An employee attends assertiveness training, learns to disagree respectfully and practices saying no. The training goes well. A week later, the same employee accepts an unreasonable workload rather than risk disappointing a colleague.

Another learns the principles of effective leadership, then stays silent when a senior manager makes a decision they believe is wrong. A third understands how to give constructive feedback and avoids a difficult conversation for fear of damaging a relationship.

In each case the employee knows what to do. What is missing is not the skill but the willingness to use it when doing so risks generating disapproval from another person. This dynamic is one of the most overlooked obstacles to effective workplace learning.

What Approval-Seeking Costs the Organization

When approval-seeking behaviors are allowed to go unchecked in an organization, too many decisions get escalated upward. Employees who are qualified to make a call often refer it up the chain instead, on the belief that an approved decision carries none of the personal risk that an independent one does. Managers absorb that load, and they are already the most pressured layer in the organization. Gallup’s State of the Global Workplace 2026 report found that 45% of managers experience significant daily stress, compared with 39% of the people they manage.

Learning also gets optimized for the wrong outcome. A participant focused on approval-seeking works out what the facilitator wants and delivers it, passing the assessment without acquiring the capability.

Observed problematic behaviors also tend to get misdiagnosed. Silence in meetings reads as disengagement. An avoided conversation reads as poor communication. Reluctance to try an unfamiliar method reads as resistance to change. Learning and development (L&D) is then asked to solve a communication or motivation problem, when the true driver is more often than not a fear about what other people will think.

When the Need to Be Liked Gets in the Way

The need to feel valued, accepted and validated is a legitimate human need, not a weakness to be trained out. This need has been one of the strongest drivers of behavior throughout all human history, and no less so today, yet it is perhaps the least well recognized of our core needs.

People clearly care about how others see them. A 2024 YouGov survey found that 48% of U.S. adults describe themselves as people-pleasers, and 93% report engaging in at least one people-pleasing behavior often.

This can be particularly problematic in an organizational context when those concerns override judgment, values or professional responsibility. Consider an employee who believes that disagreeing will make them unlikeable, or that asking a question will make them look incompetent. Staying quiet, deferring, seeking reassurance and agreeing with views they privately question are all then rational responses to that belief.

For L&D, this distinction is important as it can make the difference between whether or not the tools supplied in training get used. Failing to build this understanding into learning programs risks seeing substandard outcomes.

Teach the Need Behind the Behavior

So, how do you build this understanding into programs? Traditional skills training focuses on what employees should do. A more complete approach also examines what stops them from doing it in the real world.

Participants can be asked to recall a specific recent occasion: a time they agreed with something they disagreed with, held back a question or accepted work they had no capacity for.

The next step is to examine the thinking underneath it. What did they expect would happen if they acted differently? Who would have been disappointed? Making those assumptions visible helps learners recognize that the behavior was not dictated solely by the situation. It was an attempt to manage someone else’s opinion driven by an underlying need of their own, and that recognition creates the opportunity to choose differently.

Separate Performance From Personal Worth

People avoid challenges partly because they read mistakes as a verdict about their worth. A presentation that lands badly becomes proof of being a poor communicator. Feedback becomes a threat to identity rather than information about a skill.

Training can address this directly by asking participants to distinguish three things: what happened, what it revealed about their current capability and what they would do differently.

Rather than concluding, “I am terrible at difficult conversations,” a learner might arrive at, “I avoided stating my position because I was worried about the reaction. Next time I can state it clearly and stay respectful.”

The first turns a single experience into a judgment on one’s identity. The second identifies a behavior that can change. The distinction gives an employee agency and allows them to take responsibility for performance without treating every outcome as a judgment on their value.

Give Learners a Standard They Can Apply Themselves

Approval-seeking encourages people to assess their actions by other people’s reactions. If others are pleased the decision felt right, and if others are unhappy it felt wrong.

Much of this is a design problem rather than a mindset problem. Where the criteria for good work are vague, reading other people is the only way to find out how you are doing. Transparent rubrics that define what adequate, strong and exemplary execution look like remove that ambiguity, and let learners assess their own progress without waiting for confirmation.

Reflection questions after a challenging activity build the same habit:

• Did the decision reflect the available evidence and the responsibilities of the role?
• Was the behavior consistent with the person’s values and objectives?
• What can be improved, regardless of who approved?

Self-assessment of this kind is a genuine step forward, but it has a limit. On a difficult day a person is not always the most reliable judge of themselves, and those days when stress, anxiety, tiredness or self-doubt take hold are exactly when the conviction is needed. The most stable anchor point sits outside the individual altogether: the purpose of the work and the people it serves. An employee who can answer, “Who is this for?” holds a standard that neither a manager’s mood nor their own confidence on the day can rattle.

This is consistent with self-determination theory, which examines how work environments support autonomy, competence and relatedness. External feedback remains valuable, revealing blind spots and sharpening judgment. The shift is that it becomes information to weigh rather than the final authority on personal worth.

Design for the Moment When Approval is at Risk

Before designing a learning intervention, L&D professionals can ask three questions: What do we want people to do? How may a fear of disapproval be stopping them from doing it? And how can we help them practice doing it anyway?

The answers need to shape the learning experience. If employees need to challenge assumptions, give them opportunities to disagree. If they need to make independent decisions, let them practice without immediate reassurance. If they need to have difficult conversations, let them experience the discomfort of doing so in a safe learning environment. Then measure whether they do these things back at work.

The aim is not to make employees indifferent to other people’s opinions or dismiss feedback. It is to help them stop treating approval as a prerequisite for action.

When the need to be liked competes with the purpose of the work, employees need a reason to choose the work. Helping them find that reason may be one of the most valuable contributions L&D can make to lasting behavioral change.