Most of us understand what it takes to advance our careers when we first start out as individual contributors (non-managers, aka individual contributors, or ICs for short): Get better at your craft, produce high-quality work on time, be dependable and reliable, work well with others, and don’t be a jerk.

This approach worked well enough for me when I began my career at IBM, moved to Apple, and then jumped into the wild world of tech startups. As an introvert, I transitioned into management at eBay, became an executive at Yahoo, and eventually became the CEO of my own startup.

I found I had to move past initially pretending to be an extrovert to finally embracing my introversion in order to authentically and sustainably advance my career and be happy with my work. In this article, I’ll share seven examples of how you can leverage a strength associated with your natural introversion to advance your career and become a better leader.