From Pleasing People to Leading People
“To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is a great accomplishment.”
-Ralph Waldo Emerson
Growing up, I was always very likable. It came natural to me. I think it was early on in middle school when I started to realize that if I dressed a certain way or acted another, I would be able to get the attention of the folks that I wanted to like me: the “cool kids”, and it worked. This was the beginning of my “people pleasing personality” and it continued on throughout high school and even college.
You cannot lead people if you need people.
Pleasing folks isn’t the same as leading them, and this is one of the biggest lessons I had to learn in order to start my success journey. Naturally, after nearly a decade of doing my best to please people, I became very good at it. But working to make everyone happy tended to leave me unhappy and unfulfilled, so I had to change something.
Whilst making the transition from pleasing people to leading people, I discovered that many of the folks that I was used to pleasing didn’t like where I was headed. This often happens when folks decide to swim upstream; go against the grain. Like crabs when placed in a bucket, they will try to pull you down when you try to escape. In fact, most success stories have a common denominator in that there are always nay-sayers, doubters, haters. Most people don’t like it when you strive for greatness because it shines light on their mediocrity. If growth is expected, change is essential.
“Care about what other people think and you will always be their prisoner.” -Lao Tzu
The root of my people-pleasing mentality came from me wanting to do what made me feel good. So often it found myself avoiding dealing with difficult issues and decisions to maintain my image or make someone feel good about themselves. In order for things to change, I realized I had to change the way I looked at things. Are the people you are taking criticism from the same people you would go to for advice? If not, maybe you need to reevaluate too.
It wasn’t easy, and there is still that part of me that likes to please others, but I have a burning desire to add value to people which is much more important to me than making them happy. After all, a child isn’t pleased with you when you have him take his medicine, although it will speed up his recovery. Your feelings toward your dentist probably aren’t those of cheerful candor and joy, although you know visiting him will serve you. So it is true with a manager offering you a correction or a professor circling a big fat C on the top of your paper. When there is value added despite a little discomfort, that creates a healthy "tension". Tension is what causes the arrow to fly to hit its target. It is what allows the tight-ropiest to walk safely across Niagara Falls. It is what grows your muscles when you are bench-pressing in the gym. Tension leads to growth, and time under tension is equivalent to quantity of growth.
There is a difference between tension and conflict, and as long as you can navigate things on the side of tension rather than approaching those tough conversations or decisions with conflict, you can add value to others and make progress in your mission. It is a leader’s responsibility to embrace tension, harness it, and utilize it to move an organization forward.
The best way to determine whether or not your decisions are based on your priorities is to filter them through principles or values.
For example, when making an organizational decision, run your decisions through this filter:
- What’s best for my organization?
- What’s best for the people within my organization?
- What’s best for me?
By filtering decisions through these questions, you will be able to clearly determine what’s best for your organization.
Navigating tension is a key principle in business and an essential element in the transition from People Pleasing to People Leading. Learn to operate under tension and you will never break under pressure. First you must learn to lead yourself, and then you can learn to lead others. When asked who the hardest person to lead is, you might be tempted to say those under you or those above you in an organization, but it really boils down to learning to lead the person in the middle. You are neither your own slave nor your own master, so learning to be your own leader is a faculty that must be developed in order to stop pleasing and start leading.
Are you working to please others or are you furthering a mission?
As a leader, do you know the difference between tension and conflict?
Are you decisions based primarily off of feelings or principles?