While highly skilled and high-performing employees are certainly the goal for any organization, becoming overly focused on developing skills that are too high can actually be problematic. Perfectionism isn’t necessarily a good thing for your employees—or your organization.
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Striving for perfection can have detrimental impacts on morale and productivity. Organizations have an important role to play in helping employees find the right balance between positive performance and perfectionism.
What’s Wrong with Trying to Be Perfect?
Mentally, striving to be perfect is draining and self-defeating. None of us is perfect. Consequently, in trying to be perfect, we’ll always come up short. The result: unnecessary suffering.
In an article for Psychology Today, Toni Bernhard explains her own struggles with striving for constant perfection. “If I couldn’t do something that rated 10 out of 10 — or at least close to that, I didn’t want to do it at all,” she writes.
Taking that approach, she says, was an ongoing source of suffering and unhappiness for her—not only in her professional life but also in her personal life. Even when engaged in leisure activities that were supposed to be fun, she says, she had the tendency to strive for perfection.
Perfectionism and Its Impact on Productivity
It may be counterintuitive at first, but employees seeking perfection in their work are probably reducing their productivity. This is because few tasks at work need to be done perfectly. Employees can waste valuable time trying to perfectly format a report for management or creating an extremely sophisticated spreadsheet, when good enough is really good enough.
That added investment of time comes at a cost not only for the employee but also for the organization.
Overcoming Perfectionism
Bernhard suggests two strategies for overcoming the desire for perfection: mindfulness and self-compassion. “When you become aware that you’re comparing yourself to others over something you’re doing, stop this stressful habit by bringing yourself to the present moment,” she writes.
That’s the mindfulness part. “To do this, take a couple of conscious breaths and switch your attention to the sincere effort you’re putting into the activity — and maybe even to how much fun it is!”
The second tip is self-compassion. This simply requires taking a step back and telling yourself you don’t need to be perfect at whatever it is you’re doing and to go easy on yourself.
Perfection is great in theory, but it’s unattainable; striving for perfection can negatively impact your own productivity and morale, as well as the productivity and morale of your employees.
Fortunately, there are some simple ways to overcome the drive for perfection. Bernhard’s tips can be put to work for many of us.