The best leaders are skilled at knowing the strengths and weaknesses of every person on their team and then assigning work that capitalizes on strengths and avoids weaknesses.  But the truth is that there are many traits that can be both a strength and a weakness, depending on how it is channeled and applied to certain jobs or tasks.  Over the last few weeks, we’ve looked at a series of such traits.  Procrastination.  Impatience.  Competitiveness.  Unreasonableness.  At first glance, these may seem like flaws.  But when properly channeled or applied in the right situations, each of these so-called ‘flaws’ can also be ‘qualities’.

Is the reverse also true?  Can something generally viewed as a quality also be a flaw?  The goal with virtually any quality or flaw is to channel and harness it for whatever value is offers without allowing it to become a detriment.  Take perfectionism, for example.  Many people admit freely to being perfectionists.  It’s seen by many as perhaps a ‘desirable flaw’ in that most successful people shamelessly claim to be perfectionists.  If one must admit to a flaw, that’s the flaw to have.  But is it always good to be a perfectionist and can even that trait become problematic?  If so, how can one best manage a perfectionist?

Perfectionism as a Quality

Perfectionists are people who insist that things must be ‘just so’.  Everyone knows a few folks like that.  Perfectionists believe that a state of completeness and flawlessness can and should be attained.  In mild cases, perfectionists derive a very real sense of pleasure from the labor of a painstaking effort.  Such people might also be dubbed persnickety or particular.

There are great advantages to being a perfectionist or having one on your team.  Perfectionism evokes images of the athlete practicing a given shot, kick or putt over and over, until rare mastery is achieved.  According to Malcolm Gladwell in his book “Outliers,” it takes about 10,000 hours of practice to achieve mastery of any skill.  Many times, perfectionists are the people so driven and focused as to devote 10,000 hours toward mastering any skill.

In a positive form, perfectionism can provide the driving energy which leads to great achievement. The meticulous attention to detail necessary for scientific investigation, the commitment which pushes composers to keep working until the music realizes the glorious sounds playing in the imagination, and the persistence which keeps great artists at their easels until their creation matches their conception all result from perfectionism.

Perfectionism as a Flaw

Yet perfectionism is also a good example of a trait that is a quality until, in extreme, becomes a flaw.   How so?  The dogged pursuit of perfection often proves to be the greatest obstacle to achieving it.   In that sense, ‘perfect’ becomes the enemy of ‘good enough.’  In extreme cases, perfectionists are unable to feel satisfaction because in their own eyes they never seem to do things well enough to warrant a feeling of satisfaction.  In such cases, obsessive perfectionists believe that work or output that is anything less than perfect is unacceptable.  They are often secretly viewed as obsessive or compulsive.

Perfectionists not only lose perspective on the quality of their work, but also the work of others.  The more they pore back over a product or creation in pursuit of a fresh perspective, the farther it moves away. This often results in paralysis.  While “perfect” exists as a concept that compels perfectionists to keep trying to better their work, any judgment that perfection is achieved is actually entirely subjective and thus imperfect. This explains why a perfectionist can judge something perfect one minute and then hopelessly flawed the next without making a single change.

The quest for perfection also leads to dithering.  Perfectionists will endlessly rework a sentence or a melody or a sculpture from its original form until it comes full circle back to the form in which it originally started.  For them, trying out other possible forms is often the only way to be convinced that the original was, in fact, best.  However, that process wastes time and often is more like an itch that needs to be scratched than an effective work process.

Moreover, this presumes the perfectionist is able to return to the version that was considered good in the first place.  The perfectionist’s judgment often becomes too muddled during the perfecting process to really evaluate quality.  Thus, perfectionists often don’t finish a project but rather abandon it, not knowing what else to do to salvage it from the wreckage of their own obsessive tinkering.  When they return to it later, they often find that time away was the only thing that actually improved their ability to judge quality objectively.

In fact, perfectionists can even sabotage their own success. They may not turn in projects on time because they’re not yet perfect. They can’t prioritize what needs to be done quickly and what needs more time to be completed.  They want to rigidly follow rules to get things “right,” and this may mean being uncreative, because creativity involves making mistakes.  Even worse, they don’t learn from their mistakes, because if one occurs, it should be concealed like a nasty secret. So perfectionists are unable or reluctant to get crucial feedback that would keep them from repeating the same mistakes in the future.

Managing Perfectionism

A lot of perfectionists feel that they simply have high standards and that it is the rest of the world that falls short.  The goal in managing perfectionism is to find a way to leverage the desire for perfection toward quality without becoming trapped in a miasma of permanent dissatisfaction with everything created.  Managing a perfectionist requires reminding that person that additional changes made to a creation no longer makes it better but just different (and sometimes worse).

Here are some more tips for managing a perfectionist:

Do:

• Recognize there are both positives and negatives to having a perfectionist on the team
• Assign jobs that require great attention to detail without being too large in scope
• Explain to the perfectionist the behavior noticed and to try to increase his/her self-awareness
• Help perfectionists see that their behavior may limit their career

Don’t:

• Put a perfectionist in a role that is overly complex
• Don’t put a perfectionist in a role that requires managing other people because they may be overly critical
• Insist that perfectionists learn to mitigate their need for perfection
• Ask the perfectionist’s advice on how to deliver criticism so that they will receive it best

Quote of the Week

“I’ve been called many names like perfectionist, difficult and obsessive. I think it takes obsession, takes searching for the details, for any artist to be good.” Barbra Steisand

© 2012, Keren Peters-Atkinson. All rights reserved.