People Pleasing and Middle Management

I often meet with clients who have been thrust into middle management. It is a compliment to them of course: they are so good at their work that their higher ups now want them to do something completely different. 

But too often we are being taught how to be managers by people who were not taught how to be managers, who were in turn taught how to be managers by people who were not taught how to be managers. Being promoted to our level of incompetence means being taken out of the thing we do well and placed into a thing we initially do not. 

This is especially hard for people pleasers. We now have bosses above and employees below. We have people on either side with their own motives and expectations. One group is demanding results and the other group is trying to resist demands. It is a squeeze. 

With this change of position comes a needed change in philosophy. People pleasing is short-term focused thinking. It is taking action to remove the threat of immediate pain. Keep people pleasing and they won't hurt you with their guilt trips and disappointed faces. This doesn't work in management. 

A manager, a leader, needs vision that sees beyond the short-term moment. Our ideas on how things should run may not be immediately apparent to our employees, and even to our bosses. But if we bend to the feelings of the moment in order to not rock the boat, then everyone loses in the long run. People pleasing not only hurts you, it hurts the ones you are seeking to please.

As we have discussed previously, the way out of people pleasing is setting boundaries. A helpful tool that is all about boundaries is the Eisenhower Matrix. Invented by the 34th president, this tool helps you categorize tasks. Each task can be placed into one of four categories depending on its urgency and its importance.

In the above image, the things in the green box (urgent, important) get done right now by you and your team. The things in the red box (neither urgent nor important) are distractions to be abandoned. 

Where people pleasers struggle is in the orange and blue boxes. People will bring you tasks that they claim are urgent. The instinct then is to set aside work so that person is not disappointed in you. This will often come at the expense of things in the blue category that are important but not urgent. This is how a people pleaser will find themselves not doing their own self-care or even the long term strategic planning that will benefit everyone.

It is in the orange category where delegation is important. The new middle management role requires getting others to do work to benefit the organization, not just taking it on yourself. And it requires setting time and sticking to the important things in the blue category.

When you set boundaries and stick to them, people win.

If you are a people pleaser in Rochester, New York State, Colordao, Utah, and now South Carolina, I would be happy to talk with you about this!