Politics in consulting and the disproportionate burden of people-pleasing for a living
People-pleasing isn’t your weakness—it’s your job
Consultants are notorious people-pleasers. In the world of software consulting, we spend nearly all our time thinking about our clients. We adapt to the processes and systems that work for them, and every day we have to balance our own desire to make things better with the equally strong need to not burn bridges. Even though hands-on programming was about 50% of my job, it took up about 10% of my brain space. The other 90% was occupied by the complex political game I needed to play to stay afloat and succeed in an organization where I will always be an outsider.
As a software consultant, I have worked with some truly exceptional people. At both 8th Light and Formidable, my coworkers were some of the kindest, smartest, and least self-serving people I know. However, I also know that when companies talk about having “the best people”, what they really mean is they have the best people-pleasers. From a company’s perspective the most valuable consultants are the ones who take on any assignment without question or complaint. They prioritize the client’s needs, and rarely consider their own career development when making decisions about technology or process. They patiently deal with difficult people again and again, and avoid expressing their own opinions when they could create friction or conflict.
As cynical as I am sometimes, consultants make great hires, and I believe everyone would benefit from this experience at some point in their career. We all need to learn how to adapt to new circumstances, approach professional relationships with humility, and gain influence by building trust over time with people we have no formal authority over. In my experience, we all want to win friends and influence people, but only some of us are aware of the complex diplomacy it takes to do so. I have always thought that if I left software consulting, I would make an equally great political organizer or contestant on The Circle. In general, consulting companies tend to invest more in mentorship, training, and ongoing support because people are the product.
However, there is something about this dynamic that just hasn’t been sitting right with me recently. If you are a manager, a consultant, service worker, or anyone whose career success depends on looking out for the needs of other people, is it ever okay to express anger at work?
Conventional wisdom says no. Is a man explaining your own area of expertise to you? Just smile and nod and let him finish. Is a stakeholder placing an undue amount of blame on you for the thing that went wrong even though you warned them about it months ago? Apologize to them for not getting it right, and ask follow-up questions to figure out how you can work together better next time. Is someone literally yelling at you, berating you, or harassing you? Be the bigger person and deal with it until you are able to transfer to a different team. (Even if you report this kind of behavior to your own HR department, there is very little that can be done if a client is treating you this way, and parting ways with this client would cause your company to lose revenue.)
This is especially true for people who are not white men. This 2015 paper cited multiple studies of hiring decisions in the medical field and found that there was a greater negative bias against women who expressed anger during the hiring process than there was for men. As a matter of fact, men who expressed what was perceived to be justified anger during the hiring process were slightly more likely to be hired than men who did not express any anger. Women experienced the opposite effect, no matter the cause.
Brescoll and Uhlmann found that the expression of anger by an applicant enhanced the evaluation of men and lowered the evaluation of women, particularly women applying for a high-status position. The existence of a specific external cause for anger mitigated but did not eliminate the negative bias toward women; external attribution for anger improved the status and salary ratings for women who expressed anger but had no impact on the lower rating of competence.1
This doesn’t just apply to tech, of course. We see this all the time in political discourse, in family dynamics, and in society in general. Emotional men are passionate, but emotional women are bitchy.
Anger can be used to intimidate, to harass, or deflect blame. It can also boil under the surface, creating resentment and passive-aggressive behavior. (For the record, this is most often how I see women express their anger at work, and it can be equally toxic!) I don’t believe it is always good, or that the expression of anger does not warrant scrutiny.
It is such a difficult dance when we are told to bring our whole selves to work, but leave our self-protective instinct at home. I can express my feelings and needs to my friends and family at home, but at work I have to put my own needs aside and focus first on making other people comfortable. For some of us this isn’t just a best practice, it’s a survival skill. If I push back too hard, if I say what I really think or express what I really feel, I won’t be hired, promoted, or protected from retaliation.
Speaking of job searching, I left my job recently and I’m on the market for a new one. While I won’t tell the whole story here, I will say that for me there has historically been a high correlation between anger and burnout. The thing that really wears me down isn’t just the number of hours worked, but the number of hours I spend in a shitty situation that I can’t do anything to change. As a consultant, you tend to end up in a lot of these situations, particularly after the “recession” word gets thrown around and the scarcity mindset takes over. Billable hours start to matter more than your happiness, career advancement, or desire to be treated with equality and respect by the people you work with every day. Once layoffs are looming and our livelihoods depend on how convincingly we can people-please without complaining or asking anyone else to change, it just feels icky. Don’t you just love capitalism?
How can individual employees have boundaries around how they are treated at work when their employer says otherwise? Can we really trust the decisions leaders make about what kinds of situations their employees should be able to handle when these leaders are all well-paid white men (who are largely insulated from the real work we do)? Is this just a consulting problem? I honestly don’t know, but I’m talking about it in that context, because it’s what I know.
I don’t know the answers today, but I need to talk about the problem. For some, people-pleasing might just be a part of the job. But when people-pleasing becomes an expectation, it has a disproportionate negative impact on women, people of color, people with disabilities, and anyone else who already deals with more pushback and scrutiny just for coming to work in their own body. I don’t know about you, but I’m exhausted.
Isaac, C., Lee, B., & Carnes, M. (2009). Interventions that affect gender bias in hiring: a systematic review. Academic medicine : journal of the Association of American Medical Colleges, 84(10), 1440–1446. https://doi.org/10.1097/ACM.0b013e3181b6ba00