The Perfectionist Leader: When High Standards Become The Problem

Reading time: 7 minutes

Sarah had extraordinary taste. It was uncanny.

She could look at a presentation and immediately see what was wrong. Though it’d take me a few run-throughs, Sarah could quickly spot an argument that didn’t address the main objections, or a data point that was technically accurate but misleading.

She was usually right. She had high standards and was elevating our professionalism.

She was also making her team miserable.

She wasn’t doing it deliberately – she wasn’t a difficult or unreasonable person. She just couldn’t allow imperfect work.

Every deliverable had to go through her and everything came back with comments. Every version her team members created was close but not quite right.

Within about 18 months, her people stopped trying to make their first drafts anything decent. After all, why bother? Sarah was going to rewrite it anyway.

That’s the perfectionist leader paradox. The standard that they believe produces great work ends up producing the exact opposite.

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What Perfectionism Looks Like From the Outside

From the perfectionist leader’s perspective, perfectionism feels like caring. It’s their way of taking the work seriously.

From the outside, it looks a lot different.

If you’re a perfectionist leader, your team will view you as a leader who is rarely satisfied with their work. When you always give them notes on how to improve whatever they do, you’re really just setting a bar and raising it every time they get close.

Over time, your people will learn that the bar is a moving target and they’ll stop trying to clear the bar. In fact, clearing the bar won’t even be their goal anymore – it will be simply to avoid the feedback. Instead of trying to create the best work, they’ll focus on trying to get the least amount of feedback. That means they’ll bring things to you earlier, so you can tell them what to do before they’ve invested too much of their time.

They stop taking risks because you don’t reward risks.

In other words, the perfectionist leader wants excellence, but all you’ll get in the end is compliance.

[Spoiler Alert: once you get frustrated with compliance, you’re going to start having difficulty delegating. That’s the pattern]

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The Real Problem With Being a Perfectionist Leader

Here’s the thing about perfectionism that nobody wants to say directly.

It’s rarely about quality. In a way, perfection is not the purpose.

If it were about quality, there would be standards. Because quality can be measured against specific criteria. And specific criteria means people should know when something is good enough, or when it genuinely needs more work.

Perfectionism doesn’t work like that.

Perfectionism is a moving target. It protects the leader from the discomfort of releasing something that might fail. Or that might be judged.

Because if it fails, that failure may reflect on you. So you need to maintain full control to save your perfectionist identity.

The perfectionist leader isn’t managing the quality of the work, their managing their anxiety that comes with being associated with work that isn’t perfect.

I’ve seen this pattern play out with a lot of leaders at every level, across multiple industries. There’s the CMO who rewrites every piece of copy before it goes live. Or the VP who can’t approve a strategy until they’ve over-examined every assumption.

I also worked with a CEO who continued to tweak the decks in the minutes before a meeting. It was mind-numbing for everyone else. Because the leader claims they’re protecting quality, but they’re really just protecting themselves from being vulnerable (which is often tied to conflict avoidance in leadership.)

I’m not trying to slam you or any perfectionist leader. I’m just trying to uncover the hidden pattern of what it means to struggle with perfectionism.

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What the Perfectionist Leader Costs the Team

The costs of perfectionist leadership are much more than most leaders realize. Here’s why:

Speed. Perfect takes longer than good. In most organizations, “good” shipped on time is always better than “perfect” shipped too late. The perfectionist leader usually becomes the bottleneck, especially if they are victim to a fear of failure. Everything waits for them as their need for decisions pile up. And that’s bad.

Professional development. People learn by doing and by failing and by understanding why they failed and what they can do better next time. But a perfectionist leader who doesn’t know how to stop micromanaging intervenes before the employee even has an opportunity to fail. That means there’s little learning and professional growth amongst the team. Instead, the team stays dependent on the leader’s judgment – they’re not allowed to develop their own and, in the end, the underperforming employee never gets a chance to shine.

Creativity. Perfectionism and creativity are an incompatible pair. Creativity requires the freedom to produce things that don’t quite work yet. It requires rough ideas and experiments that might fail. That’s the bane of a perfectionist’s existence. They’ll shut that down faster than a health inspector at an asbestos-filled restaurant. By doing that, the team learns that imperfect attempts are not allowed – and creativity is not encouraged.

Trust. When a leader consistently changes what their team produces, the message – regardless of their intent – is, “I don’t trust your judgment.” Over time, the team stops exercising judgment at all and waits to be told what to do. The leader then wonders why they have to be so involved in everything.

In other words, the perfectionist leader creates the very problems they’re trying to prevent.
That’s their trap.
And most of them don’t see it.

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The Question That Changes Everything

I ask perfectionist leaders a question that they almost always find uncomfortable:

What’s the negative impact that will happen if this goes out at 90% instead of 100%?
How would things change with the customer, the project, or the business?

In most cases, when they actually think it through, the answer is some version of: nothing will be impacted.

The 10% gap they’re working incessantly to close rarely changes the result in any meaningful way. The presentation would still have landed the same way. The strategy would still have worked. The product would still have shipped and been received well.

Instead, the time, the team morale, and the creative energy almost always cost more than perfectionism is worth.

The perfectionist leader knows this, at some level. But when they release something that’s imperfect, they can feel their discomfort immediately. Meanwhile, the costs of perfectionism are slow to appear. That’s how the human brain works.

The good news is that there’s hope. Once you accept that you’re a perfectionist leader, you can find a way out of it.

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How a Perfectionist Leader Starts to Change

Contrary to popular belief, the path out of perfectionist leadership isn’t about lowering your standards. Your standards might actually be important to the company.

The thing to change is how you use those standards.

The perfectionist leader who can break through this does a few specific things differently.

  • They get clear on what actually requires their standard and what doesn’t (and they’re honest with themselves that most things do not require their standard.)
  • They separate “this is how I would have done it” from “this is genuinely not good enough,” because those are two different things. Confusing them demoralizes others.
  • They learn to ask a question first: What does this person need to grow, and is my commentary about helping them or satisfying me?

Most of the time, the perfectionism is self-serving. It’s about reducing anxiety and giving psychological safety.

A perfectionist leader who can clearly understand that is already most of the way to changing it. Awareness is the hardest part. Everything after that is practice.

If you recognize the perfectionist pattern in yourself and want to understand what’s driving it – and what to do differently – the Leadership Diagnostic Workshop is built exactly for this. Perfectionism shows up in almost every cohort. It always looks slightly different with every person, but the realization is game changing.

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Jeff Matlow is a leadership coach, mentor and 3x entrepreneur who helps senior leaders spot the unconscious patterns keeping their teams dependent on them – then redesign the environment so everyone can actually perform. He’s spent 25+ years working with leaders at Disney, Porsche, Nestlé, and hundreds of high-growth companies. Think Ted Lasso meets Brené Brown meets a Navy SEAL. Learn more about working with Jeff or subscribe to The Best Leadership Newsletter Ever.