The Perfectionism #pleasestopleaderships

“A perfectionist is someone who is really good at knowing how they should be not how they are”

When we, as leaders, revert to perfectionism, we’re often operating from a place of hypervigilance. It’s not about having high standards or caring deeply about quality—it’s about being driven by a survival mechanism that treats imperfection or "less than" as a threat.

Perfectionism in leadership shows up in two ways:

• Avoiding Perfectionism: Fixated on eliminating all errors and mistakes.
• Pursuing Perfectionism: Compulsively chasing idealized traits or outputs/outcomes

Sometimes it manifests as Double-Standard Perfectionism, where we hold ourselves to impossibly high standards but don’t impose the same on our teams. Other times, it’s Projecting Perfectionism, where we see the team as an extension of ourselves and expect them to meet our personal benchmarks because their performance reflects on us.

What makes perfectionism especially hard to recognize is that it often pursues worthy goals—but in compulsive, damaging ways. We might obsess over:

• Perfect engagement scores
• Zero complaints, errors, or bugs
• Flawless stakeholder relationships or feedback
• Being perceived as consistently collaborative
• Always delivering “better, faster, cheaper”
• Being promoted every 2 years or always receiving a "leading expectations" performance rating
• insert any other worthy pursuit here ...

These outcomes look good on the surface, so both we and the organization often excuse the toxic means used to achieve them. For instance, we might celebrate high engagement scores without realizing the score came so that the team avoids being stuck in endless "solution meetings" when scores are lower.

What Function Does it Serve for Us as Leaders?

First things first: perfectionism is not a character trait. It’s a survival mechanism—hypervigilant to specific threats to our sense of self. Whether it’s avoiding negative consequences or ensuring we’re accepted and valued, perfectionism acts as our shield. What makes it particularly dangerous? It’s often rewarded by its outcomes, making it harder to recognize as a problem. This mechanism has three key ways it operates:

1. It creates rules about how to be safe in the world: "You must anticipate every possible problem", "You must always have data", etc. Along with these rules come vivid scenarios of what happens if we break them: "If you make a mistake, you'll lose credibility", "If you lose credibility, you'll lose your position", "If you lose your position, you'll be alone and helpless"
2. It has methods to enforce compliance: Highlighting every insecurity; Creating scary scenarios of failure; Reinterpreting past successes as achieved through perfection; Constantly questioning and doubting our decisions; Pressuring us to double and triple-check everything
3. It has punishment systems when we don't comply: Creating stress before important moments; Making us hypervigilant to any sign of criticism; Diminishing our achievements; Making us question our competence or our place
4. Some of the times it makes us blind to evidence so we can keep the illusion of perfection - either evidence of not perfect or evidence that the means to achieve perfect were toxic.

Here’s what perfectionism does for us (or so we think):

1. Safety and Control

Perfectionism gives us an illusion of control in an uncertain world. If everything is flawless, what could possibly go wrong, right? It shields us from criticism, prevents negative consequences, and creates a comforting sense of certainty. And when perfectionism delivers visible wins—like high engagement scores, impeccable deliveries, or glowing stakeholder feedback—it feels justified.

2. Validation

It’s a way to prove our value, to feel irreplaceable. We convince ourselves that being perfect ensures acceptance, admiration, and worth. It’s a shield—against being criticized, discarded, fired, demoted, or ignored. And when perfectionism aligns with organizational cultures that reward "excellence," the reinforcement becomes even stronger.

3. Coping with Pressure

In high-stakes environments where mistakes feel unacceptable, perfectionism becomes the only way to survive, and it remains a solution for future pressures. It provides clear rules for navigating the pressure and offers a path— a harsh one—through uncertainty. It’s the ultimate coping mechanism in systems that reward short-term results.

4. Identity Protection

For many of us, perfectionism isn’t just a habit—it’s a deeply ingrained part of our identity. We’ve built careers on being “the one who never makes mistakes,” the one who delivers flawlessly every time. Letting go of perfectionism can feel like letting go of ourselves.

But here’s the painful truth: there’s no link between perfectionism and actual performance. The energy we spend striving for perfection often doesn’t deliver the long-term results we think it will. Worse, it masks the damage being done.

Perfectionism’s outcomes look so good that we—and our organizations—excuse the cost.

How Does it Feel on the Receiving End?

Being on a team with a perfectionism focused leader feels like being caught in their personal perfectionism machine and can feel radically different depending on how their perfectionism manifests:

1. You become an extension of how they treat themselves. Their inner rulebook becomes your daily reality - their standards, their fears, their need for flawlessness. If they obsessively check their own work twenty times, that becomes the team's "quality process". If they're deeply concerned about potential mistakes, that concern influences how the team approaches decisions and projects.
2. The team culture gradually aligns with the leader's drive for perfection. What started as reasonable processes and ceremonies evolve into tools for perfection. The culture of high performance, while coming from a place of wanting to do great work, can become culture of perfect. Over time, the team is full of people who either already share these perfectionism tendencies or quickly learn to adopt them.
3. Sometimes the leader's perfectionism shows up as "kiss up, kick down" - they're so focused on meeting expectations from above perfectly that they'll drive their team into the ground to do it. You end up working ridiculous hours, chasing unrealistic goals, facing constant monitoring and criticism - all while your leader works even harder to manage relationships upward.
4. Other times they'll completely withdraw from the leadership role. Since everything the team does reflects on them (and must therefore be perfect), they distance themselves entirely. Suddenly you're hearing "come to me with solutions, not problems" or finding yourself without support or representation. It's the under-the-bus leadership style - they'd rather step away, distance themselves, blame the team, than risk being associated with imperfection.
5. Or maybe you've got the overcompensating perfectionism, when leaders don't demand perfection from you. Instead, they stay up late fixing your work, double-checking everything, quietly correcting what you do. You might not even know it's happening until you realize every deliverable has been "polished" before it goes out.
6. Perhaps the most poignant version is the "perfect leader" perfectionism, investing enormous energy in their own development - reading leadership books, attending trainings, studying best practices - all with the desire to serve their team better but they completely lose touch with what the team actually needs. They're more focused on being/appearing the leader they "should" be than the leader you need them to be.

What makes all of this especially exhausting is how it creates a culture of constant vigilance. You're either watching your leader burn themselves out with perfectionism, or you're being pulled into their perfectionism patterns, or you're trying to navigate around their perfectionism defenses. Either way, it's exhausting, demoralizing, and ironically, it usually makes the team less effective, not more.

Then, you start experiencing:

• Constant stress about making any mistake, no matter how small
• Paralysis in decision-making because no option seems "perfect" enough
• Exhaustion from endless revisions and checks
• Loss of confidence as nothing ever seems good enough
• Diminished creativity or innovation as risk-taking feels too dangerous

You may even start internalizing the perfectionism voice yourself. You begin second-guessing everything, overworking to meet impossible standards, and losing touch with what "perfect enough" actually means.

What Can We Do Instead?

Recovering from perfectionism or learning to have a healthy relationship with this part of us is a long journey. As we go through it we can use these as intermediary solutions:

1. Recognise the Difference: High standards = "This needs to meet specific criteria for specific reasons" Perfectionism = "This needs to be perfect (end of sentence)" - this means that whatever we are pursuing has to have a very solid justification on why we are pursuing it - with very logical and rational "if/because" explanations.
2. Practice "Good Enough" (I try to use "Perfect enough"): Set explicit criteria, define what "done" means before starting. When defining done also make sure you are explicit on why that is the definition of done. We can always check with others if the reasons we came up with make sense and are reasonable.
3. Build Recovery Skills: Learn to handle imperfections without spiraling or reacting. Look at imperfections, trade-off, less's as proof that we are a "recovering perfectionist". This is my favorite tool, I take pride in the evidence of "perfect enough".
4. Shift from Prevention to Adjustment: This is a bit tricky. Perfectionism looks at preventing "bad" things from happening. Thinking about "I'll adjust and fix if there is something's wrong" and getting comfortable with fixing after the fact is a great skill. It's the equivalent of replying to the email you just sent in order to attach the attachment :) without freaking out.
5. With what you do to perfect think about it like this: "If I would things the same way for the rest of my life, for everything I do, would that be sustainable?"; "Would I expect the people I care about to do things like this for the rest of their lives in everything they do?". Thinking about effort or approach like this gives a critical eye on the decisions we make in the moment of how we do things.
6. Monitor Your Perfectionist's Triggers: Notice when perfectionism spikes (high stress, uncertainty, etc.). Knowing what triggers, activates, annoys, scares the hell out of our perfectionistic part is the best thing. Getting to know this part of you, see how it developed, what it wants to protect you from, how did it learn to protect you. Building a relationship with it, a relationship of compassion, respect and care. Becoming friends with it and then learning to live with each other, because you both want the same thing: For YOU to be ok. Being ok also means living with the realities of life, because you can take it.

My Perfectionist says "hi!" to your Perfectionist.

Awareness is the best learning tool, #pleasestopleaderships series brings some insight into the loooooong list of crappy leaderships we might use, explain why we might revert to them, and if possible provide alternatives.

Here is the series: