.”

That always ends in failure because you end up setting that narcissistic personality off and they feel attacked and unsafe. They’ll keep repeating their behaviors and spiral into more dramatic narcissistic behavior where if you focus on finding anything that you can to honestly tell them that you believe is a good thing that they’ve done, it deescalates them, brings them back to a little bit of a place of safety so that they can focus on the work at hand.

I know you’re making a face, you’re like, “I don’t know that I want to do that,” but it does work. I’m not saying that you have to make something up you need to make a big deal out of it, but even something as simple as, “You did such a great job with the team meeting yesterday,” then shifting the conversation quickly to what you need to get done puts them in a place where they feel like they can be safe with you and that you’re not secretly judging them because I think that’s a lot of the time what a narcissist is most worried about is being judged for something.

I’m making fun of this. If anyone’s dealing with a narcissist, I know this is serious because it can be very toxic, but it’s almost like giving them their fill like, “No, you’re awesome and let’s get to business quick.” That’s the formula that I’m hearing. If it starts to go sideways, be like, “No, you’re still awesome. Let’s keep going.” I’m making it very simple and I know it’s very complex and it’s challenging to deal with this personality type, but I think that is at least a way to get started so that you can make some progress.

With a narcissistic personality, they’re one of the most challenging to work with because they don’t see their own narcissism. They’re not the type of person who would accept that they need something changed because their real fear is that they do need to change, their natural self isn’t worthy enough, isn’t good enough for whatever they’re doing. It is very strange behavior because the behaviors that they have and how people normally translate and read them are completely different than where it’s coming from.

In the last category, we talked about the narcissist. Is the back staber synonymous with the narcissist or is that a totally different type of person?

That’s totally different. The backstabber, maybe not. The backstabber is someone who is very worried about being blamed for something. They’re finding someone else to blame, someone else to put in front of themselves as a shield to take that blame. Very early on in my career, I came across the backstabber. I will say, I was fortunate in the situation because she blamed me for something that happened months before I even joined the company. That was a good way for me to learn how to deal with this type of personality because my boss at the time who wasn’t this backstabber came marching into my office, my cubicle, to say, W”e discovered that this horrible thing happened with this client. We can’t believe you did this. We need to get this fixed right away.”

Being very early in my career, I didn’t know what to do with the situation other than apologize, and because of my introverted energies, I knew I couldn’t deal with it on the spot. I told her, “Let me finish this one thing. I want to look into the situation to see what happened. Is it okay if I come to you in half an hour? We’ll get this all sorted out. I’m sorry.” I think for a lot of people, an apology feels like a very dangerous thing because you’re already admitting fault, but all I wanted to do was de-escalate the situation and calm her down. What happened is I looked into it and saw what happened, didn’t know why or whoever it was did what they did.

What I did see is that it happened over the summer and I hadn’t started at the company until like September or October. I had a nice little out. To my surprise, the backstabber was with my boss at the time when I went to speak to her she wouldn’t leave. Because I didn’t want to make the situation worse than it was, I focused on the facts and said, “Here’s what I found. I wasn’t here at the time so I can’t explain what happened but here are some different options I see on how we can fix things.”

One thing that I was very careful with was not calling out the backstabber on her behavior because I didn’t want to target my back for her to then continually come back to me in the future. I ignored all that, accepted the fact that she was this horrible backstabby person, and focused on the fact so that we could get the work done. Karma because she ended up getting fired within a year because she ran her mouth. She was such a terrible person that it caught up with her anyway I still managed to stay off her radar while she was still there.

I do like that advice because this is real. This is what people are dealing with in the workplace. I’m kidding here, but not as well-adjusted as we are. I think that the gossiper is related to the backstabber. If you were to focus on that particular person’s character or performance or whatever, you know that that person is going to the water cooler and saying every nasty thing that they can about you, which doesn’t foster anything but toxicity. I like how you focused on the facts and were super careful and probably did a lot of documentation to back up your stuff sticking to the facts, then trying to move on with the business is probably the best way to deal with that person. They can say, “She’s so cold. She deals with facts.” So what? That’s the reality of it. There’s not a lot for them to grab a hold of then.

I know so many people and some clients that ha declined to work with because their focus is on getting back at these people, either teaching them a lesson, showing them what it feels like or trying to change their behavior. It’s either not possible or makes the toxicity worse. If you focus on, “Let’s focus on the facts. I’m going to ignore all of your bad behavior and not reward, even with negative attention,” they’ll typically draw towards someone else to lash out at because they’re not getting what they need out of y in terms of the negativity with the only caveat at that the narcissistic personality, you are giving them enough to that little boost to their ego that you can deescalate them t get the work done.

One question on the backstabber, what category would you put the person? I think a lot of people are going to be like, “I have got this person in my organization.” What about the person who copies your boss? They email and they always copy the boss. Where do they fit? Are they like a backstabber? I don’t know. Where do they fit?

I always put them in the category of brown noser and who also is very of themselves. Whenever I come across these personalities, it’s because they don’t have enough confidence in their own way so they end up mimicking their boss because they understand that if they’re like their boss, they’re likely to be favored or at least not be seen in a negative light.

Everybody, the lesson is don’t copy your boss when you’re sending emails to other people. It’s not nice unless it’s absolutely necessary.

Do you mean carbo copying? I thought you meant somebody who mimics their boss.

No. they’re carbon copying on every email. That would be like a brown noser and a backstabber.

They’re trying to tattle on you and be like, “Our boss is watching so you better behave.” Honestly, I ignore them. I deal with them the same way as a backstabber. stick with the facts. That boss probably has many emails that they’re copied on that they’re not reading. In all honesty, I got copied on a lot of stuff and would always tell my team, “Can you make sure you tell me if it’s something I need to read, or if you’re throwing my name in there because you’re doing a power play?”

Power play or maybe that’s their name, Flash Backstabber. Coming back to introversion, I want to make sure that if someone’s introverted and they’re dealing with these individuals, would you say carving out more time because this takes a lot of energy for an introvert? What extra TLC or love do you ve yourself as an introvert dealing with these folks in the workplace?

Journaling helps a lot. Getting all of that negativity out of your head so that you can look at what you’re thinking and be like, “This is silly. Why am I giving all my power away to these people who are stable and don’t have all their stuff together?” Focusing less on the drama and more on the facts and getting the work done can help in itself because then you’re not giving your energy away to battling this mellow drama that they want, that they’ve created that doesn’t exist. By not engaging in that level of interaction with them, you’re automatically protecting yourself because you’re not engaging. They can’t get that rise out of you. They’ll maybe try a couple more times, but they’ll shift to someone else because they need that drama.

Introverted Leader Community

It’s like, “The drama is not stopping at my door. You can move right along. Keep on going.” That’s helpful. Let’s switch to, you have a community called The Introverted Leader Community. Can you share a little bit more about that and what’s included?

It’s something I started because I find that a lot of introverted leaders don’t have a lot in terms of a support network and especially as we move into more senior roles, it’s hard to know who to trust. I mean, we had all these conversations about different personalities that make your life miserable. It was my way of collecting all these people who have the same type of challenges and want a semi-anonymous space where they can very openly discuss these challenges. What it’s morphing into more is a place for me to host more community-style coaching with people.

I’ve got a program that I’m starting. I am working with a small group of people to move into their first leadership position. Rather than having all these live calls that are naturally energy-draining for us, most of the work will happen more within the community with the option of meeting biweekly on a group call if that’s something that’s comfortable for them. I’m using it as different ways to try out, how can I best serve the introverted community out there by tailoring the coaching, and the strategy to a way that works with them rather than drains their energy.

Advice For Extroverts

That’s helpful. Before we end, we have people who aren’t introverted who are reading. They say, “This doesn’t apply to me. Next.” I’m like, “No.” If we have our extroverted ladies on the line, maybe they’re leaders or individual contributors, what advice would you give them to deal with their introverted boss? now we’re flipping. Now we’re talking to our extroverted people. What advice would you give them in dealing with our beloved introverts?

I would say that one of the main things, especially with an introverted leader, is our need to have that quiet time to make a decision. One thing I always recommend is don’t force your introverted boss to make a decision on the spot because they won’t, or they’ll decide out of your favor because it’s a difficult decision for them, and they need a moment to make that decision whether it’s by the end of the day or the next day, and it’s also about making sure that you give them an opportunity to speak because especially as leaders, we want to give our team all the space that they need to speak, show up and show off how great they are.

You’ll never know how much you can get out of your introverted leader if you’re the one doing all the talking. If you create that little bit of space, and especially for the extroverts reading, I know sometimes that can be challenging to let that silence hang and not fill it with more speaking, because most of you are doing your thinking by speaking out loud, remember that introverts are the opposite, where we need to think, formulate our thoughts, and then speak. If you’re always filling that space, you’re never going to get the full value out of your leader.

“Party Lines” For Introverts

Going back to our introverts, one of the things that I have done is give introverted leaders, I don’t want to say party lines, because I’m introverted, but a couple of party lines in their toolkit. If they are requesting or someone needs an immediate answer, at least they can say, “That’s a great question. I’ll get back to you on that,” or based on my experience, I think this is a good idea, but I need some more reflection time or some quick party lines so that they aren’t completely thrown off guard and want to run out of the room. They seem competent and they still can have that time. I don’t know if you’ve ever shared that party line, but maybe is that transition or pivotal line in a conversation so that you still can buy your time, but appear as a strong leader.

A few, and some of them are similar to what you’ve shared. Often for decisions, it’ll be, “If you need a decision right this moment, I’m leaning more towards this, but if you give me,” insert the amount of time that you need, a day, an hour, whatever, “I can think this rough properly and give you a response that I’m confident in.” I know a lot of leaders are very nervous when they get questions during presentations and at meetings where they don’t have the answer at hand. My favorite party line for that is always, “That’s a great question. I’d love to get back to you tomorrow with that full response. It’s a little bit more complicated than I can get into right now.”

Those are good. Thank you for sharing that as some tools. I ask all of my guests, but I’d love to hear your thoughts coming from our conversation, what are 1 to 2 ways that you believe women can be braver at work?

Bravery At Work

One way is to play what I call the worst-case scenario game. A lot of women I think blow out a proportion of the negative ramifications of what they want to do, like what they know they should be doing, they want to do, whether it’s saying no to something volunteering for a stretch assignment, or asking for that promotion. What I always do with my clients is ask them, “What’s the worst that can happen?” A lot of the time, it sees elaborate scenarios that aren’t going to come to fruition. One of my peeves doing all the office housework as a woman in leadership.

You’re in a group with a mixed group of people, somebody needs to take minutes, and oftentimes that work goes to a woman. I don’t know why, but I would always say, “I’d rather contribute this way,” especially now we can use AI tools to do all of that work for us. Some women are still uncomfortable with saying no to that because they’ve been asked to do something. What I’d say is, “What’s the worst that can happen? Will you get fired? Will you be told that you’re not contributing or that you’re being difficult?” Is that truly going to happen? Now in some circumstances, maybe if it’s a toxic work environment.

Maybe you want to be packaged out.

Maybe it’s a scenario where people will be nasty, but is that going to hurt your career long-term? Typically when playing this game, all those negative scenarios won’t happen.

Play that game, and I’m hearing take the action because your fear is not going to happen. Most of the worries aren’t going to happen. Take action and don’t let that fear stop you because you’re stuck in catastrophic thinking. The last piece I wanted to ask you is how women can find you and your wonderful work online.

I’m primarily on LinkedIn and have joined Instagram for my coaching practice. My website as well is JYYCoaching.com.

Closing

I know you are active on LinkedIn. Thank you so much for being here, representing and normalizing. Introversion is not a bad thing. We can be a very powerful introverted leader. Thank you for the work that you do.

Thank you so much for having me.

That’s a wrap of my discussion with Julianna. I hope you found our conversation both valuable and inspiring. As a reminder, please rate, review, and subscribe on Apple Podcasts and Spotify. The show is also available on any other podcast platform you enjoy. Until next time, show up. Own your introversion and be brave.

Important Links

• Julianna Yau Yorgan
• Hello@BraveWomenAtWork.com
• 24 Career And Leadership Affirmations
• 5 Steps To Managing Imposter Syndrome
• Get Paid: 10 Negotiation Tips
• Brave Women At Work: Lessons In Leadership
• Barnes & Noble – Brave Women At Work: Lessons In Leadership
• Books-A-Million – Brave Women At Work: Lessons In Leadership
• The Introverted Leader Community
• LinkedIn – Julianna Yau Yorgan
• Instagram – Julianna Yau Yorgan
• Apple Podcasts – Brave Women At Work
• Spotify – Brave Women At Work
• https://JYY.link/brave-women-at-work-podcast/

About Julianna Yau Yorgan

Julianna Yau Yorgan is a professional coach and career strategist for introverts ready to thrive in an extrovert’s workplace…. without being more extroverted.