Review Tedtalk "the Power of Introverts"

Name: Thuy Nguyen (Noty)

Student id: 3425754

Review TEDTalk "The power of introverts"

In February 2012, Susan Cain had an inspirational talk in TED conference about 'The power of introverts'. What she wants to communicate with her audience is that people tend to perform well in the stimulation zone that suits their habits and characteristics. By using the speech content from the lecturer Cathy Brigden about finding the motivating factors to improve employees' engagement, this review will analyse why Susan Cain's talk can be an inspiration for the managing strategies in the organisations.

In any organisation, there will be two types of person - the extroverts and the introverts. Cain's speech is convincing because she successfully cleared of the assumption that the introvert people like her cannot be appointed to the important positions in the company. The sympathized comments from her extrovert audience are the clear evidence of her success. As a matter of fact, from an examination on the relationship between the difference of employees' personalities with their sale performance, Abidin (2016) concludes that the majority of leaders in the company are more introverted. This result proves that the introverts could work really effectively and dynamically if they receive the right stimulated way.  

There is a strong coherence between the message of Cain and the lecture. It could be the solution for the main challenge that the lecture mentioned about how managers can motivate their staffs to maximize their efforts and persistence in achieving the grand final objective. As Cathy said, motivation comes from different forms and each form relates to the correlative theory. An excellent manager must identify the right characteristic of his or her staff to apply the right type of motivational theories because nobody shares the common desire and value. For example, in the story of Cain, the summer camp's counsellor applied the needs theory of Maslow to encourage her abandoning her books. She stimulated her sense of belonging to make her following the camp's spirit. In the similar cases, the manager can use the two-factor model because there is a difference between the introverts and extroverts' commitment to the different intrinsic and extrinsic factors (Prakash et al. 2016).

In Vietnam, except the international firms, it is really hard to apply this key message in the workplace because the employees have to adapt to the organisation environment by themselves and try hard to maintain their jobs. However, most of the huge companies in Vietnam still provide their staff some basic extrinsic motivation factors such as bonus salaries or paid insurance.

If Cain has mentioned people should balance themselves for the best performance, she could add one more term in her speech which is ambivert. The ambivert is the person who can balance their introvert and extrovert personalities into their working style. In addition, she could suggest some useful methods for managing well the introverts such as assigning the solitude tasks or acknowledging their good performance (Christensen, 2016).