People pleasers and principles

People pleasers are wonderful, and are ultimately suffering from self-harm if they yield on principle because of pressure. A former student of mine will always be a people pleaser, but he has built a successful career by only yielding to pressure that doesn't violate his principles. He took his Conflict Resolution degree and applied to be Human Resources Director for a franchise of seven restaurants. Even though there was no mention of Conflict Resolution in the job application announcement, he was about 15 minutes into the job interview when the owner of this string of restaurants said, "You're hired. This is exactly what we need."  The owner held no more interviews.

Now, two years later, my former student runs the employment of more than 300 people, with conflict management systems and subsystems that keep the inevitable conflicts from growing to harmful proportions. He does all this by being a people pleaser whose principles still ultimately serve as his beacons, his guardrails. He has, for example, managed conflicts that have included overt racism, conflicts that his boss, the owner of these seven restaurants, was willing to compromise on, but my former student was not. In instances like this, our principles can theoretically get us fired, and sometimes they do. 

Usually, however, when we show that we are of value, we can uphold our principles against all odds without dire consequences, even if it looks like we are not going to be people pleasers in this case. The longer we have shown our value, the more this is true. 

My former student--his name is Adam--literally finishes virtually every conversation with a version of, "Let me know if there's anything I can do to help." Could there be any more obvious definition of a people pleaser? Still, he never yields on principle, and he makes that a feature, not a bug, of his mode of management style. He's so good at relieving the pressures on others that, when he stands for something, the pressures on him, in turn, diminish.

BTW, as I write this, he has applied for a position in a neighboring state that would be much like his current position, except he'd be overseeing literally an order of magnitude more people in multiple states--more than 3,000 of them--and his salary would be approximately doubled. Not bad for a people pleaser...