Have you ever been so accommodating that your personal preferences have disappeared altogether? So accommodating that you’ve convinced everyone around you that their favorites are your favorites? People pleasers out there, you know what I’m talking about.
I was recently at my brother’s house and we were ordering pizza. My husband ordered our usual toppings – pepperoni and bacon. Someone suggested ham and I responded with, “Ooo my favorite! I want ham!” Confused, my husband looked at me and said, “No, your favorite toppings are pepperoni and bacon.” I looked at him and shot back, “No, your favorite toppings are pepperoni and bacon.” I’ve been married to my husband for five years. We’ve been together for a little over nine years. And we live in Metro Detroit. Add all that up and it equals a lot of pizza. According to The New York Post, the average American eats pizza three times a month. Until we had this conversation, I don’t think I had ever ordered ham on my pizza when he was around, unless it was suggested by someone else. Which means in the roughly 327 times we’ve ordered pizza as a couple, I never communicated that my preferred pizza topping was ham. I never insisted that I wanted to order ham. I never just ordered ham as one of our toppings and didn’t ask what my partner preferred. Instead, I accommodated to the point where my personal preference all but disappeared.
Why? That’s simple: because it’s easier.
When I first met my husband in November 2015, I was in the phase of my life where my inner thoughts constantly repeated mantras like, “Keep your head down,” “Don’t make waves,” “You’re not special,” and my personal favorite, “No one cares what you think.” Yikes. It’s not surprising that I was a super accommodating partner at the onset of our relationship, but it is a little surprising that I was able to keep it up for years.
For those of you wondering what pizza and my marriage has to do with work: it’s much easier to see your own patterns and behaviors in your most secure and safe relationships. If I was that accommodating to my partner, how much more accommodating was I in my career? And to what detrimental effect?
And for those of you wondering if I know that bacon is the same thing as ham – it just isn’t, okay?
Over-accommodation at work looks like this:
- You’re 5+ years into your career and by all accounts, you’re doing well. Leadership really likes you, gives you lots of projects to work on, encourages you, and provides you with some autonomy. Let’s say at some point early on, you decided to retool the organization’s training program. You went through employee training there, it was fine, but you had ideas on how to improve it. Of course leadership said yes. You were excited to work on it, excited to training the next couple people hired on your new system, get feedback, and tweak it. And now it’s perfect, and it has been for the past three years. You’ve also been in charge of onboarding every single new person hired at the company since you started this project. You check your calendar and see that you’ve been assigned the onboarding for a new person next week. You’re immediately irritated and you don’t know why. When did training become part of your job? You don’t want to train every new person. You don’t even like training new people. You just wanted to improve an internal process three years ago and ever since then, you’ve been designated as the “trainer.” You over-accommodated. Leadership assumes you like being the trainer. After all, you were so excited to revamp the process so it makes sense that it translates into you wanting to do the training yourself. Right? Wrong. But who’s going to tell leadership that after all this time?
- Your company has this big client who brings lots of business, is very particular about how he likes things done, and at some point, has decided that you are the only competent person in the office to handle his deals. When he first started communicating his preference for you, it felt great. It validated your hard work, your methods and organization, and it made you look really good to leadership. The big client is needy and since you’ve been his point person, he has no qualms about texting you any time of day, calling you whenever he needs you, and demanding that you prioritize his deals. As your role at the company has shifted throughout your career, you have held on to this big client. Originally it was a possessive thing – you simply weren’t ready to let go of that continual validation that you’re great at your job, even if your job no longer includes personally handling any deals. Then you tried to introduce the big client to a person you felt would be a suitable replacement for you, but that blew up and the big client was very mad, threatening to take his deals elsewhere. Lately though, your new role is taking you in a different direction that you’re excited about and you don’t really want to handle even just the big client’s deals. You don’t do that anymore as part of your job, and you’re starting to resent the fact that he keeps pulling you back into that role that you outgrew two promotions ago. You over-accommodated.
For me, over-accommodation took root in the beginning of my professional career because I was young, eager to prove myself, and not secure in my skill set or knowledge level. The only indicator that I had found myself in a spot of over-accommodation was the sinking feeling when I saw something put on my calendar that I didn’t want to do, or the unwarranted anger or resentment when the big client texted my personal cell instead of calling the office. It’s only by tuning into those negative emotions that didn’t seem rooted in something other than a stubborn toddler stamping her foot saying, “But I don’t wanna do it anymore” that I was able to realize what was happening.
If you’ve identified yourself as a possible over-accommodator and want to turn the tide, this is what has worked for me (also keeping in mind this is a loooong process to undo years of behavior patterns both on your end, and for the people you’ve been over-accommodating):
- Identify the area you’ve over-accommodated in. It’s that itchy, irrational annoyance. Could also be pure rage, hey, I don’t judge.
- Next, trace it back. Why were you put in charge of this task, and how long ago? Have things changed in your role? Have things changed in your preferences?
- What do you ideally want to have happen? Do you have five big clients and maybe you want to reduce it to one or two? Do you never want to welcome a new employee to the organization ever again? Make sure they’re instructed not to approach you until their third work anniversary?
- How do you arrive at your ideal scenario? Do you have the power and authority to make that happen? Or do you need leadership approval?
- Consider the impact on others for your ideal scenario. Can you cut off your big clients cold turkey and dump them all on other team members? Or do you need to start a transition process, where you do some training of the client’s preferences with a team member, work on some files together, before letting them fly solo? Are you hurting the organization by refusing to train the new employee next week? Might it be better to accept that you’ll be training this new person but it’s time to have a conversation about trainings in the future?
- Don’t lose sight of your end goal. It might take you weeks, months, years to get there. But if it removes that “ugh” you feel, reinvigorates you to work on the projects you’re actually excited about, then it’s worth it.
Small warning: once you start identifying the areas in your life that you’re over-accommodating, you’ll just keep finding more of them. And you might find that your over-accommodating spilled over into your personal life, too. But then, one random Wednesday night after work, your husband will surprise you with a delicious pizza. When you open the box, you see the most beautiful ham and bacon pizza you’ve ever seen and you realize, suddenly, “Hey, I care what I think.”
