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Steven Claes shared thisA new word arrived for people like many of my readers. Psychiatrist Rami Kaminski coined “otrovert” in his 2025 book The Gift of Not Belonging, to describe people who are warm, socially capable, and still feel like outsiders in any group. One real conversation beats twenty polite ones. A reviewer for the Human Givens Institute praised the book, then noted her surprise at one claim: Kaminski even suggests introverts struggle to build deep one-to-one relationships. Other psychologists, like Carly Dober quoted in ABC’s coverage, have also pointed out that there is no peer‑reviewed research on “otroversion” yet. So here is where I land as a CHRO who spends a lot of time with ambitious introverts. Introversion already covers the person who skips the drinks, then talks for two hours with one colleague by the coffee machine. That is not a new personality type. That is just introversion. Renaming them does not change how promotion committees read “needs more presence” on a review. It does not change the way visibility is rewarded in the room where careers get decided. Keep the word. Rewrite the criteria that penalise it. Fix the room, not the introvert. And if someone you know is halfway through an online quiz trying to find the label that finally explains them, send them this. The label they already have still works. The work now is getting organisations to see it. I go further in my newsletter for ambitious introverts, including the visibility system I use to get reserved people recognised without asking them to perform (whenever organisations are not (yet) willing to change). -> https://lnkd.in/eUw4frik
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Steven Claes shared thisI finally had two hours to myself. They came at exactly the wrong time. Nothing on the calendar. No messages to answer. No one waiting for me. Just the report I'd been trying to get to all day. I opened it. And realised having the time to do your best work doesn't mean you're still able to do it. The Introvert's Focus Tax ↓
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Steven Claes shared thisThe meeting was cancelled at 09:40. I know exactly what I felt. And it wasn't disappointment. I made a second coffee and stood at the kitchen window for a while, watching absolutely nothing happen outside. There was no productivity gain. I did not reinvest the time wisely. I just had an hour that nobody wanted anything from, and it felt like the building exhaled. Extraverts feel this too. Everyone lies about it. Tell me you did not smile. 💚 If you know someone who'd feel this too, reshare it. Join the A+introvert community for great moments like this: https://lnkd.in/en59EKuG
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Steven Claes shared this“You just need a thicker skin.” I spent years trying. It made me worse at my job. You cannot toughen the part of you that notices things, because the noticing is what makes the work good in the first place. Every attempt to become less sensitive ended the same way: I became less useful, and still just as tired. What changed things was not less sensitivity. It was better filters. Not one filter, five, because feedback arrives in different shapes and each one needs its own screen. A comment in a meeting is not the same object as a written review, which is not the same as a passing remark from someone who has never done your job, which is not the same as a piece of advice from the one colleague who has been in the room where it matters. The five that actually did the work are on the whiteboard. They are not clever. They are mechanical, in the way that most durable things are: something you run a comment through before you let it into your week. Sensitivity is data the world ignores. If you have ever been told to develop thicker skin, this one is for you. 🔖 Save this for the next time a comment starts its 4K rerun. The A+ Introvert Newsletter Every Saturday I send one piece on introvert careers and the organisations that keep losing quiet talent. No filler, no repackaging of the week's posts. -> Subscribe here (free): https://lnkd.in/en59EKuG
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Steven Claes shared thisAn idea I keep circling back to as HR leader: employment regulation is something HR is expected to already know. Then you take on a new role, or inherit a new country, and there's no idea what to check first or when to stop worrying. That's introvert work: read twice before trusting, write it down, and have the answer ready before the room asks. Chances are it disappears the usual way: the written case gets absorbed as pre-work already done, while credit goes to whoever raised the risk out loud. The other option is external counsel, billed by the hour. Building your own reference fixes both the cost and the guessing: 1. Pick the country you just inherited 2. Name all the risks that bite: probation, notice, parental leave, working time, collective agreements 3. Find the answer and note where it came from 4. Flag what changed in the last year 5. Keep it somewhere you can point to (👆 make sure to save this) That third step matters most. A public model answers in the same confident tone whether it knows your country or is filling the gap with pattern matching. Sounding certain is free. Proving it is not. Corbey trains on a curated dataset with context per country, and every answer links back to its source. It doesn't pretend to know what it doesn't know, and it speaks your language on EU and UK employment regulation. Two things build that reference fast: 1. Corbey, your AI Advisor for HR in Europe 2. The five steps above, done once and saved Try it here for 7 days. Walk away if it doesn't earn its place. https://lnkd.in/epf5zrGk #PartnerCorbey
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Steven Claes shared thisThe hardest thing to tell an introvert who is performing extroversion at work is that it is working. It works, which is exactly why nobody in the company ever has to change anything. I have sat in a version of this conversation many times. Someone says about a candidate: "He really came alive in that presentation." The room nods. He gets the role. Read the left column of that whiteboard again. Every line on it is something the job asked him for, and he delivered all ten. For years I let that sentence pass. Now I ask which decision got better. The room usually goes quiet. Because a senior role is never only the work. It carries an unwritten spec inherited from whoever held it last: how often they were in the corridor, how they opened a meeting, how fast they answered. Nobody writes that down. Everybody calibrates against it. So the promotion arrives as a reward and then becomes a contract. Perform at that level, at that frequency, for as long as you hold the role, and there is no mechanism anywhere in the company for handing the contract back. Three years later he leaves, and we code it as balance, and we lose the judgement that got him promoted. The cost of a badly designed room belongs to the people who designed it. We have spent years charging that cost to the individual instead, and calling that development. → Write the role spec before you name candidates, then strike every line that describes the last holder rather than the work. → When someone says a candidate came alive, ask which decision got better. Up to you to decide what your last succession slate was actually measuring. Your room may not change this year, and you still have a career to run in the meantime. 🎓 Be Seen is a free 5-day email course on getting your thinking in front of the people who decide, without performing for it: https://lnkd.in/eRWH7HXj ♻️ Share this with your network if you agree.
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Steven Claes shared thisIf you can sit through four hours of meetings that change nothing, you can sit with yourself for twenty minutes that change something. New week. Join the A+introvert community for impact: https://lnkd.in/eRWH7HXj
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Steven Claes reacted on thisIt's Sunday, and my introvert brain has already played Monday's meeting going wrong four times. Not once going right. This is the part of being an introvert that catches a lot of us off guard. Not the quiet. The replaying. I can picture the bad version so clearly. The long pause after I talk. The question I can't answer. The louder person who talks over me while I sit on the thing I wanted to say. I've lived that meeting a hundred times before I walk in the room. But I never once live the version where it goes well. Then I read a line this week that stopped me. "If you can overthink the worst, why can't you overthink the best?" The overthinking was never the problem. It's just a strong imagination pointed the wrong way. So this Sunday I'm trying one thing. Every time the bad version starts to play, I play the good version instead. Same detail. Same clear picture. It feels fake at first. Then it starts to feel like getting ready. What's the meeting you've already played wrong this week? ---- The bad version of the meeting is a preparation problem wearing a fear costume, so I put the fix in one place: The Quiet Leader's Meeting Playbook, including what to do when someone talks over you and how to get your point back into the room. 👇 https://lnkd.in/e7KAehq4 ---- PS. As introvert CHRO, I (Steven Claes) write more about the introvert career every Saturday👇: https://lnkd.in/es3CKUJS
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Steven Claes reposted thisI did everything you're supposed to do. By 3pm, I was completely drained. I'd kept the morning clear of meetings and even protected time later in the day to recover. Nobody had ignored my boundaries or pushed something into the space I'd blocked. On paper, the system had worked. So why was I staring at my laptop, unable to string a sentence together? It took me a while to realise I'd been protecting the wrong thing. The Introvert’s Meeting Tax ↓
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