Sounds familiar? If it does, you are not alone since hundreds of thousands of parents have been hearing this for ages now.
Or, consider this one. A friend's son, who is in Class 12, is extremely nervous - not because of his board examinations, but at the prospect of having to leave school and make acquaintances in a new environment. The friend is more nervous than his son and is wondering whether he should take some sort of psychological counselling. The son may be a loner, which his parents are not willing to accept. After all, they know that the world belongs to extroverts, go-getters who can attract attention in a crowd.
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You must have come across many so-called loners or introverts at the workplace, too - people who will work quietly, avoid mixing with colleagues, who get away from social interactions and are comfortable with only a select few. In short, he will certainly be the last guy his colleagues will want to have lunch with. The corporate world, which loves to pounce on jargons, has a special name for them - lone wolves.
The term originates from wolf behaviour. Normally pack animals, wolves that have left their pack are described as lone wolves. For a person, a lone wolf is an individual who prefers solitude and works alone.
In theory, one cannot blame colleagues for avoiding lone wolves because reciprocity is key to all relationships - whether it is peer to peer or boss-subordinate - and loners can sometimes be a burden when it comes to teamwork. In a team, you are supposed to help others whenever possible and engage in conversations to find a common solution.
Lone wolves feel uncomfortable in such situations and, therefore, don't get support from colleagues. In general, lone wolves suffer from a deep sense of insecurity - they either worry that working with others will slow them down, or are unsure about how they will be received by others, or are overly critical about themselves for some perceived inadequacies. So, there are countless examples of loners being overlooked for promotions or eased out of their jobs.
Modern-day management consultants or psychologists, however, contest such stereotyping of talkative people being invariably smarter than the reticent, even though there is no correlation between the gift of the gab and good ideas. Consultants want managements to get out of the mindset that loners are necessarily a bad thing. They say companies must create an environment that will let each person give their best efforts and know how to get work out of these people instead of dismissing them.
Great companies do identify jobs that don't need teamwork and need people who can focus better while being alone. Here's the case of a company at which one senior-level employee rejected the team approach and equated his work with state secrets, as a result of which other employees preferred to keep a safe distance.
The human resource department's first idea was to give him a firm golden handshake, until the CEO figured out he was valuable since he could come up with ideas that rocked. The CEO decided to give him the space he required, made him report directly to him and work exclusively on special projects. The ideas the employee came up with were then thrashed out and implemented by other departments. The approach has worked beautifully.
Unfortunately, very few companies have such a strategy in place for lone wolves. In her book, "Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking", Susan Cain says the modern workplace is designed by extroverts for extroverts. That is sad, she says, as depending on which study you consult, "one third to one half of Americans are introverts - in other words, one out of every two or three people you know. The number must be at least as high in other parts of the world".
Such stereotyping of introverts is jarring since there are examples of many successful people who are self-proclaimed introverts. Take author J K Rowling, for example. Rowling recalls on her website how she first got the idea for Harry Potter in 1990 when she was travelling alone on a delayed train from Manchester to London. "To my immense frustration, I didn't have a pen that worked, and I was too shy to ask anybody if I could borrow one," she writes.
Research has found many positives of lone wolves. For example, they practise engaged listening, they know what's going on in the company since they observe everything minutely because of fewer distractions and they empathise with employees' concerns.