You might think that being a perfectionist is a good thing. You want to do your best at work and impress your boss and colleagues. But being too perfect can actually hurt your career and your well-being. Here’s why you should let go of perfection and aim for excellence instead.
Perfectionism is not the same as having high standards or working hard. It’s obsessively avoiding mistakes and setting unrealistic goals, causing stress, depression, and hindering productivity and relationships. It’s becoming more common due to social media and competitive environments, but it’s important to avoid falling into this trap.
Being a perfectionist might seem like a good thing, but it’s not. It’s better to be excellent than perfect. Excellence is doing your best, embracing imperfections, and finding joy in the journey.
How perfectionism limits your potential
It’s important for you to recognize the ways in which perfectionism is limiting your progress. Here’s some valuable insight you should consider.
Perfectionism is Demotivating
Striving for perfection can demotivate you in the long run. Aim for excellence, but don’t take it to the extreme. Setting unattainable ideals makes you feel inadequate and prevents you from experiencing the satisfaction of achieving your goals. When feeling down, it’s hard to put energy into your work, which hinders your effectiveness.
Embrace your limits and do your best. This approach allows you to invest your energy in your responsibilities and relationships, making others feel good about working with you (which benefits your career).
Perfectionism Distances You from Others
Perfectionism can isolate you from your colleagues. When they realize your unrealistic expectations, they might hesitate to collaborate because they feel they can’t meet them. Your tendency to overwork and overthink can also push people away. Believing you’re near-perfect can intimidate those aware of their own flaws. Moreover, if you never admit mistakes, you appear fake, eroding trust as people see through your facade.
Professionalism is vital, and you don’t have to reveal all your imperfections. However, finding a balance matters. It’s important to have the courage to ask for help or admit when you don’t have everything figured out. Being authentic strengthens relationships and boosts your credibility.
Perfectionism Reduces Your Effectiveness
Perfectionism hampers effectiveness and career growth. It limits progress, contribution, and recognition. If you can’t admit mistakes, you miss out on opportunities to learn and improve. Striving for excellence is commendable, but excessive pursuit of an unrealistic standard leads to stagnation.
Know when to stop, and be happy with delivering on a project where you’ve done well, even if not perfectly. Instead of waiting to release your work until it’s perfect, get used to making it better over time, and the career benefits of continuous learning.
How to deal with perfectionism in the workplace
Recognize the signs of perfectionism
Perfectionism can be harmful for your career and well-being. It can make you less productive, creative, and happy. It can also make you hard to work with or manage. But how do you know if you or your employees are perfectionists? Here are some signs:
- You are slow because you want everything to be perfect.
- You are overly organized.
- You often seek approval or feedback for your work.
- You have trouble delegating or trusting others.
- You give up easily, especially if you face challenges or failures.
- You have trouble making decisions.
- You procrastinate a lot.
- You avoid difficult things to escape failure.
If you say yes to many of these signs, you may benefit from some strategies to cope with perfectionism and improve your performance and well-being at work.
Acknowledge the Person, Not Just the Work
Perfectionism is a learned habit based on the need to get approval or praise for things done, rather than getting recognition for one’s worth as a person. Recognition is about appreciating the contribution of people for who they are, not just by what they can do.
A simple way to start recognizing your staff is to have a chat. Connect with the people who work for you. Ask them questions about themselves: Learn more about who they are as people and about their life. By doing this you are valuing them by showing interest in their uniqueness and expressing gratitude for the people who add to the business, not just for what they do for the business.
Practice Gratitude
Gratitude is the best way to fight perfectionism. Perfection is really just a bunch of judgments. When you feel grateful, you can’t judge. Being grateful for everything your people are and what they offer lets them feel good in a different way, not based on judgment. Don’t just think it, say it! Gratitude can change a business culture. You could even ask yourself every day, “What can I be or do today to make the office or organization a place of gratitude?”
Encourage Self-Compassion
Improving self-esteem can sometimes backfire. Some studies showed that too much praise made children less confident and more entitled. The praise made them think they had to be perfect to be worthy. That’s why self-compassion is better. Self-compassion is about accepting and being kind to yourself, no matter what. Psychologist Kristin Neff says we should stop comparing ourselves and embrace our flaws. Nobody said we had to be perfect.
You can help your employees be more kind to themselves and feel better at work by teaching them self-compassion. Here’s how:
- Don’t be scared of rejection or failure. They happen to everyone and they don’t mean you’re bad or worthless. As a leader, show them that it’s not personal and that you’re all in this together. Give them stock options to show that you share the success and the risk.
- When things go wrong, take a moment and breathe. Don’t rush to fix it or blame yourself. Just accept what happened and how you feel. Trying to hide your feelings can make them worse later.
Know What Different People Can Take or Accept
Everyone is different, and their ability to take or accept recognition or gratitude also varies. Some people can take a lot of recognition and will do well from it, and some can take almost none and won’t enjoy it at all. If you give someone more than they can take, it won’t work—it may even have the opposite effect!
A simple way to know what works for each person is to ask yourself, “What can this person take or accept?” It doesn’t have to be the same all the time, either. Each day, ask, “Do my staff members need anything from me today?”If you’re uncertain or the answer is affirmative, make an effort to check in with them by asking, “How are you doing? What’s going on?” If you ask, you will find out.
Focus on learning goals
Learning goals vs. performance goals. Suppose you are an innovator, your aim is to achieve success and make a lot of money. You therefore view every product that is not a hit as a setback. This feeling of disappointment could undermine your confidence, or discourage you from exploring new ideas.
Alternatively, suppose your aim is to experiment with new things and find out what works and what doesn’t. Then as long as you keep trying, you can’t lose. In this case, the outcome would just be the result of what you’ve learned; the setback itself has no significance.
As you can imagine, people who set learning goals set higher goals since failing is not something negative. They are much more resilient, improve themselves more through repeated practice, and can even have better business outcomes. Here are some tips you can use to foster more learning goals and enhance mental well-being in the workplace.
Understand Your Employee’s Needs
Understanding other people’s needs doesn’t mean you have to meet them.
Be open to know what is happening for your employees, and ask these questions:
- What will be the outcome if I meet their current needs?
- What will be the consequence if I don’t meet their needs?
- What does this person really need?
Asking questions allows you to see where you can enable others to know what they know and choose what works for them. When you ask, you can sense which choices create a feeling of lightness or ease in your future and which ones don’t. While it isn’t always logical, every person knows what his or her choices will create.
Encourage your staff members to make decisions about their work. Ask them, “What can I offer you to get this done or create this?” Let them know you are there for them and trust that they can do it. Don’t intervene and worry about details; let them do their work the way they do it. They probably do it differently from you, and you might not like the way they do it, but if you allow them to do it the way they do it, you might be amazed.
Foster workplace friendships
Workplace friendships benefit perfectionists by providing resources, feedback, and new ideas for healthy perfectionists, while increasing approval, trust, and reducing exhaustion and burnout for maladaptive perfectionists. These friendships enhance communication, creativity, and well-being in the workplace.
Here are more tips to promote friendships in the workplace:
- Encourage regular communication for workplace friendships, fostering a harmonious atmosphere and information sharing.
- Begin meetings with casual chit-chat to facilitate deeper conversations and connections among employees.
- Promote cross-team collaboration for friendships, innovation, and exposure to different perspectives.
Be Accepting of Perfectionism
You can’t resist perfectionism—that just creates more of it. But when you are accepting of it, you give everyone the room to choose what works for them. You can’t force people to choose something different; they have to decide for themselves. Appreciate and have gratitude for each person and their differences; ask questions and seek ways to enable; and invite staff to enable themselves in the business. If you incorporate these healthy habits for dealing with perfectionist employees (or anyone in truth) in your business, you will allow changes to happen with ease.