Overcoming Introversion in Three Counterintuitive Steps

We live in a society that rewards outgoing people. In her TED Talk "The Power of Introverts," Susan Cain notes this was not always the case, as the drive towards rewarding extroverts began in the twentieth century with the rise of big business. Outgoing people, namely extroverts, get rewarded for their actions. Our society looks for people who are willing to take charge. To paraphrase Cain, even though introverts can solve difficult problems, teachers and counselors encourage extroversion, and introverts can be viewed as problem children. For introverts, this can be a difficult pill to swallow. I should know: I consider myself an introvert. Yes, I can become extroverted in some situations, and people exhibit qualities of both introverts and extroverts. Like many self-proclaimed introverts, however, I can feel drained after going through situations that require me to act like an extrovert. I know leaders who identify as introverts, and this post offers guidelines to help you thrive despite your introversion.

Self-realization: There are times and places for introversion 

After all, introversion is a personality trait, not a disorder or disease. I'll note just like Cain that introversion can be viewed as a disease. I've made this observation out of frustration when I'm unable to get out of my own shell. One should not view introversion as a disease or weakness that should be removed from the body. Rather, the first step an introverted leader takes means that the leader realizes there are times and places for introversion. This is no easy task, as many introverts note that they wish they could control when they must act instead of ruminate on the situation. Look, I go through this myself. Whenever I write an article, I prefer to write in solitude because I can focus my attention on transforming my thoughts onto the screen. Unfortunately, life demands that we address other people's needs, and there exist times when we must put aside the task we feel most important now. Anyone with a family can attest to such situations. For example, I often get home before my wife, so I'm the one who cooks dinner. "I'll wait for dinner to cook," said no hungry person ever, so my priority shifts from writing to cooking when I know my wife is coming home.

Self-reflection: Figure what drives one's introversion.

Ironically, a second step of sorts is to think about why you feel comfortable as an introvert. It could have arisen from a situation you encountered during childhood. For example, when I was in elementary school, my parents owned a time share in Del Mar, California. I met a boy about my age, and I started hanging out with him. I enjoyed spending time with this young man -- almost to the point where I would follow him. Unfortunately, I overheard him talking to his mom about this kid who was clingy and wanted to go wherever he went. I heard what he said, and thought "that sounds just like me, so it must be me." Instead of confronting him and figuring something out, I chose to close myself off and not speak to him again. Not because I felt angry at what he had to say, but because I felt embarrassed for being too close. Thus, introversion became a defense mechanism that I used to shield myself from rejection. Through reflection, you can figure out why you choose introversion, and you must confront your fears even if you fear you will falter. You will face pain and rejection at times. To receive recognition for your leadership skills, you must risk shattering your perceptions that you hold dear. Figuratively speaking, you might feel like you're putting yourself in danger.

Growth-mindset: Be bold through uncomfortable situations

Actions follow reflection. This brings me to a question: once you realize the situation calls for appropriate social behaviors, how do you prepare yourself? Practice, practice, practice! I'm serious. If you feel uncomfortable in situations that demand you shift towards extroversion, you must put yourself in situations that force you to do this.  You can do this in one of many ways, I list a few below:

• Take on stretch assignments in areas outside your current job
• Find a mentor in a position of leadership whose background differs greatly
• Socialize as often as you can.
• Write down your thoughts before attending meetings

As I've discussed in previous articles (why you should do stretch assignments and how you find the best stretch assignments), taking rotations outside your comfort zone force you to directly face your fears. Take on short term projects where you interact with customers or project management. You risk failure if you do not interact with other people. This can feel daunting at first. In fact, I argue that if you do not think "why did I put myself in this situation?" within the first one or two months of a rotation, you do not stretch yourself far enough outside your comfort zone. Something to remember: You lead a team, and your team wants you to succeed. Seek them out for their advice. Seek the manager you report to for advice. It is not weakness to ask for help. As Peter Bregman notes, "needing help — asking for help — is an essential part of being a leader," and the idea that leaders only help others and don't need help themselves is not true. "The reality is that leaders who don’t need help have no one to lead. People feel good when they help. They are inspired when they are needed. They don’t think less of the people they help, they feel more connected." If you want to feel closer to your team, this means you must reach out to them in your time of needs. This will build trust.

Seek your team's feedback: Build their trust while learning to feel comfortable reaching out to them

I believe in the power of mentorship. When I had my first job straight out of college, I did not have a third party to express my concerns. I felt lost in the jungle called a large company. I would wager that extroverts feel the same way when joining a large team. After all, it is human to feel uncomfortable in new situations, and every person's personality consists of a combination of introverted and extroverted traits. Find someone to mentor you even if for your first couple months. In a new situation, a seasoned employee can show you the ropes: forms you need to get processes started, training classes you need, managers who can approve documents such as parts order forms. My point here in seeking out informal mentors is that you can make lasting professional friends who can help you shift from being a new employee to an experienced one. Who knows, maybe you'll return the favor some day.

Of course, a temporary mentor can get you so far. I would suggest that you seek out a leader who can guide and maybe even coach you. This leader should be one level above your current manager. Yes, this can feel uncomfortable especially if your prospective mentor lives directly in your chain of command. However, you will need to report status to managers anyway, so why not seek their advice? Every leader is a person, and they all started somewhere. The CEO of your company, for example, was once an entry-level person who made mistakes and got less then stellar feedback from their managers. However, that CEO stuck through the tough times, learned from their mistakes, and used constructive criticism as opportunities for improvement. Do not fear making mistakes. You will take risks, and you will naturally mess things up. The important thing is for you to share your concerns with a mentor you develop trust with, so they can point out how you can best learn from those situations.

Anita Campbell at American Express notes that "it can be a good idea for you to step out of your comfort zone every now and then." You can do this by socializing with your coworkers. This can take the form of hanging out during lunch or going to happy hours together and schmoozing. Do not be afraid to share personal details about yourself. This will take practice because you might not know how much information is too much. No one wants to know about that large growth on the back of your neck, or your constant indigestion, for example. However, you can talk to them about your hobbies, your family in positive light, exciting things you did last weekend, and so forth. The point here is that you share personal information, so your team feels connected with you, and you with them.

Bonus: Prepare for your meetings by writing down your thoughts.

Before meetings, write down your thoughts. OK, you can think of this as a bonus step: Create a personal agenda of topics you want to discuss to ensure that you address them. I do this whenever I meet with my mentor or a manager. This at the least makes sure that I do not forget to address concerns I might have. When you develop a meeting rhythm with your team, you might find that you might not need to write all your thoughts down. You get into the habit of discussing issues with your team on a regular basis. However, it is a good idea to write down your thoughts before important meetings.

Remember, it is not easy for introverts to become extroverts. It will not happen overnight. Despite what other people say, it is perfectly acceptable for you to be introverted. You should remember, however, that you will need to be outgoing in many situations. I did not explicitly state reasons why you need to be less introverted when needed, as I assume you already know this. For example, you could get passed up for promotions when compared to an outgoing coworker who shows no fears of speaking their mind. If you practice these steps, you will find it easier to reach out and be active in a team. You will make mistakes: I know, I've made mistakes by going back into my comfort zone when I should have asked my program manager and team members questions each day. However, the funny thing about stepping outside of your comfort zone is that you expand it. Just don't forget to stay in that new spot. You will need to continually need to go outside, and you might reach a stage where you look forward to doing that. I wish you the best of luck!

Do you want to learn more about engineering, career advancement, and leadership? Please read my prior posts on this subject:

• How You Can Successfully Propose Your Engineering Projects using Five Principles
• Definitive Guide on Boosting Careers: How to Find Stretch Assignments
• Accelerate your career through stretch assignments 
• How to Market Yourself for Larger Paychecks and Promotions
• How to Evolve Your Stagnant Career towards Exciting Fields in STEM
• How to Turn Cynicism into Positive Action
• Sometimes leadership means cleaning up the mess you created
• Learn from your mistakes to build on your experiences

How You Can Successfully Propose Your Engineering Projects using Five Principles

Engineers enjoy working on cool projects. We're nerds and proud of it. It is one thing to work on a hobby project such as home automation with a Raspberry Pi single board computer (SBD) or developing custom Alexa Skills. Suppose you have an idea for a cool project where you work. How do you convince internal funding sources to fund your idea? Ultimately, you must write a project proposal. Before you do that, I will describe principles you should follow to ensure your proposal's success. This article assumes you will internally propose your idea instead of an using an external crowdfunding source like Kickstarter. I share five principles on how you can get your project ideas funded within your company. These principles are

1. Check for relevance: Focus on your company's technical strategy
2. Refine your idea: Write, Re-write, Re-write again
3. Determine your project costs: ROI is key
4. Find the relevant markets: More demand means more interest
5. Write to the funding source's guidelines: Stay within the lines while painting vivid pictures

Follow these principles to increase your odds of proposal success. Let's start with making sure that your idea aligns with your company's technical strategy and why you should do this.

Write a concise project proposal to show your idea's relevance to your company

Check for relevance: Focus on your company's technical strategy

If you want to sell your idea to leadership, make sure that it aligns with your company's technology strategy. Companies typically publish their strategies internally on their Intranet. It might take some digging to find it. You might need to speak to people in the Business Development department. My point is this: You must know your company's technology road-map and where your idea fits. If your company develops autonomous cars, for example, an algorithm to improve its ability to cooperate with non-autonomous cars would be beneficial to your company. An algorithm for self-regulating temperatures in people's house would not.

At a high level, companies exist to make money. Explore this concept deeper, and you will find that companies have missions and values. Missions explain why companies exist: make the world a better place, make roads safer, help people live healthy lives, and so forth. Values set the boundaries on how companies will go about fulfilling their missions. Your idea must help your company achieve their mission.  Simply put, the technology strategy explains how they will do this. You can find advice on developing strategies, yet you need not worry about that. Your ideas represent tactics -- ways that you help your company execute their strategy.

Refine your idea: Write, Re-write, Re-write again

I've been told that the first draft of anything sucks. On a side note, the quote "the first draft of anything is shit" is often attributed to Ernest Hemingway. However, it could be attributed to Anne Lamott who authored Bird by Bird. When writing, I live by the mantra Fast, Bad, and wRong or FBR. (For more details on FBR, see the "Fast, Bad And Wrong: A Mantra For Creating The New And Impossible.") The ideas here are not that you suck as a writer. It's that first drafts represents your opportunities write all of your technical thoughts down on paper. You want to do it FBR, so you do not lose your thoughts. Write down your thoughts fast, so you document them. Do it bad, so you don't pause and reconsider what you write down. Do it wRong because you will revise your proposal multiple times to get it right. This does not mean that you should write your first draft in one sitting. No, if you need to take a break, take a break. However, when you sit down and write, make sure that you focus on writing your proposal

Remember your company's technology strategy? When you revise your first draft into your second draft, refer to the strategy. If you documented technical ideas that do not align with the strategy, remove them or put them in a future works section. When I write first drafts, I use a "more is better" strategy with FBR because I want to cover my bases. However, I know that I will not need all this material. You can delete text. It's OK.

Tip: Learn concise writing, or try not to express your idea with a plethora of beefy wordy excessive words

When you revise, say what you want to say with as few words as possible. In other words, keep it short and simple. Although teachers expressed this idea to me from an early age, I find guilt in not following this advise. You probably do this too. Why do people write lengthy papers? Perhaps they trained to a "grade by thickness" mentality in college / university. Perhaps they think the more they write, the more important their writing becomes. Unfortunately, the audience gets lost in discursive statements that drone on and one. In fact, they probably don't read it. Why do you think proposals have abstracts and executive summaries? Rhetorical question.

When you edit your draft, you should cut excessive verbiage. Take my sub-header for example. Instead of writing, "try not to express your idea with a plethora of beefy wordy excessive words," I could have written "express your idea with a minimum number of words." It's straight to the point, and you don't fall asleep when reading it. I find it vague, yet I could revise it further to say something like "express your idea briefly yet comprehensively."

Tip: Have someone else review your proposal draft

We are all blind to our own mistakes. You should have someone else review your revised proposal draft. At this stage, it would be inappropriate for you to have a member of your company's hypothetically names Innovative Technology Research and Development Board review your proposal. However, if you know a fellow engineer or technologist who interfaces with that group, you have ask them to review it. You could ask your manager or another manager to review as well. Better yet, find someone who successfully submitted a proposal to this group. That person would know what works and what didn't. Offer to meet with them over coffee or lunch, pay for them, and have a list of questions prepared. Take notes during your conversation, and thank them both in person and via email for their time

Determine how much your project costs: ROI is key

To sell your idea, you need to show it has a reasonable return on investment (ROI). To show ROI, you must figure out how much it costs to implement your project. This serves as your baseline to prove that the company will earn a long-term profit if management funds you. You can break costs down into one of several categories:

• Engineering / software development labor costs
• Manufacturing costs including tools and labor
• Fringe benefits
• Hardware procurement
• Software procurement / licenses
• Training and education

Even if you develop software as your proposed project, you will need to buy hardware. For example, if you decide to develop a cutting edge Deep Learning / Artificial Intelligence software application, you will need a machine with Graphic Processing Units (GPUs) to handle the processing you need. Your standard word-processing and Excel laptop for day to day work will not cut it. GPU powered computers are not cheap, and you will need to factor that into your proposal cost.

What are fringe benefits? Think of them as cost of money involved with bringing people onto your project. Suppose you staff your project with a senior engineer having an hourly salary of $50 / hour. You will need to factor in costs for that engineer's benefits including health insurance. With fringe benefits, this could easily become well over $100 / hour. This becomes important because your company's Internal Research and Development Program (IRAD) already considers fringe benefits in employee hourly rates, so your budget will retract if you do not include it in your budget. Imagine you budgeted that senior engineer for 100 hours at $50 / hour. With that budget inconsistency with the true rate, you will get no more than 50 hours for that engineer. Your project could fail with half of that person's time. Include the fringe benefits in your labor estimates.

How do you calculate ROI? Once you know your costs, you can calculate the return using one of several measures. The measure you use will depend on what you intend to accomplish:

• Process improvement: Number labor hours saved multiplied by hourly rate(s)
• New product: Number of units sold 
• Product upgrade: increase in sales, cost savings to customer

Remember, these figures are estimates. You perform your own analysis to derive both your costs and returns. How do you effectively calculate such numbers? Much of this comes from experience. As you gain engineering experience, you develop a sense for how much time and effort projects take to completion. Granted, you might feel uncomfortable in calculating sales estimates. In that case, find a coworker who successfully submitted project proposals, and request their help. 

Tip: Have your coworker review your ROI figures

Every person is blind to their own mistakes. When you have your coworker review your proposal draft, request they review your ROI estimates. They could find something you missed in your calculations, or they could tell you that your sales estimates are way off base. The IRAD program review staff will review your numbers, so you want them to be accurate. If you know a coworker who serves as the liaison to that program, seek their advice before your submit your proposal. They will know what kinds of proposals get accepted, and which proposals get thrown into the trash bin.

Find the relevant markets: More demand means more interest

When you calculated your project's ROI, you might have calculated how much sales would increase. Although many companies have lofty values and mission statements, remember that leadership wants to show profits. You show profits by convincing them that your idea generates market demand. How do you show that your project increases market demand? You must talk to people. Discuss your idea with coworkers, managers, current customers, and potential customers. Figure out what they need. According to Josh Wolfe on The Knowledge Project, "ask yourself: 'What Sucks?' Almost everything that we use, almost everything that was ever invented, started with somebody saying, ‘Huh, that sucks. I’ve got a better idea.’” Go out and ask people what they think sucks in their lives, and you can figure out how your idea can make their lives better.

If you consider yourself an introvert, you should learn to behave like extroverts. Challenge yourself to speak to strangers. Seriously, you must learn to sell your idea. You will have time to develop your project on a bench by yourself later. This is the time for you to reach out for support. Yes, you can figure out market demand by doing Internet searches. However, companies rarely publish the best known information online. If you do not work in customer relations, find people who work in business development. Send them introductory emails and request 30 to 60 minutes of their time to discuss your idea in person. You will learn much from these conversations including uses for your project. What's the worst that can happen? You can learn that your idea has no relevance, or someone has already done it. If this happens, consider it an opportunity to move on to a better idea.

Does the market have to be external? No. You could apply your project to other business areas within your companies. This rings true if your idea focuses on process improvements. For example, if you propose to use Artificial Intelligence and machine vision to improve yields in smart phone processing board manufacturing, your company's television division could use that idea to improve yields in their television production lines. What if your company's divisions have different customer groups? If you prove value to both groups, you increase likelihood that your leadership approves your project.

Tip: Develop your professional network well before you develop your project proposal

You might notice a common thread in proving market value: You need to speak to people. To make this easier, develop your professional network. When people know you personally, they show more willingness to help you. If you have opportunities to attend conferences whether internal to your company or not, attend them! If you can present on a project, by all means, present it. Whatever you do, DO NOT miss out on the networking opportunities that conferences represent. Speak to people, find out what interests them, hand out your business cards, and get their contact information. You never know when you will need their assistance. The person you chat with at a conference could be a potential customer, an insider to a potential funding source, or someone who can mentor or coach you when you develop your project proposals. Get out there and make yourself known!

Write to the funding source's guidelines: Stay within the lines while painting vivid pictures

Look, you should respect the review board's time. This means that you write your final proposal draft according to their guidelines. If they request a one page summary, provide them with a one page summary. Yes, you will develop far more than a page while you develop your project. That's great because you can save that information for when they ask you for more information. Do not provide them with information they do not request because (a) they will either not read it, or (b) they will be annoyed that you make them spend more time reading irrelevant text.

Of course, project proposal guidelines can have more than page limits. The review board can request you provide the following in your proposal summary:

• Summary of project
• Project implementation plan
• Project timeline
• Project costs
• Source materials including any prior work (i.e., patents)
• Any products your proposal supports
• Relevance to other business units
• Sales or ROI estimates

You will not need to provide all of the information I listed above in your proposal. It depends on your company's internal processes and the funding source. It will take time for you to provide this information, yet you should compile this information when you edit your proposal drafts. You should provide this information concisely. (See my tip on concise writing.) If the internal IRAD group has an internal website for you to submit proposals, make sure you save your inputs in local documents. It sucks when you write text in an online form only to lose it to a system glitch.

Tip: Prepare to present your project proposal

Keep extra material saved in separate documents, so you can incorporate them into a project briefing proposal. You can delve deeper into your proposal when you present it to the proposal board. However, you need to stay within their guidelines here as well. This means using the company presentation format and staying within a predetermined time limit. The more prepared you are, the more likely you will impress the proposal board. You want to convince them that you can

Summary

In this post, I discuss five principles that you can use to successfully write an internal business proposal for your engineering project idea. Engineers enjoy working on cool projects. Imagine developing a matter transporter used in Star Trek or a light Saber used by Jedi knights. We love turning science fiction into science reality. Unfortunately, engineers often work in business environments where they must prove their idea's worth before leadership will grant funds for developing these projects. The five principles discussed include focusing on your company's technical strategy, refining your proposal idea, determining project costs and ROI, finding relevant markets to sell your product, and writing your proposal to the funding source's guidelines.

Not all ideas are created equal, nor are the best ideas guaranteed to receive funding. By following these principles, however, you will increase your proposal's acceptance chances. These principles allow you to develop your idea to your audience's needs.


Do you want to learn more about engineering, career advancement, and leadership? Please read my prior posts on this subject:

• Definitive Guide on Boosting Careers: How to Find Stretch Assignments
• Accelerate your career through stretch assignments 
• How to Market Yourself for Larger Paychecks and Promotions
• How to Evolve Your Stagnant Career towards Exciting Fields in STEM
• How to Turn Cynicism into Positive Action
• Sometimes leadership means cleaning up the mess you created
• Learn from your mistakes to build on your experiences