You can't please everyone

But that doesn't mean you should not bother at all

As I enter week four of a brand-new role in familiar surroundings, I’m once again getting reacquainted with agency life.

That hasn’t been too difficult as 12 out of my 15 years of full-time employment have been in agencies and, more importantly, five of those were at Tank.

Returning was a no-brainer, as I wrote in my LinkedIn post!

However, I was very quickly reminded of one particular aspect of agency life that I’d not thought about for some time, with the caveat that I now know it’s not just an agency phenomenon.

People pleasers give me a wave

This is a trait you particularly see in agencies due to that client-agency relationship, where one party is paying the other for its service, expertise and – critically – its ability to get results.

However, it’s not exclusive to those of you who work in agency world, as in-house people experience it too.

Regardless of your sector or role, there can be numerous downsides to trying to please everyone, or keep them all happy, motivated, supported, engaged, effective… or paying their bills!

Clearly, it can be exhausting.

It can also manifest itself in the way you act towards your line manager(s) or members of the senior leadership team, where you might start to embark on a desperate attempt to never, ever fail.

(By whatever metric you’re defining as ‘failing’ – usually with a ridiculously high bar due to your own impossibly high standards).

Those of you who know you’re a people-pleaser will have quickly identified yourself while reading my first few paragraphs. If you haven’t, this list from Calm might help.

At work, people can be guilty of all of the seven signs listed in that article, but I think these are three that are often most commonly seen in people-pleasers, regardless of your job:

• Difficult saying no

• Overcommitting

• Fear of rejection

All of these are common in agencies where we spend our time meeting and ultimately exceeding client expectations to help them achieve their goals.

It happens in-house too.

It can in happen in the same team, between different departments, or right up the ladder to the boardroom.

It also happens within all of those levels, including between boardroom members.

Finding a balance

The downside of when your work becomes solely focused on people-pleasing is that it starts to become less strategic and more scattergun, where all you’re doing is responding to the whims of someone else (or your own insecurities) to achieve a result that’s become basically impossible.

When this happens, everyone becomes way more ineffective, as you try to secure that level of recognition at any cost – either through over-servicing against the budget or self-inflicting an upcoming bout of major burnout.

The upside of people-pleasing, much like overthinking, is that you maintain that drive to get those results, as long as you know what those results should be.

This is where people-pleasers and pragmatists can work really well together to balance each other out, ensuring they get the results they were asked for, without sacrificing time, money or – most importantly – their mental wellbeing.

That Calm article outlines far better than I could how to identify and deal with the signs of people-pleasing, but I would like to emphasise one of its points even further.

If you know you’re the type who is prone to people-pleasing at work, find someone who isn’t.

Seek the support of that individual who you’ve spotted finds an effective balance, or is perhaps the complete opposite.

They’ll give you an alternative point of view that you can weave into your own ways of working, helping you to identify those moments when you might need to stop… take a breath, and reassess.

I guarantee they’ll learn a thing or two from you, too.