Are You a “Pleaser Achiever”?

So what is a “Pleaser Achiever”, you may ask? Well, let’s start with a simple quiz

• When someone comes to you for help at work and your boss tells you you can say no, do you still try to help them?
• When your manager gives you feedback on where you can improve, do you think about it extensively?
• If you have a bad meeting with your boss, does it affect you the whole week?
• If you have conflicts or disagreements with anyone at work, do you think about it at night?
• Are you quick to apologize?

If you say yes to most or all the questions above, then you’re a “Pleaser Achiever.” Here are the common traits:

• We like to be helpful and will go out of our way to help.
• We take ownership in everything we do and will always make sure we close the loop.
• We like harmony at work. We may be bold to disagree with others at work on content, but we try our best to avoid ruffling feathers.
• We are perfectionists.
• We take feedback very seriously and will think from all angles how we can improve our work.

You may say, “What’s wrong with that? Don’t most successful people have these traits?” Unfortunately, the “Pleaser” part of this can be detrimental to our career progress and happiness. Here are three reasons why:

Reason #1: Lack of Prioritized Focus

A “Pleaser Achiever” will always look for ways to “please” others by helping to solve a problem. What this means is that we’re likely to misread what core things we must do to advance our career and what things we really should just say no. I encountered this just recently. I’m leading a large cross-functional project with many business requirements and one of them is highly complex. My entire team has been a bit lost as to what to do, so I started stepping in to help them navigate. It was taking a lot of time. When I mentioned this to my manager in my weekly update, she said something completely surprising. She said, “You shouldn’t spend so much time on this. This is an optional requirement and not a priority for our group. Even though it’s a tough problem to solve for the business, you need to prioritize your time differently.”

Lesson Learned: Even when you know you can help an effort, it’s important to prioritize and align with your manager. I wasn’t getting any credit for a chunk of work I was doing for several weeks. Instead, helping them made me look like I didn’t prioritize properly.

Reason #2: Nice People Finish Last

A “Pleaser Achiever” is usually very diplomatic. We’re not push-overs, but we also have a hard time ruffling feathers. At the core of it, we are perfectionists. We want to do things perfectly and want everyone to like us, whether we admit it or not. Unfortunately, this is not the path to senior leadership. Most senior leaders have to make tough choices every day that are not liked by some people. While being diplomatic is an important skill as a leader, achieving results and being decisive matters more.

Lesson Learned: Career advancement to leadership requires you to have the self-confidence to make tough choices that can ruffle feathers. Stand your ground. It’s better to be respected than likable in business.

Reason #3: Letting Feedback Affect Your Core Self-Confidence.

A “Pleaser Achiever” can feel destroyed by a simple careless comment/feedback from our boss. One of the biggest disadvantages of being a “Pleaser Achiever” is that we think we need to do everything and anything to get approval from our manager. This would make us ultra-sensitive to their feedback. This is dangerous to our core happiness. Bosses are humans with their good days and bad days. Even the best manager will make mistakes and say things to us that aren’t motivating. It’s up to us to take it in stride and shrug it off as just a bad day, instead of making every little feedback mean something more.

Lesson Learned: We need to have self confidence in our own abilities instead of depending on praise from others to feel “happy” about our work. The best quote I saw on this is from “Ray of Dawn” by Dr. Thurman Fleet. He said, “The honest and faithful performance of [work] is rewarded by the knowledge of a job well done.” Ask yourself, when do you allow yourself to feel happy about work? Is it only when you are recognized by others, especially your boss for a job well done? Can you instead feel happy about your work because you know you did a good job, regardless of anyone else’s opinion? It is a perspective worth considering.