Have you ever pretended to be an extrovert all day?
Yeh it's exhausting!
Saw this with a lot of my designer colleagues.
They do great work.
They keep your head down.
They wait to get noticed.
Then someone louder walks off with the credit, the promotion, and the "executive presence" gold star.
Last week, I got Tim Yeo on the show to chat about this.
He spent 20 years designing/leading teams in tech, including as the first design leader at 3 separate fintech startups that each hit $700M+.
He's also the author of The Quiet Achiever, and he coaches introverts on how to get unfireable without acting like someone they're not.
We went deep on 3 things:
1. How to get recognition
Good work doesn't get noticed on its own.
Tim's advice: spend as much time on your communication as you spend on your craft.
2 things you can practise:
- Speak slower: Tim moved from Singapore to Australia. English as his 1st language and people still struggled to follow him. He tried changing his accent that didn't work. Slowing down did. Same words, same points, just at pace people could keep up.
- Tell better stories: Before you open your mouth, work out what your audience already cares about, then connect your idea to that. People lean in when they hear something that affects them.
If your technical skill is a 10/10 but your communication is a 3/10, people will only ever experience you as a 3 π₯²
2. How to get promoted
Nobody feels ready for the next level.
Tim's seen it at every company he's worked with. Take action instead of waiting to feel ready:
- Make something.
- Ship it.
- Show people.
Either it proves you're ready, or it shows you exactly what you're missing.
One designer Tim coached was the only design hire at a 500-person company, constantly talked over in meetings.
He started recording short videos of his ideas and post it to Slack. The CEO saw one and told the team to put it on the roadmap.
BOOM!
Figure out your own medium for visibility.
3. How to become un-fire-able
Not every project is equal.
Sunrise projects are where the company is actually headed. The work that hasn't been figured out yet, the stuff nobody's done before, the future of how your company see's the world.
Tim says "with AI rewriting half the job descriptions in tech, nobody has the full skillset for what's coming next anyway." So the person willing to attempt the hard, undefined thing often matters more than the person who's technically most qualified.
Enthusiasm and appetite for failure become the differentiator.
Put yourself on the sunrise project. Being the quiet one who's willing to try the thing nobody's figured out yet. That's more valuable than being the loudest one in the room.
What Tim said that stuck with me:
"The picture of a leader never looked like me. I'm an introvert."
He said it to himself years ago, assuming he didn't fit the leadership mold. But this assumption led him to find his own mold of what an introverted leader looks like, that's when he coined the phrase The Quiet Achiever.
More from Tim:
We also went deep on being Asian in tech, startup vs corporate career growth, and why interviewing is a skill you lose if you don't practice it.
Watch the full livestream β
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