You’ve heard of IQ and you may have heard of EQ, or emotional intelligence too. Will you help me coin a new term? How about SPQ, or self-promotion intelligence? Some people have it in spades and they get much deserved recognition for their contributions to their organizations and society. Some people, with low SPQ, make a lot of noise for what little they contribute. While others barely make a peep about all the great work they do. Guess who gets further ahead? What are examples of high and low self-promotion intelligence that you know of? And how can introverts boost their SPQ? I’ll write more about this soon. Meanwhile, I welcome your input (publicly or in a direct note to me).

Copyright © 2010 Nancy Ancowitz 

Learn to speak about yourself more compellingly and improve your presentation skills. Also get pointers on taking care of your voice, courtesy of speech pathologist MJ Kanner. See my interview with Jeff Rivera, founder and editor in chief, The Gatekeepers Post, “the leading social media book publishing community on the web.”

I just got home from my fourth holiday gathering this week. While I enjoyed each gathering—because I arrived rested, paced myself, aimed for just a few good conversations, took breaks when I needed them, and stayed the right amount of time for me—I’m happy that I’ll have some downtime for the rest of the weekend.

Sheryl Nance-Nash offers five useful pieces of advice in her article “How to Make the Most of the Company Holiday Party,” in The Faster Times. Here’s how each of her points applies to introverts:
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“Perceptual biases lead us all to overestimate the number of extraverts among us (they are noisy and hog the spotlight),” according to Laurie Helgoe, Ph.D., in her cover story, titled “Revenge of the Introverts,” in the October issue of Psychology Today. By now, you probably know that introverts actually make up half the population.
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You may enjoy contributing to communities like LinkedIn, Facebook, and Twitter, where you can expand your network by connecting from users around the world, share information, and raise your visibility. If you’re an introvert, you can use these venues to thrive quietly in your Batcave, devouring facts and figures, theorizing, and philosophizing online sunup to sundown. Each day you can wake up and read, research, and write some more. (more…)

If you had to guess, which of the women in the photograph to the left is an introvert and which is an extrovert*? Can you tell?

If you subscribed to the myth of introverts being antisocial, neither looks the role. However, if you were better informed and knew that the main difference between introverts and extroverts is where they draw their energy—introverts from their solo time and extroverts from their social time—you’d look further.
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What do you if your great work doesn’t speak for itself? As a leader, how can you help your team members gain visibility too? And how can you navigate the stereotypes about women in business (at least as pervasive as stereotypes about introverts!)? I answer these questions in my interview with Diahann Boock, who recently started Women’s Ally, a new online membership community offering career planning and leadership development to professional women.

What goes through your head when you think of selling? If you’re anything like me, you think: The spotlight is on you. Your every word counts, and you have to be “on.” Always be closing, right?

Sleepless nights, bad hair days, and personal dramas notwithstanding, you have to be out there, pushing yourself and your wares at every cocktail party and convention. You’re so in your customer’s face, she can inhale the jalapeño you had for lunch.
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A colleague crows at you in a self-congratulatory tone, listing the mountains of achievement she’s climbed and minimizing yours as molehills. She uses “I” to punctuate the start of each sentence. She namedrops to further raise her status—and lower yours. Another colleague is the brains of the organization, but he gets drowned out when he pipes up at meetings. So his less gifted colleagues get the recognition and the compensation that he deserves.
You’ve heard of IQ and you may have heard of EQ, or emotional intelligence, too. Now for a new term: SPQ, or self-promotion intelligence. The term is definitely pop and meant to be fun, but your SPQ is also serious business when it comes to your career (even though the acronym also stands for Sweet Potato Queens!).

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Be conscious of the balance between immersing yourself in your work behind the scenes and getting the recognition you deserve. For five of my tips on using your quiet strengths to your advantage, check out “Work Skills for Introverts” by Patricia Rivera for Jobs (powered by Philly.com and Monster).