Marcus is everyone’s best friend. He has a team of devoted employees who think he’s the best manager in the world. He spends much of his day in 1-1s with everyone from his direct reports to the newest junior hires. Everyone agrees that he makes plenty of time for anyone who wants it, and will listen for as long as you need him to. Bring him any problem, and he promises to make it right. Since he took over the organization, you feel like your concerns are really being heard. However, he never seems to get around to fixing those problems. The colleague you complained about still got promoted. The product team is still railroading you. The goals still don’t make any sense. But Marcus is so busy, you can’t blame him; after all, there are just so many problems he’s dealing with.
Maria is less well loved. She’ll make time for you if you request it, but unless you report to her directly, she tends to keep her distance. She can be brusque at times, and doesn’t seem to have a lot of patience for office gossip or wasted time. But since she took over the department, things have changed. The roadmap has fewer objectives and they all make sense. Your difficult colleague seems to have gotten some feedback and he’s started listening to your ideas. Meetings run better, and the team is focused for the first time in ages. There are still problems, but they seem less important now that you’re really getting stuff done. And the most amazing thing is that she seems to go home at a reasonable hour every night!
Marcus is a people pleaser. He has a deep aversion to ever directly making people he cares about unhappy. So if you’re in the group that he cares about and you ask him for something, he’ll always say yes, even when there’s too much happening and he can’t possibly deal with all of it. By trying to make everyone happy, people pleasers often burn themselves out.
Signs you might have a people pleaser on your hands:
I’ve seen many versions of people pleasers over the years. One version is the team pleaser, like Marcus. People tend to love him because he spends so much time with them. He wants to engage with your emotions, to make sure that you’re happy, and to hear about anything that is bothering you so that he can try to set it right. He doesn’t play favorites, but those who are willing to pour their hearts out to him end up getting most of his time. The therapist people pleaser can inspire huge loyalty on his team because of his willingness to hear what you are upset about, and his genuine concern for your emotional well-being. Unfortunately, this can mean he amplifies drama and negativity, and disappoints his team by making promises to them that he cannot possibly keep.
On the other side, there is the external pleaser. She very much wants to make her boss and her external partners happy, and is terrified of revealing problems on her team. As a result, she spends a great deal of energy managing upward and outward, and in particular tends to significantly overcommit her team. Despite wanting to please, she frequently doesn’t provide much praise or feedback to her teams internally. This may seem surprising, but this people pleaser struggles to have difficult conversations internally so she avoids talking about serious issues within the team, and this can actually lead to a refusal to acknowledge good work as well as problems. She will never willingly share problems with her manager, and readily agrees to any requests that come in for projects.
In both cases, the people pleaser struggles to say no, and sends contradictory messages to both the team and the external parties. One manager might insist on jumping on every single issue brought in front of the team and doing all of the tedious work of, say, resolving data problems that are due to bugs in the product. Because the manager doesn’t actually have the focus for this task, the issues are resolved slowly. Furthermore, the team lacks transparency into the problems their customers are facing, and so they struggle to prioritize fixing issues. By attempting to shield the team from having to do unpleasant work, the manager makes that work drag on and reduces the team’s ability to solve problems for good.
People pleasers who focus externally can be a huge blind spot for their managers: because they’re so focused on only talking about good things and saying yes to everything that comes their way, their managers often don’t even know about problems on the team or within projects until it’s too late. These people can be very good at distracting you from your concerns. They have plenty of excuses. They promise to do better next time. They may even be genuinely contrite when you provide corrective feedback, but it’s very hard for them to do things that visibly make others unhappy. And you probably like your people pleasers very much as people. They’re very nice!
You might think people pleasers create teams that feel safe to be vulnerable and fail, but in fact the opposite is true. These managers make it hard for the team to fail in a healthy way, because of the manager’s own fears of failure and possible rejection. An externally focused people pleaser shuts down honest conversation by evasion and, if necessary, emotional manipulation that rests on his status as the person that everyone likes so much. A team pleaser sets her team up to fail by promising things that aren’t realistic, and the result is often a team that feels extremely bitter toward either the manager or the company for failure to live up to these inflated expectations.
What should you do if you find yourself managing someone in this situation? Help the person feel safer saying no and externalizing more decisions so he doesn’t take failure personally. Providing him with strong partners who can take on the task of determining the work roadmap is a good option. Sometimes people pleaser managers work well in agile frameworks because the team itself takes ownership of work planning. Create better processes for getting work scheduled that don’t rely entirely on the manager’s discretion. When it comes to promising things to the team itself, having a structure that specifies the requirements for getting promotions or accessing other opportunities can apply here as well. For example, when promotions involve more than the manager’s discretion, the people pleaser can rightly point to the process as something outside of her control.
When you’re managing a people pleaser, one of the best things you can do is show the person that he’s exhibiting the behavior, and highlight the downsides. Sometimes all it takes is awareness that his habit of saying yes is a problem for the team. Recognize that this usually comes from a personal value of being selfless and caring about others, and honor these values even as you try to correct the unhealthy behaviors. People pleasers, after all, just want to make you happy.