Why We Need to Talk About Manager Perfectionism

Photo credit: Uday Mittal

Have you ever felt like your manager holds too tightly to perfection and doesn’t cut themselves and/or others much slack?

Or maybe you’re that manager.

I know I’ve fallen into the hard-on-myself trap as a manager myself.

Research shows that perfectionistic tendencies in managers can show up in a couple of different ways. There are the perfectionistic leaning managers who trust no one, the hard-on-others managers.

They can fall into habits of:

·      Not delegating

·      Engaging in critical or hostile feedback patterns

·      Failing to encourage participation in decision making

·      Failure to develop talent on their team

·      Creating environments that leave little room for mistakes and learning.

And then there are the hard-on-themselves mangers, who demonstrate what the researchers call “high self-oriented perfectionism,” mostly focused on self improvement without much monitoring and judging of others.

This can show up as the sacrificial “I’ll do it all” attitude. Sometimes that’s about feeling you’re the only one who can “do it right,” which sends its own problematic message--that your team can’t be trusted. This could be an overlap between the hard-on-self and hard-on-others patterns.

Other times, as was my tendency, perfectionism can show up as the uber self sacrificing type of leadership. Especially during a challenging year when I oversaw the merger of two academic departments, I wanted to be in the trenches with my team, saving my colleagues from some burdensome tasks, making sure they saw me as shouldering all the workload I could while they were involved with heavy teaching loads. Saying “Yes, I’ll do that” became rote, as I stayed on the hamster wheel in a situation of constant deadlines and decision fatigue.

I was working with stellar talent. And they were all team players who took leadership, did unpleasant tasks when needed, and volunteered themselves. They did not complain, even in the midst of a massive bureaucratic grind to move the gears of the university for a department merger. And they did their work beautifully and innovatively; their leadership shone brightly during this time. The leader perfectionism thing was my issue, driving me to overcommit my own limited energy.

Anyone else ever been there?

These kind of behaviors often result in burnout, and that definitely happened to me. To recover, I scaled back my workload at the university in my last year on faculty, working half-time, focusing only on department leadership and leaving the classroom teaching to others. I was honestly happy to take the financial hit to recover my well being.

But slashing our paychecks and workloads to recover from burnout is rarely feasible for most of us. We need to develop habits that stick to mitigate perfectionistic patterns.

And it turns out that perfectionistic hamster-wheel behavior is a very common problem for managers, especially as middle-managers experience an increasing squeeze from “above” and “below,” heightened workloads, more emotional labor to manage in chaotic institutional contexts.

The results of manager perfectionism? Yes, manager burnout, but also missed opportunities for team development, and in the worst cases, a big risk of burning out and losing the talent on your team.

Your ability to help mitigate the perfectionistic tendencies on your team is a conversation for another time, but if you're read this far, take a moment to consider that issue.

What do the hard-on-others versus hard-on-ourselves approaches have in common?

1)        A failure to model self compassion and giving ourselves a break.

2)        The potential to limit the development of others on our team by clinging to habits—ego-driven habits, it might be fair to say—that involve constant overwork, lack of break-taking and reflection, and potentially poorer results.

Whether you're a manager or your work with one, find the tools to jump start conversations and strategy to mitigate perfectionism.

Get a good start in my free webinar on October 15, “Moving Beyond Perfectionism.”

Register for Free Perfectionism Webinar

By learning about and developing strategies to mitigate perfectionism, you'l enhance your team development and and move the needle towards an innovative, compassionate and resilient work environment. And you'll be better equipped to work skillfully with those members of your team who struggle with perfectionism themselves.

Join me on the 15th! And plan to lock in the learnings with a roadmap to new habits through the 7-Day Perfectionism Reset™.

Register for 7-Day Perfectionism Reset™