Are you a victim of the perfection paradox? It’s a common issue for leaders, where we set ourselves – and perhaps others – impossibly high standards, with the aim of achieving even greater success and boosting performance beyond our wildest dreams. But the reality is that such levels of perfection can never be reached and, rather than making success more likely, we are actually setting ourselves up to fail.

Unpicking the paradox

From early childhood we are brought up to believe that perfection is something to be sought. Full marks in a test, flawless looks, a perfect memory are all attributes which are highly prized yet, more often than not, actually create barriers to success and happiness.

While it’s true that we get a short-term hit of dopamine from achieving what we perceive as perfection, if you ask most gold medal winners about the Olympic aftermath they’ll tell you about the mental crash that follows their success. As soon as we achieve our goal, we are programmed to start seeking the next high point, to break another record or find another tiny increment of improvement. As a result, today’s perfection becomes tomorrow’s ‘not quite good enough’, which brings with it a new level of self-doubt and dissatisfaction.

The impact of seeking perfection

What is the impact of striving for perfection, as a leader?

If we’re producing a report for the board and want it to be perfect, we’ll probably end up putting in way too many hours, never being satisfied, submitting it late and pushing our stress levels through the roof. Will the report be any better for the anxiety? Almost certainly not.

If we ask others to do something and are never quite satisfied with their efforts, what’s the effect on them? Our micromanagement and criticism will erode their trust, disempower them and ultimately push them to think “What’s the point?”. A surefire way to negatively impact performance and lose staff.

Seeking perfection will also have a detrimental effect on our own career. We can become paralysed by our desire to appear perfect, not speaking up in meetings for fear of saying the wrong thing, making us seem distant and disengaged when the opposite is true.

Hiding behind perfection

As Seth Godin wrote in a recent blog, “Perfect is unattainable and perfect is a place to hide.”

This is such an astute observation.

When we focus on perfection, we’re living in a fantasy world. As the Japanese have long recognised with the art of Kintsugi, when we accept and embrace the reality of failure and mistakes, and learn to love our imperfections, we find the truth and beauty of human existence.

The philosophy of After Action Review is based on similar principles, of bringing errors out into the light and learning from them, rather than hiding behind a pretence of perfection.

Breaking out of the perfection paradox

As leaders, we can only succeed when we see the perfection paradox for what it is: a trap. When we allow ourselves to recognise the truth, we realise that perfection is the opposite of perfect. In fact, it is fundamentally flawed.

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