Maybe I'm a bit too quiet for the board table.

A coachee said that to me last week. I have been working with her for several months. Bright, considered, and forensically clear in her thinking. She had the ear of everyone who mattered and the respect of people at every level.

I'd never once experienced her as quiet.

But she'd been carrying that belief for twelve years. It started with a poorly delivered personality profile that told her she was an introvert. And somewhere along the way, introvert became quiet, quiet became a story she told herself every time she compared herself to other leaders.

Here's a myth worth dismantling. Introversion doesn't mean quiet, and extraversion doesn't mean loud. It never has. The distinction is about energy, not volume. Introverts recharge alone. Extroverts recharge with people. That's it. Some of the most commanding, room-filling, authoritative leaders I've worked with in twenty years are introverts. Some of the most hesitant and uncertain are extroverts.

But organisations don't always see it that way. They have an idea of what a leader looks like, how they sound, how they fill a room, and how they convey confidence. And that idea is almost always coded as an extrovert. Visible. Vocal. Quick to speak. Comfortable in the spotlight.

So what happens to the brilliant introvert who processes before they speak, who leads through depth rather than volume, who influences through relationships rather than rhetoric? Too often, they get passed over. Not because they lack capability. Because they don't match the template.

It's even more troubling when we apply confirmation bias. When organisations expect quiet, they notice quiet. They stop noticing the sharp question that reframed the whole conversation, or the one-to-one that turned a struggling colleague around, or the strategic clarity that nobody else in the room had reached yet. The Pygmalion effect takes hold. The person starts to perform the label they've been given. And twelve years later, they're sitting across from a coach, wondering if they're too quiet for the board table.

Badly delivered profiling accelerates all of this. A tool that was designed to build self-awareness becomes a ceiling. A shorthand that was meant to open a conversation closes one down instead.

The expert-to-leader transition is hard enough without carrying a limiting belief that was never true in the first place.

So here's the question for anyone who commissions or leads leadership development. Whose leadership potential are you underestimating right now, and how much of that judgment is based on a label rather than evidence?