For most of my career, I thought there was something slightly wrong with me

Not enough that anybody else would notice. Just enough that I constantly felt like I was experiencing work differently from the people around me. I could do the job itself perfectly well. What exhausted me was everything surrounding it. The meetings, the networking, the office politics, the constant interruptions, the pressure to always appear engaged and switched on.

Meanwhile other people seemed completely fine inside those environments. They’d spend all day in meetings, socialise afterwards and still appear mentally fresh the next morning. For years I assumed the issue was confidence, or resilience, or ambition. Maybe I just wasn’t built for corporate environments properly.

It took me a long time to realise I wasn’t struggling with work itself. I was struggling with the psychological demands surrounding modern work culture. And once I understood that distinction, a lot of things started making sense.

Why certain environments left me completely wiped out. Why I consistently delivered strong work but still felt professionally invisible. Why networking felt fake and exhausting in ways I couldn’t properly explain. Why meetings drained me in a way they clearly didn’t drain other people.

None of that was a capability problem. It was a mismatch between how my brain naturally operates and the operating system modern workplaces run on.

So I’ve been quietly building Introvert Operating System

Introvert OS is seven modules covering the things most workplaces never explain properly.

The hidden psychological cost of meetings and visibility. Why introverts often feel invisible despite being highly capable.

How to build professional influence without constant self-promotion. How to manage cognitive energy before it manages you.

And how to build a version of career success that doesn’t require permanent psychological exhaustion to maintain.

It’s practical, it’s honest and it’s built entirely on 20 years of working inside corporate environments as an introvert and gradually figuring out how to navigate all of it without constantly performing a version of myself I wasn’t.

As someone who’s been following my introvert content, I wanted you to see it first.

Get Introvert OS

Cheers

Lee

Over the last few articles I’ve written about the talent review, the manager relationship, and building visibility with senior leaders. All of it has been about one central truth: the decisions that shape your career happen in rooms you’re not in, made by people working from imperfect information.

Pay decisions work exactly the same way.

Most people assume their salary is determined by their performance, their experience, and what the market pays for their role. Those things matter. But they’re not the whole story. And understanding what the rest of the story actually is might be the most practically valuable thing I can share with you.

How companies actually decide what to pay you

Most medium to large companies organise roles into grades or levels. Each grade has a salary band with a minimum, a midpoint, and a maximum. The band is usually wider than people assume, often spanning thirty to fifty percent between the bottom and the top.

Where you sit within that band is determined initially by what you negotiated when you joined. And then by your annual pay review.

Here’s the part nobody tells you. Two people doing identical jobs, at identical performance levels, can be paid twenty to thirty percent differently simply because one of them negotiated better when they started. The company is not obligated to correct that gap. And in most cases, they won’t unless you make them.

Annual pay reviews work like talent reviews. Managers are given a budget, usually expressed as a percentage of their total payroll, and asked to allocate it across their team. The budget is almost never enough to give everyone a meaningful increase. So managers have to make choices.

Those choices are influenced by the same factors we’ve been talking about for the last three weeks. Who is performing well. Who is a retention risk. Who has made their contribution visible. And frankly, who their manager believes in enough to fight for in the budget meeting.

The people who get the largest increases are not always the best performers. They are the people whose managers fight hardest for them. And managers fight hardest for the people they trust, value, and don’t want to lose.

This is why Rooms Two and Three from the previous articles matter for your salary as much as they matter for your promotion prospects. Your relationship with your manager is the single most important lever in your pay review. Not your performance rating.

Why most people are underpaid and don’t realise it

There are three reasons most people earn less than they could. None of them are about their capability.

The first is the starting salary trap. Your starting salary anchors every pay conversation you will ever have at that company. Annual increases are typically expressed as percentages of your current salary. Which means a poor starting negotiation compounds negatively over your entire tenure. Someone who accepts £45,000 when the role could have paid £52,000 is not just losing £7,000 in year one. If they get three percent increases each year, they are still behind by a compounding amount five years later. The time to fix a low starting salary is not three years in. It is before you accept the offer.

The second is confusing loyalty with strategy. The single most reliable way to increase your salary significantly is to change jobs. The average pay increase from moving externally is between ten and twenty percent. The average annual pay rise for staying put is two to four percent. Most people stay because they feel loyal, comfortable, or because job searching feels hard. All of those are legitimate reasons. But they should be conscious choices, not defaults. You are not disloyal for knowing your market value and expecting your employer to meet it.

The third is finding the conversation too uncomfortable to have. This is the most common reason and the most fixable. Most people find salary conversations deeply uncomfortable. They worry about seeming greedy, damaging their relationship with their manager, or being told no and not knowing what to do next. So they avoid it entirely. The discomfort is real. But the cost of avoiding it is also real. It just shows up quietly, as a slow accumulation of lost earnings over years, rather than a single obvious moment.

Where the flexibility actually is

There is almost always more room in salary than companies let on.

Within your current band, most managers have discretion to move people without needing additional sign-off. If you are below the midpoint of your band, there is often room to move you without triggering a formal regrading process. Most people don’t know where they sit in their band. Some companies will tell you if you ask directly.

At promotion moments, the cleanest opportunity for a significant jump exists. Both the budget and the justification are in motion simultaneously. Most people underuse this moment by accepting the first number offered rather than negotiating properly.

In retention situations, budgets appear that did not previously exist. The same manager who told you there was no budget for a pay rise will often find budget when you hand in your notice. This is not a cynical observation. It is a reliable pattern of corporate life. The time to use it strategically is before you get to the point of handing in your notice.

What to actually say

The salary conversation does not have to be a confrontation. The most effective version of it is not aggressive. It is prepared, specific, and positioned as a professional discussion rather than a demand.

Before you open the conversation, do the research. Know what your role is paying elsewhere. Job postings, salary sites, conversations with recruiters in your field. You want a specific number with market evidence to support it, not a vague sense that you should be earning more.

When you’re ready, ask for a specific meeting rather than raising it at the end of a one to one. Something like this works.

“I’d like to have a conversation about my salary when you have time. Can we schedule something in the next couple of weeks?”

That signals seriousness without creating an ambush.

In the meeting, lead with your contribution. Specific outcomes, not tasks. Then present your market research as context rather than a threat. Then state your ask clearly and specifically. Vague asks give managers an easy way out.

When they say there’s no budget, which is often the first response regardless of whether it’s true, this is worth knowing. “No budget” frequently means “not in this cycle” or “not without sign-off from above” or “not unless you push back.” The response that keeps the conversation open is something like this.

“I understand there are budget constraints. Can you help me understand what would need to be true for this to be possible, and can we agree what that looks like for the next review cycle?”

That doesn’t accept no as a final answer. It moves the conversation forward and puts your manager in a position where they either give you a clear roadmap or acknowledge that one doesn’t exist. Both are useful.

One thing worth sitting with

Most introverts find the salary conversation harder than most people. The combination of self-promotion, potential conflict, and uncertainty about the response is genuinely uncomfortable for people who prefer directness and dislike ambiguity.

But here’s what I’ve observed after two decades in recruitment. The discomfort of having the conversation lasts about twenty minutes. The cost of not having it lasts years.

You do not need to become someone who enjoys negotiating. You just need to have the conversation once, properly prepared, with a specific ask and the evidence to back it up. That’s not a personality change. It’s a skill you use occasionally, in a specific situation, for a significant return.

The people who earn what they’re worth are not necessarily more talented or more confident than the people who don’t. They just had the conversation.

Next time I’m going to write about getting promoted without playing politics. Specifically, what actually gets assessed when promotion decisions are made, and how to position yourself for the next level in a way that feels authentic rather than performative.

In the first article I wrote about the talent review. The meeting where your name comes up, decisions get made about your future, and you’re not there to represent yourself.

In the second article I wrote about Room Two. Your manager relationship. Why introverts underinvest in it. And why giving your manager the material to advocate for you is not politics, it’s self-preservation.

This article is about Room Three. The hardest room for most introverts. And the one that matters most for whether your career actually goes anywhere.

Room Three is senior leadership’s awareness of you. Whether the people above your manager know who you are, what you contribute, and what you’re capable of. It’s the room that determines whether you get promoted, considered for opportunities, and protected when things get difficult.

Most introverts have almost zero presence in it.

Not because they aren’t capable. Because the instinct that defines introversion, to do excellent work quietly, keep your head down, let the results speak, trust that good performance will be noticed, is precisely the instinct that keeps you invisible in Room Three.

I want to be honest about something before we go any further.

Building Room Three presence is the part of career advice that makes most introverts want to close the article. Because the moment it sounds like networking, schmoozing, or performing a version of yourself you don’t recognise, it stops feeling like useful advice and starts feeling like an instruction to become someone else entirely.

So let me be clear about what I’m not suggesting.

I’m not suggesting you start dominating meetings. I’m not suggesting you volunteer to speak at every all hands or engineer opportunities to be seen with senior people. I’m not suggesting you perform enthusiasm you don’t feel or build relationships that are transparently transactional.

None of that works for introverts anyway. And most of it doesn’t actually work at all.

What I am suggesting is something much simpler and much more sustainable. That you get deliberate about the fact that Room Three exists, and that you find a way to build presence in it that feels like you.

Here’s what actually moves the needle.

The quality of your work in high-visibility situations

Not all work is equally visible. Some projects are seen by lots of senior people. Others are invisible to everyone above your immediate manager. The former are significantly more valuable for your career than the latter, even if the latter is technically more complex.

High-visibility work tends to be cross-functional, involves multiple senior stakeholders, or is connected to something the leadership team has publicly said they care about. When these opportunities come up, taking them is one of the most natural ways to build Room Three presence without it feeling fake. You’re not performing. You’re just doing your job in a room with more people watching.

If you’re already doing this kind of work, make sure the right people know what happened. Not through self-promotion but through normal professional communication. A brief note to a senior stakeholder after a project closes. A summary shared upwards that gives your name visibility alongside the outcome. These are small, low-energy acts that accumulate over time.

Genuine relationships built through genuine curiosity

The introvert’s version of building senior relationships is not working the room at a company away day. It’s something much quieter and much more powerful.

It starts with asking good questions.

Most senior leaders spend their professional lives surrounded by people who tell them what they want to hear, agree reflexively, and avoid saying anything that might be unwelcome. A more junior person who asks a genuinely thoughtful question, listens properly to the answer, and follows up with something useful is genuinely memorable. Not because they performed interest. Because they were actually interested.

If there’s a senior leader whose work you find genuinely interesting, or whose judgment you respect, you don’t need a formal opportunity to connect with them. A brief message asking if they’d have fifteen minutes to share their perspective on something you’re working on is enough. Most senior leaders say yes to that. Not because they’re doing you a favour but because being asked for their perspective by someone who clearly means it is genuinely pleasant.

Come with real questions. Listen more than you talk. Follow up with something useful afterwards. That’s a relationship started.

The sponsor question

There’s a distinction worth understanding between a mentor and a sponsor.

A mentor gives you advice. A sponsor puts your name forward when you’re not in the room.

Most people have mentors and no sponsors. The difference is significant. A mentor helps you think through a decision. A sponsor is the person in the talent review who says “actually, I think she’s ready for this” when your name comes up.

Sponsors are not found by asking someone to be your sponsor. They develop through repeated genuine interaction where a senior person becomes convinced of your capability and invested in your progression. The relationship building I described above is how sponsorship starts.

But there’s something you can do to accelerate it. Once you have a senior leader who seems interested in your development, make it easy for them to sponsor you. Keep them informed of what you’re working on and what you’re delivering. Ask for their input occasionally. And signal your ambitions clearly enough that they know what to look out for on your behalf.

A sponsor who doesn’t know what you want can’t advocate for it.

The most important thing most introverts never do

Tell people what they want.

Not on a first meeting. Not loudly. But at some point, to the right people.

Your manager, as covered last week, needs to know you want to progress and what that looks like. But so does at least one senior person above them. Because if your manager leaves, gets restructured out, or simply lacks the political capital to push your case effectively, you need someone else in the room who knows your name and knows your ambitions.

This is not manipulation. It is the professional equivalent of making sure your CV is up to date. It is basic career maintenance for a world where decisions about you are being made by people who may not know you as well as they should.

For introverts, the instinct is to hope that good work eventually gets recognised by the right people without you having to do anything to make that happen. Sometimes it does. More often it doesn’t. The people who progress are not always the best performers. They are the people whose names come up positively in the right rooms, spoken by the right people, at the right moment.

Room Three doesn’t require you to become an extrovert. It requires you to be intentional about one thing. Who knows your name, and what do they think when they hear it?

That’s the question worth sitting with this week.

Next I’m going to write about the salary conversation. Specifically, how pay decisions actually get made inside companies, why most people are paid less than they could be, and what to say and when to say it to change that without it feeling like a confrontation.

In last week’s article I wrote about the talent review. The meeting that happens without you, where your manager sits in a room with senior leaders and gives their account of who you are and what you contribute.

If you haven’t read that one, the short version is this. Your career inside a company is almost entirely filtered through one person’s perception of you. Your direct manager. Not your actual performance. Their perception of your performance. Those are not the same thing, and the gap between them is where careers quietly get stuck.

This article is about that gap. And specifically about why introverts are more vulnerable to it than most people realise.

Let me start with something uncomfortable.

Most introverts I know have a surface level relationship with their manager. Not because they don’t respect them, or don’t want a better relationship, but because investing in the relationship feels like performance. It feels like the kind of thing extroverts do naturally and introverts have to force. So they default to doing excellent work and hoping that communicates everything it needs to.

It doesn’t.

Here’s what actually happens when an introvert has a surface level relationship with their manager. The manager has a vague, positive impression of them. They know they’re reliable. They know they deliver. They probably like them. But when someone in the talent review asks “what’s Sarah working on and how is she getting on?” the manager gives a general, forgettable answer because they don’t actually know the detail. Not because they don’t care. Because Sarah never told them.

Compare that to the colleague who has a weekly fifteen minute catch-up with their manager, not to report in or be micromanaged, but just to keep the communication flowing. That colleague’s manager can talk about them specifically and convincingly because they hear specific things specifically. Same performance level. Completely different account given in the talent review.

I want to be careful here because I know what some of you are thinking. That sounds exhausting. I don’t want to perform a relationship I don’t naturally have. And I understand that completely.

But here’s the distinction worth making. There’s a difference between performing a relationship and investing in one. Performing is fake. Investing is strategic and genuine.

You don’t need to become someone who makes small talk in the corridor or lingers after meetings for a chat. You don’t need to go for lunch or build the kind of warm social connection that drains you for the rest of the afternoon. What you need is a consistent, low-effort mechanism for making sure your manager knows what you’re working on, what you’ve delivered, and what you need from them.

For most introverts, that mechanism is a regular one to one. Not a long one. Fifteen to twenty minutes, weekly or fortnightly. Structured enough that it doesn’t require you to fill silence or navigate an unplanned conversation. Purposeful enough that you leave having said something specific about your work.

If you don’t have a regular one to one with your manager, that is the single most important thing you can put in place this week. Not a performance development plan, not a career conversation, not a difficult conversation about your future. Just a regular slot where information flows between you without you having to engineer it every time.

The second thing worth thinking about is what you actually say in those conversations.

Most introverts give task updates. I finished the report. I’m working on the presentation. The project is on track. These are factual and correct and almost completely forgettable.

What your manager actually needs to be able to advocate for you is outcome language. Not what you did, but what changed as a result of what you did. Not “I finished the analysis” but “I finished the analysis and the team are using it to restructure how they handle client onboarding, which should save them about three hours a week per person.”

One sentence. Takes five seconds to say. And gives your manager a specific, credible, memorable thing to say about you when your name comes up.

I know this can feel like self-promotion. For introverts who find any form of self-promotion uncomfortable, framing your outcomes in conversation feels like showing off. But I’d ask you to reframe it. You are not boasting. You are giving your manager the information they need to do their job, which includes advocating for you. Without that information, they can’t. And the person who suffers when they can’t is you.

The third thing, and this one tends to surprise people, is asking your manager what they need from you rather than waiting to be told.

Most managers have never been asked this directly. The question itself, how do you prefer to be updated on progress, what would make the biggest difference to you in how I work, is rare enough that it signals a level of professional self-awareness that most managers respond to very positively.

For introverts this question is actually easier than most relationship-building activities because it’s direct, purposeful, and has a clear outcome. You’re not making conversation. You’re gathering information that helps you work better. That feels natural in a way that small talk often doesn’t.

The answers will sometimes surprise you. Your manager might tell you they prefer a short written update to a verbal one, which is actually great news for most introverts. They might tell you they’re most stressed about a specific area of the team’s work that you didn’t know about and could help with. They might tell you something that completely reframes what you thought they valued.

None of this requires you to be someone you’re not. It requires you to be intentional about one relationship that has more influence over your career than almost anything else.

Your manager is not your friend. They don’t need to be. But they are your primary advocate in every conversation that determines whether your career moves forward or stands still. Giving them the material to do that job well is not politics. It is self-preservation.

The irony for many introverts is that the quality of their work is rarely the problem. The problem is that the one person who most needs to understand and articulate that quality often doesn’t have enough to go on. Not because the introvert isn’t communicating, but because the communication they’re doing isn’t landing in the right place.

A weekly fifteen minute conversation, outcome language instead of task updates, and one direct question about what your manager needs from you. That’s the whole thing. It’s less than most people think. And it makes more difference than almost anything else you could do for your career right now.

In the next article I’m going to write about Room Three. The room where senior leaders form their views about who is ready for more. And why the introvert’s instinct to stay out of that room is one of the most costly career decisions you can make without realising you’re making it.

There is a meeting happening in your company that you have never been invited to and probably don’t know exists. Your name is being discussed in that meeting.

Decisions are being made about your future there, whether you’ll be promoted, whether you’re a retention risk, whether you’d survive a restructure. And everything said about you comes from one source: your manager.

If you’re an introvert, that meeting is one of the most important things to understand about corporate life. Because the system it represents is almost perfectly designed to disadvantage you.

Let me explain what I mean.

I’ve spent over 20 years in recruitment and talent acquisition, sitting on the other side of the table in exactly these kinds of conversations. I’ve watched careers accelerate and stall. I’ve seen genuinely talented people get passed over while louder, more visible colleagues moved up. And the reason is almost never performance. It’s almost always presence.

The meeting I’m describing is called a talent review. Most companies run them quarterly or annually. Managers and senior leaders sit in a room and discuss their teams. Who is performing well. Who is ready for the next level. Who they’re worried about losing. Who they’d protect if they had to cut headcount.

Your name comes up. Your manager gives their view. The room responds. And a version of you gets formed in those people’s minds that will shape every career decision made about you until something changes it.

Here’s the thing that should concern every introvert reading this.

You are not in that room. You cannot speak for yourself. You cannot add context, correct a misunderstanding, or demonstrate your capability in real time. Everything depends entirely on how your manager talks about you. Not on what you’ve delivered. On how they talk about it.

A manager who champions you will say something like this: “She’s been exceptional this quarter. She’s ready for more and I’m worried we’ll lose her if we don’t create an opportunity.” A manager who is lukewarm will say: “He’s solid. Does what’s asked. Not sure he’s ready for the next step yet.” A manager who barely thinks about you will say almost nothing. And in a talent review, silence is not neutral. It’s a vote against.

Most people I’ve spoken to over the years have had no idea this process exists. They assumed their work spoke for itself. They focused on delivery, kept their head down, produced results. And then watched someone noisier, someone who spoke up more in meetings, someone who seemed to spend more time managing upwards than actually working, get promoted instead.

This is not an accident. It’s a structural feature of how most organisations work. The system rewards visibility. And visibility is something many introverts either resist, find exhausting, or simply haven’t been taught how to build in a way that feels authentic.

I want to be careful here, because I’m not about to tell you to become someone you’re not. I’m not going to suggest you start dominating meetings or schmoozing at company events or performing a version of confidence that doesn’t belong to you. That’s not the answer and it’s not sustainable.

The answer is understanding the system well enough to work with it on your own terms.

Your career lives across three rooms simultaneously. The first room is your actual performance, what you deliver and how you deliver it. This is the room most introverts invest almost everything in. The second room is your manager’s perception of you, how they talk about you, how much they trust you, whether they can articulate your value specifically and convincingly when you’re not there. The third room is senior leadership’s awareness of you, whether the people above your manager know who you are and what you contribute.

Most introverts score well in Room One and almost nowhere in Rooms Two and Three. Not because they lack the capability. Because the practices that build presence in those rooms feel unnatural, unnecessary, or vaguely political. So they skip them. And their careers plateau at a level that doesn’t reflect what they’re actually capable of.

Here’s what I know from two decades of watching this play out. The introvert who understands how the system works, and who finds ways to build presence in all three rooms without pretending to be someone else, consistently ends up in a better place than the introvert who assumes the work will speak for itself.

The work doesn’t speak for itself. You have to speak for it, in the right rooms, to the right people, in a way that feels like you.

Over the coming weeks, this newsletter is going to go deep on exactly how to do that. Not generic career advice. Specifically how it works for people who are wired the way we are. People who find constant self-promotion exhausting. People who do their best thinking alone. People who would rather deliver excellent work quietly than perform loudly and deliver less.

The system wasn’t built with us in mind. But once you understand it, it’s more navigable than it looks.

Start by asking yourself one question. If your company ran a talent review tomorrow, what would your manager say about you?

If you’re not sure, that’s the most important thing to work on. Not a new skill, not another qualification, not harder work. Just making sure that the person in that room has enough to say.

My first proper job was in a supermarket. Weekends in the bakery, then eventually the checkouts.

I was sixteen. I had no idea I was an introvert, or even what an introvert was.

I just knew that by the time I got home in the evening I was completely done in a way I couldn’t really explain.

Not physically tired, though I was that too. Something else. A kind of flatness that needed the sofa, the quiet, and absolutely nobody talking to me for at least two hours before I felt like myself again.

I assumed everyone felt that way after a shift. It took me an embarrassingly long time to realise they didn’t.

Some of my colleagues loved it. The busy Saturday rush, the banter with customers, the chaos of the bakery when it got hectic. They were energised by it. I was depleted by the same things. We were doing identical jobs and having completely different experiences of them, and I never really understood why.

That was my first lesson, even though I wouldn’t have been able to name it at the time. The problem was never the environment. It was that I was measuring myself against people who were wired differently and wondering why I kept coming up short.

The checkouts were interesting in a different way. The bakery at least had gaps, moments where you could focus on the work without someone in front of you or hide in back for five minutes.

The checkouts were relentless. Customer after customer, small talk expected, smile required, no natural pause in the interaction until your break came around. I could do it. I wasn’t unfriendly or awkward. But every conversation cost something, and there were a lot of conversations in an eight hour Saturday shift.

What I learned to do, without really thinking of it as a strategy, was find the small pockets of quiet within the noise. A few minutes in the stock room. The walk to the break room. Even just the thirty seconds between one customer leaving and the next arriving.

Volunteering to go outside and collect trolleys was my favourite.

I was unconsciously protecting myself in tiny increments because the alternative was running completely empty before lunchtime.

I also noticed that the interactions I found least draining were the ones where I was actually useful. Someone looking for something specific, a question I could answer properly, a customer who wanted to know which loaf was best for sandwiches rather than just picking one at random. Genuine connection, even brief, felt different to obligatory performance. That distinction has stayed with me for thirty years.

It also quietly dismantled something I’d believed about myself for years. I’d always thought I was shy. Shy was the word people used for me at school, the word I’d use if anyone asked. Quiet. Shy. A bit awkward.

But shy and introverted aren’t the same thing, and the checkouts helped me figure that out without ever using either word. Shy is fear of social interaction. What I had was something different. I could talk to people all day. I could be warm, helpful, even funny with customers. I just needed to recover from it afterwards. That’s not shyness. That’s introversion. The distinction sounds small but it changes how you see yourself entirely. I wasn’t someone who struggled to connect with people. I was someone who found it costly in a way that extroverts simply don’t.

The other thing the supermarket taught me, and this one took longer to understand, was that doing a people-facing job well doesn’t mean it suits you naturally. I was good at the checkout. Customers didn’t leave thinking they’d been served by someone who’d rather be somewhere else. But competence and comfort are not the same thing, and confusing the two is something a lot of introverts do for most of their careers.

Being able to perform in an extroverted environment is a skill. It is genuinely useful and worth developing. But it is not evidence that you don’t need to recover from it. And the recovery isn’t weakness. It’s just the other side of the equation that nobody talks about.

I went on from that supermarket job to spend twenty years in recruitment, which if anything is an even more extroverted environment than a Saturday checkout. A lot of the same lessons applied, just at higher stakes and with more complex consequences. But the foundations were all there in the bakery on a busy Saturday morning, if I’d known what I was looking at.

The version of me that was sixteen and dragging himself home on the bus at seven o’clock, staring out the window needing silence, wasn’t struggling. He was just an introvert in an extroverted job, doing what introverts in extroverted jobs have always done.

Getting through it. And quietly figuring out how.

For most of my career I’ve been described the same way.

“Lee’s a bit quiet.”

Teachers said it at school. Managers said it in my early jobs. Even later in my career my bosses would occasionally mention it after meetings.

It was rarely meant badly. But it was almost always framed as something that needed fixing.

Corporate environments tend to reward people who are vocal, energetic and constantly visible. The people who speak first in meetings. The ones who fill the silence. The ones who always seem comfortable jumping into conversations.

When you’re quieter than that, people start making assumptions.

You’re disengaged.
You’re unfriendly.
You’re not that interested.

In reality, most introverts are simply operating differently. And a lot of the behaviours that get interpreted as rude or antisocial are actually just ways of managing energy and focus in environments that can be quite overwhelming.

Here are a few common ones.

Eating lunch alone

In a lot of workplaces lunch is treated as a social event.

Groups gather around the same table, conversations drift between work complaints, weekend stories and whatever the latest office gossip happens to be.

For some people that’s a highlight of the day.

For others it’s exhausting.

When you’ve already spent the morning in meetings, conversations and constant background noise, the last thing you need is another hour of interaction. Sometimes what you really want is twenty minutes of quiet.

I used to eat lunch in my car, go for a walk on myown or find an empty meeting room to sit in for a while. From the outside it can look like I hate everybody.

I don’t

I’m just resetting so I can actually focus for the rest of the afternoon.

Not engaging in much small talk

Small talk is the currency of most offices.

“How was your weekend?”
“Traffic was awful this morning.”
“Did you watch the match?”

There’s nothing wrong with it. It’s how many people build rapport with colleagues.

But for introverts it can feel strangely draining, especially when it’s constant.

Most introverts enjoy conversation. They just prefer conversations that actually go somewhere. Talking about an interesting problem. Learning something new. Discussing an idea.

Repeating the same surface-level chat multiple times a day doesn’t energise them in the same way.

So when an introverted colleague seems quiet during the usual office chatter, it’s rarely because they dislike the people around them. It’s just not where they get their energy.

Keeping their personal life fairly private

Some people arrive at work on Monday morning and happily walk everyone through their entire weekend.

Others keep those details to themselves.

Introverts often sit in the second group.

It isn’t secrecy and it certainly isn’t a lack of trust. It’s simply a preference for keeping parts of life separate from work.

Offices are rarely as private as they feel. Conversations that start between two people can quickly turn into something half the room overhears. Open plan offices make that even more obvious.

So when someone doesn’t share much about their personal life, it usually isn’t distance. It’s just a bit of personal boundary.

Being quiet in meetings

Meetings are probably where introverts get misjudged the most.

There’s an unspoken belief in many workplaces that the people contributing the most are the ones talking the most.

Anyone who has sat through enough meetings knows that isn’t always true.

Introverts often listen first. They take in what’s being said, process it internally and then think about what they want to add.

In meetings where several people are competing to get their point across, that can mean they say less in the moment. But that doesn’t mean they aren’t engaged.

Often the most thoughtful ideas appear later. In a follow-up conversation. In an email after the meeting. Or in a quieter moment when there’s space to think properly.

Listening carefully is not the same as disengaging.

Looking serious

Another strange assumption in workplaces is that friendliness must always look enthusiastic.

If someone walks around smiling constantly they’re seen as approachable. If someone looks more neutral or focused people sometimes assume something is wrong.

Introverts get caught by this quite a lot.

Many simply don’t have very expressive resting faces when they’re concentrating. They look serious because they’re thinking.

It doesn’t mean they’re annoyed, unhappy or uninterested. It’s just their default state when they’re focused on something.

Unfortunately, in environments where constant visible energy is expected, quiet concentration can easily be misread.

Leaving quietly at the end of the day

At the end of the working day some people like to announce their exit.

“Right everyone, I’m off.”

Others pack their bag, shut down their laptop and slip out quietly.

Introverts often prefer the second option.

After a full day of conversations, meetings and general office noise, they’re ready to go home and switch off. Drawing attention to themselves on the way out doesn’t feel particularly natural.

It isn’t meant to ignore anyone.

It’s just the quiet end to a long day.

Avoiding after-work social events

In many workplaces there’s an expectation that the real bonding happens after hours.

Team drinks.
Office parties.
Networking events.
“Just a quick one after work.”

For some people those events are enjoyable. They’re a chance to relax, chat and get to know colleagues outside the usual work environment.

For introverts they can feel like an extension of the working day.

By the time the afternoon arrives they’ve already spent eight or nine hours interacting with people. Meetings, conversations, questions, interruptions. Even if they enjoy their colleagues, their social energy is often completely used up.

So when they say they’re heading home instead of joining everyone at the pub, it’s rarely because they dislike the team or don’t want to be included.

Most of the time they simply need some quiet.

Time to reset.
Time with their family.
Time alone.

Unfortunately in some workplaces skipping these events can quietly affect how people are perceived. Someone who doesn’t join the drinks or social events can easily be labelled as distant or not a team player.

In reality they might just be someone who gives their full energy during the working day and needs that evening to recharge.

Quiet doesn’t mean unfriendly

Workplaces are still largely designed around extroverted behaviour.

Constant collaboration, open offices, back-to-back meetings and a culture that often rewards whoever speaks the most.

Because of that, quieter personalities are often misunderstood.

But most of the behaviours people interpret as rude aren’t about dislike or hostility. They’re simply ways introverts manage their energy so they can actually do their job well.

Eating lunch alone, listening more than speaking in meetings, keeping parts of life private or leaving quietly at the end of the day aren’t signs someone is disengaged.

They’re often signs someone is just wired differently.

And in many offices, the quieter people observing the room are usually noticing far more than anyone realises.

If you were designing the perfect job for an extrovert, recruitment would be high on the list.

Cold calling.
Client pitches.
Candidate interviews.
Networking events.
Open plan sales floors with ringing phones and KPI boards tracking activity in real time.

I built a twenty-year career in that world.

And I am very clearly an introvert.

The Agency Floor

My early agency days were measured in dials.

You were expected to be on the phone constantly. If you were not talking, you were not producing.

Think Wolf Of Wall Street, dials and phone time were measured daily.

I’d often hear from my boss “Lee, your talk time is low today”.

Somedays I’d call my own mobile or the talking clock just to try and avoid that feedback.

The loudest consultants and those with the most dials often looked the most successful. Energy was visible. Noise was equated with momentum.

I could do the job. I hit targets. I billed well.

But I would finish a day of phone calls feeling completely drained. Not anxious. Not incapable. Just empty.

For a while I assumed that meant I was in the wrong career.

It turned out I was just approaching it the wrong way.

Finding a Quieter Approach

At some point I started experimenting.

Instead of relying purely on cold calls, I leaned heavily into email marketing. This was long before it became common practice in recruitment. Most consultants were dialling for hours. I was building targeted email campaigns.

Carefully written. Personalised. Relevant.

While others were interrupting people’s days, I was landing in inboxes with something thoughtful.

It worked a treat.

Responses were warmer. Conversations started more naturally. It played to my strengths. I could think. Craft. Refine. Build relationships without constant verbal performance.

That shift was important.

It even allowed me to speak to the boss of the company and be excused from “Power Hour” and Cold Calling training - because what I was doing what working.

It showed me that you do not have to reject the career. You can redesign how you operate within it.

Introverts are often better writers than they realise. We process internally first. In a sales environment, that can become a genuine competitive advantage if you use it properly.

Listening Over Performing

Another thing I noticed early on.

Being wired to observe before reacting meant I picked up on details others missed. A hiring manager’s hesitation about budget. A candidate’s uncertainty about relocation. Subtle signals that shaped better conversations later.

This meant I closed more deals than a lot of the more experienced and louder consultants.

Introversion in a people-heavy career is not a flaw. It simply means your strength is depth rather than volume.

But depth still requires energy.

And that is where most introverts struggle.

Managing Energy, Not Changing Personality

When I moved internal into Talent Acquisition, the environment shifted but the challenge remained.

Now it was stakeholder meetings. Strategy sessions. Open plan offices buzzing all day. Calendars stacked with back-to-back calls.

The difference was that I had more control.

I started deliberately creating quiet.

I would book a meeting room for an hour just to work alone. Not because I had a meeting. Because I needed focus. Removing myself from the noise of an open plan floor made a dramatic difference to the quality of my thinking.

I began blocking quiet time in my diary. Actual calendar holds labelled as deep work. If I did not protect those hours, they would disappear under other people’s priorities.

I stopped accepting full days of back-to-back meetings where possible. Even a fifteen-minute buffer between calls changed how I felt by 5pm.

None of this made me less effective.

It made me sustainable.

Introverts do not burn out because they cannot do the work. They burn out because they ignore the recovery.

Practical Ways to Build Quiet Into Loud Jobs

If you are in a high-interaction career, you may not be able to remove the noise completely. But you can design around it.

A few practical ideas that worked for me:

• Use written communication strategically. Email, structured updates, thoughtful follow-ups can replace some reactive conversations.

• Batch high-energy tasks. If you have to cold call, do it in focused blocks rather than scattered throughout the day.

• Physically change environments. A booked meeting room, a different floor, even a short walk outside can reset your nervous system.

• Block recharge time in your calendar and treat it as seriously as a client meeting.

• Be selective with optional social events. Every interaction has a cost. Spend it where it matters.

You do not need permission to protect your focus.

You need the confidence to prioritise it.

Leadership Without Volume

As my career progressed into leadership, something became very clear.

The loudest voice in the room is not automatically the most effective.

When hiring plans wobble. When stakeholders are frustrated. When targets are missed.

Composure matters more than performance.

Being steady, measured and thoughtful under pressure builds trust over time. Many introverts are naturally good at that. We think before we react. We do not escalate emotion unnecessarily. We absorb information first.

You do not have to dominate space to have influence.

You Are Not in the Wrong Career

If you are an introvert working in what looks like an extrovert’s career, the instinct is often to assume you have chosen badly.

You probably have not.

You may just need to stop trying to become louder and start becoming more intentional.

Use writing when others rely only on talking.
Use listening when others default to performing.
Use structure when others run on energy.
Create quiet when the environment is noisy.

The world of work often rewards visibility in the short term.

Long-term success, however, is built on trust, consistency and judgement.

Those qualities do not belong to extroverts or introverts.

But many introverts learn to cultivate them deeply, precisely because they have had to think harder about how they operate.

You do not survive an extrovert’s career by changing who you are.

You survive by understanding how you work and building systems that protect it.

I’m an introvert.

But for the first thirty years of my life I had no idea what an introvert was, I’d always just thought that I was different.

That I was quiet, that I was shy, that I was socially awkward, a bit of loner.

Because that’s what my school reports said, because I didn’t contribute in class discussions.

That’s what my parents said, because as a kid I preferred to be in my room rather than outside playing with all the other kids.

And it followed me into my career, I was passed over for promotions because I was “too quiet”.

But I never felt shy.

I was never anxious about being around people.

I just didn’t feel the need to speak up or the need to be surrounded by people all the time.

I didn’t know what or who I was until I was about thirty.

A bloke I worked with uttered the words “You’re quite introverted aren’t you?”

I had no idea what he meant, nodded along and then when I had a few minutes I opened up Google.

And then suddenly everything started to make a little more sense.

Of course I didn’t buy into everything I read, but a lot of it totally resonated.

I then spent the next 12 years on a journey of fully understanding and accepting my introverted ways.

What Introversion Actually Is

It’s how you and your brain prefer to interact with the world around you.

A lot of it is biological, it’s how your brain reacts to stimulation and in particular dopamine.

An introvert’s brain has a higher sensitivity to dopamine and can be very quickly become overwhelmed by lots of stimulation.

Put simply, you were born this way.

That’s why some babies get easily overstimulated, why some are more cautious in new environments and why some kids have lots of friends and some have a few.

It isn’t learned behaviour, it’s not something you decided aged 14.

Overstimulation

Ask most introverts what overstimulates them and they’ll say socialising, i.e people.

Noisy, bright environments can do it too but it mostly comes down to interacting with people.

And one of the places where interacting with people is rewarded, is at work.

Introverts & Work

In most corporate environments, the people who speak first are seen as confident. The people who speak most are seen as engaged. The people who are always visible are seen as high potential.

So if you’re wired to process internally first, it can feel like you’re slightly out of step.

Like you’re missing something.

Like everyone else got a handbook you didn’t.

But like I’d tell my 10 year old self:

You’re not broken.
You’re not behind.
You’re not less capable.

You’re just wired differently in a system that signals competence differently.

And if you’ve ever felt that quiet friction between who you are and how work operates, you’re not imagining it.

You’re not alone in it either.

When did you first realise you were an introvert?

Over the last year this publication has been about growing on social media.

That’s still something I care about. It’s been a big part of my journey.

But if I’m honest, it’s not what I’ve been thinking most deeply about recently.

What I keep coming back to is something else.

Introversion in corporate environments.

I’ve spent 20 years working in corporate. I’m still there. And I’ve seen the same pattern over and over again:

Capable, thoughtful people being labelled “quiet”.
Strong performers being overlooked.
Promotion decisions rewarding visibility over depth.

Most workplaces are structured around noise.

And if you’re wired differently, it can feel like you’re playing the wrong game.

So from now on, this publication is going to focus on that.

Introverts at work.
Visibility bias.
Promotion psychology.
Energy in overstimulating environments.
How to win without becoming louder.

If that’s not your thing, no hard feelings at all. You can unsubscribe below.

If it is, I think you’ll find this direction more honest - and more useful.

First proper piece will be live in a couple of days

— Lee