How do extroverts and introverts learn to work together?
Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniack built Apple. Alan Jay Lerner and Frederick Loewe brought us iconic musicals, including Camelot and My Fair Lady. These famously productive partnerships had one thing in common: They brought together an introvert and an extrovert.
The common wisdom is that introverts and extroverts do not work well together. The common wisdom, as author Jennifer Kahnweiler makes clear in her new book, The Genius of Opposites, is absolutely correct in the sense that the collaboration is often going to be contentious and difficult, filled with battles and miscommunications and sometimes deliberate sabotage. Somehow, however, the introvert/extrovert partnerships such as those cited above, as well as the many unknown partnerships that fill Kahnweiler’s book, produced extraordinary results. The key to such success, according to Kahnweiler, is the five-step process at the heart of her book.
The first step, Kahnweiler argues, is to accept the alien. If introverted and extroverted people want to partner, they have to realize that they will never change the personality of the other person. Instead, each partner has to make a conscious effort to understand the other.
The second step is that battles don’t have to be avoided. Instead, they can be the means through which each partner is challenged by the other, resulting in solutions that are better than those that might have been developed individually.
The third steps is to cast the character. Because there are two very different personalities in the partnership, partners should take on the roles that best fit their unique personalities.
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