Who has the advantage?

Who would have the upper hand when it comes to sales and leadership? The extroverts or the introverts? Let's figure this out.

- FRANCIS J. KONG

When I started my career in sales, I peddled jeans, presented samples, and visited the purchasing offices of department stores and boutiques (there were no malls yet). I envied the confident, strong, and charming extroverted salespeople who would walk into the office, flash their "toothpaste commercial" smiles, crack jokes, and make everybody laugh. How I wished I were like them because I was not.

Then, when I worked up the proverbial career "ladder of success" and became a junior manager, I seemed to sense familiar things happening. I envied those confident, strong, charming, and chatty senior executives in the corporate office.

They seemed to possess the secret sauce for success, and many admired them, including me. These extroverted personalities seemed to have all the fun, while introverted, quiet, and deep-thinking people like me always stayed on the sidelines, watching them succeed without me.

Fast forward to today. We still think of the successful leader as an extrovert with a magnetic personality. Why is this so? We associate leadership with extroversion and assertiveness, just as with salespeople, but modern research has shown that this is not the case.