People Pleasing and Your Leadership
Don’t miss my new virtual workshop this month about people-pleasing and how it affects your leadership.
And, when I use the term leaders, I’m not just talking about managers in companies. We are all leaders in our lives. We lead with our clients, we lead with our families, and we lead in our communities. And when we try to please the people we lead, our professionalism and our efficacy are severely compromised.
So many of us, especially as women, were taught to be nice, take the smallest piece of pie, think of others before ourselves, and, more than anything, make other people happy.
The truth is, this conditioning does not serve us as leaders. Our relationships and our communication with others gets messy. The more we try to ensure that the people we lead “like us,” the less effective and impactful we become.
Of course, this doesn’t mean that we shouldn’t care about others. Quite the contrary. Modeling strong leadership is one of the greatest gifts we can give to those we lead.
I see this show up with clients all the time- prioritizing wanting to be liked over truly supporting the people they lead.
I even see this in coaches- especially if they are newer to their practice. They are so concerned about what their clients think of them that they don’t ask the questions that would truly support growth.
I had a client who liked to complain about his employees. He said they were lazy and unmotivated, that they insisted on working from home even though he had an office and he didn’t have an idea of what they were working on half the time. He often had to re-do their work.
I asked him if I had permission to ask a question that might be uncomfortable. He said, “yes.”
“Is this a problem with your employees or is this a reflection of your leadership?”
This is my favorite part of being a coach- getting to ask questions that people likely never get asked.
If I would have been worried about offending this client, or what he thought of me, I probably wouldn’t have asked this. But- I care more about my clients and their growth than I care about what they think of me in the moment.
This is leadership. This is what’s available to us when we are willing to truly serve those we lead.
If people-pleasing is leaking into your leadership, give yourself the gift of 90 minutes and join us on Monday, 4/24/23 at 6 pm Pacific.
