~by Haley Lynn Gray~
None of us is perfect. I don’t walk on water, I haven’t parted any seas, and I’m fairly sure I haven’t leapt a building recently.
Expecting to be right 100% of the time isn’t merely unrealistic — it’s damaging, and it’s most damaging in the people who lead.
What chasing perfection actually costs
It slows everything down. Work sits at 90% while someone polishes it, and the extra 10% is invisible to everyone except the person doing the polishing.
It prevents delegation. If only your version is acceptable, you can’t hand anything over — which is how owners build a business that can’t function without them.
It hides problems. If mistakes are treated as unacceptable, people conceal them. And concealed problems are the expensive kind.
And it stops people trying anything. Nobody experiments where failure isn’t survivable, so you get compliance and no invention.
The words part
Here’s where perfectionism and language meet, because leaders tend to express it through what they say.
“This isn’t good enough” delivered carelessly doesn’t produce better work. It produces someone who checks with you before doing anything.
Words carry differently from the person in charge. Your passing comment about a draft is, to the person who wrote it, the verdict. The remark you’ve forgotten by lunchtime may be replayed for weeks — which is why precision matters more the more senior you are.
What to aim at instead
Define what “finished” means in advance. Most perfectionism is an absence of a stated standard, so nobody knows when to stop.
Distinguish what must be right from what must be done. Contracts, payroll and safety: exact. A first draft, an internal note, a test: adequate and fast.
Reward the try. Especially the one that didn’t work but was well-reasoned.
Be visibly wrong sometimes. A leader who says “I got that wrong” gives everyone else permission to say it too, which is how you find out about problems early.
And watch how you speak to yourself. The internal standard leaks outward — people who are brutal with themselves are rarely generous with anyone else. Take the note; drop the tone.
The short version
Aim for excellent where it matters, adequate where it doesn’t, and honest everywhere.
Perfect isn’t available. Pretending otherwise mostly teaches the people around you to hide things — which is the opposite of what you were trying to achieve.
