Perfectionism and People Pleasing
The perfect storm. Combine these comparatively innocuous traits in one person and you get a multiplier effect.
When I was a rookie interviewer, I would often ask a candidate “What are your weak points?”, and frequently the answer came back “I’m a perfectionist.” The candidate probably thought that it wasn’t such a bad trait. It means the individual has high standards.
However, the practical outworking of perfectionism can be problematic for both the organisation and the individual. The perfectionist is reluctant to let anything leave their out-tray because there are one or two aspects of that report/proposal/design that could be improved. And they may find themselves forever stuck at a certain level in an organisation because they never feel they are good enough to apply for promotion.
Similarly people are generally prepared to admit to being a people pleaser. What could be so problematic about that? They want others to hold them in high regard.
But do we want our organisation to be staffed by individuals who slavishly attempt to meet everyone’s demands on them, and never push back or question the prevailing wisdom? As George Bernard Shaw pointed out “The reasonable man adapts himself to the world: the unreasonable one persists in trying to adapt the world to himself. Therefore all progress depends on the unreasonable man.” This holds no matter whether you are the chief executive, chief designer or a shop floor worker. Modern organisations depend on people who are prepared to ask “Why do we do this?”
However, while, in my view, both of these traits are unhelpful, it’s hardly the end of the world. It’s when you find both of them in the same person that the trouble starts. When that person becomes a middle manager, their people pleasing tendency means they are going to find it hard to say no to their boss, or indeed to anyone who assigns work to them, co-opts them onto a committee, requests a report, asks for their assistance etc. So, in no-time at all their in-tray and their diary is overflowing.
That would be bad enough, but as a perfectionist and people pleaser their in-tray emptying ability is fatally compromised. They are slow to complete work because, well, it’s never quite good enough to see the light of day. They are reluctant to delegate for fear that the delegee doesn’t share their high standards and, in any event, they don’t want to upset their colleagues by ‘overburdening’ them with work. Except that they are holding on to so much that rather than there being any risk of overburdening people, they are denying their staff development opportunities (for more on appropriate delegation, see my previous article).
In short the two traits act together to crush their owner in the middle. The manager feels under increasing pressure, but her safety valve has been welded shut. To make things worse, people pleasers are often poor at self-care outside of work. Exercise? Socialising? Sorry, I’m too busy looking out for others.
Is there a solution to this? The fact that the individual will often be aware of these traits, albeit imagining them to be comparatively benign, militates towards a favourable outcome. The next step is to sensitise them to the negative consequences of perfectionism and people pleasing and, in particular, to the two acting in concert.
After that we need to drill down to the false beliefs that underpin the behaviours. This is where the going gets tough, because these traits may be rooted in a fear of rejection and a fear of failure. The associated beliefs — for example, love is only ever conditional and that others are entitled to expect perfection from us — may be rooted in childhood.
Work on these might, in the first instance, include some low risk experiments leading to the discovery, for example, that one can say no and the roof will not fall in.
However we go about it, disassembling people pleasing and perfectionism is essential to our health and wellbeing. We need to do it before we burn out, when we may well lose our healthy traits, such as conscientiousness, reliability and organisational skills, as part of a general collapse in capability. When Voltaire said “the best is the enemy of the good”, he knew what he was talking about.
Incidentally, perfectionism seems to be on the rise. Simon Sherry and Martin M. Smith (2019) contend that today’s young generation are more perfectionist than ever, and speculate that this may be due to a combination of overcontrolling parents and social media posts that reflect unrealistic images of others’ ‘perfect’ lives.
If you have a colleague who is a perfectionist and/or people pleaser, you can be part of their adjustment to a happier life. If you work for them, encourage them to provide you with development opportunities through delegation. If they work for you, give them permission to say “no” once in a while. And if the only person reading the report will be you, let them know that it doesn’t need polishing ad infinitum.
Reference
Simon Sherry and Martin M. Smith (2019). “Young People Drowning in a Rising Tide of Perfectionism,” The Epoch Times, B8, February 14–20.
