MC92 Manager Mindset: Perfectionism

how many takes should we do of this one how many i mean i can come in hot already i think perfectionism is a real worry for a manager it's something you've got to really combat but it's it's one of those classic examples of a strength that casts a big shadow i love that okay let's start with that strength that casts a big shadow listeners welcome welcome to the management cafe we are straight in there because uh straight in there with this one with perfectionism welcome to the management cafe we are running a series on managing mindsets where we're looking at different cognitive tendencies and and think about how to shift them if we want to self-reflect on them etc we're going to be here for about 20 minutes and we is as you've already heard tim and myself pilar or t what you were saying what did you say what the cast a big shadow it's a strength the cast a big shadow and so i've got a developing theory here which is as an individual contributor perfectionism is more strength than shadow i think when you're doing tasks if you want the task to be perfect and it's a you know it's a controllable task you know it's a beginning and end then wanting to do it really really well still it still can be kind of negative overall it's absolutely a good thing you know trying to do things with the best ability you want it all to be done perfectly great but as a manager once you start working with people it's much more fluid and i think it actually tilts the balance from mostly positive to you know it tilts more into the direction of problematic and i see this manifest in several ways you know if you hold people to impossible standards because you want everything to be perfect if you are constantly chasing a state that doesn't exist because a group of human beings is always in a fluid state there's always going to be ups and downs and even just life work there's always going to be problems and things gonna break and if you're chasing perfection it's an illusion and as an individual if you're trying to do your job perfectly in a situation which you fundamentally cannot control to that level then you're setting yourself up for unhappiness and and an impossible task so i think perfectionism as a mindset is something that is very difficult to carry into management i think that you can't hold that job too tightly just because uh what am i trying to say yeah i think if you manage by principles and you know like a bigger picture i said in my mind perfectionism is details it's trying to do everything is to try to have everything buttoned down you know all the little things should be in all the little boxes everything you know everything should be perfectly and tidy and i just don't think that's possible as a manager there's a few mindset mindset shifts i see there from being an individual contributor to a manager which i think is probably part of the issue why without a lot of support some great professionals climb up onto management and crash i love that that if you are used to if your tendency is perfect to be perfectionistic i don't know if that's if that's a word then you're used to task and to doing that task very very well and actually you need to drop that in a way it's not about lowering standards but about not wanting to not putting that as the first you know the priority and then probably you've come from having control over the pieces that make up your work yes yes technical i'm thinking maybe something quite technical and then actually you're getting to a place where the pieces that make up your work are people and that's really difficult so it's quite if you have a perfectionistic tendency it's i mean i think it could be valuable in that you probably expect the best and sometimes expecting the best out of people brings out the best in them you know in an ideal world but actually it can be very hard emotionally to be there and there's going to be a big friction there's a lot of friction between your ideal outcome your goal and reality like reality is always going to be at odds with where you want to be because it's never going to be perfect as you said particularly when when you've got people involved so i think it's really hard for people who have had this you know if you're at school being a perfectionist is a wonderful trick you don't think about doing an exam you can get 100 right you can literally get a perfect score if you're a perfectionist and so school university perfectionism will do you really well when you're starting off in a job it's probably pretty well defined and it's normally you know your first job is normally fairly task oriented where uh where perfectionism again is rewarded and and you can move forward for that so to then get to a level where suddenly it can have a downside it can be discombobulating and one of the things that i've seen is where if people won't i don't want to give up on it but but if they won't dial down on the perfectionism desire on the desire to you know you're saying it can be motivating for people you know you turn those high standards it can be but if you don't offset that with some pragmatism about what's really like what's realistic in this situation with these people in this circumstance you can lose people if you set them standards they can't achieve or if you grind them too hard trying to get to something which actually isn't worth it uh then it can run out and one of the other things that's coming to mind is that you know it's probably too literal interpretation of but if you're trying to get to 100 you know what's that like 80 20 rule you know 80 of it is easy last i remember the builder the guy who did the renovations on my house he was telling me like for them the last 10 you know 90 of the work will go really smoothly the last 10 is always the harvest and and worse and for them they've got to get to that end point so if you're chasing perfection and you're asking people to do that last time in your work context do you really need it yeah is it worth the effort it's going to take to try and squeeze out that extra you know 10 percent or 20 in order to have it meet your standard of perfect work what's the cost yeah and also just going back also to an earlier point that last bit it just might not be possible and when you're coming in like you say as someone who either by age or process or nature or whatever and you're not only hit by the reality talk about your pragmatism the reality of the people you're working with but also the context because you're also you've got limitations especially in middle management you have the limitations of the team that you're working with and also the limitations of what else is going on in the organization and what's possible and it might just be that it's not possible to get this perfect right now in this situation yeah yeah i've got an example i've been living through recently which is uh i'm on the board of an organization and the board has to be composed has to be composed of a certain number of people within the organization so someone was saying you know the board needs different people you know different skills and like in an ideal world sure but in the real world the board can only be made up of the people of a certain subset of people if those people don't have the skills you're not getting the skills on the board because like you can't do it which means you have to give up on that perfect board the perfect structure and you have to say well what's the reality which is a really hard thing for people to do yeah i was looking through the website of drama school the other day and i saw the board actually was made up of the classic the typical board you might expect in a non-for-profit but then they also have the staff member who was on the board and a student member who was on the board and i can see how again student you might not get the perfect board member from a student body because some people might not be interested you know who have the skills or who wonder oh good so i see how that is an organizational structure and you can't expect perfectionism just because the structure doesn't allow you to say well we can't find any suitable students so we're gonna have two staff members yeah well that's not possible you have a student and staff member yeah yeah well even even think about a really you know a really common example and that is you're managing a team that team is composed of only the people you've got right people you can hire who'll join your company who'll do the job and so you might wish that you know that joe is really well organized because in joe's role it would be great but joe's not really well organized yeah so what do you do you force them to be really well organized do you fire them and try and find someone else who's really well organized what if they don't have the other skills that joe has like what if the market doesn't provide you with that type of with your ideal candidate that happens all the time basically i mean i'd suggest that's the majority of it nobody's perfect right yeah so to an extent you can try and create the ideal situation you can try and move them more in the direction that you want to but there does have to be a point where you let it go and say okay i've done as much as i can or this is this is as good as it's going to get can i accept this situation or like what am i supposed to change it as opposed to constantly pushing things to be perfect if that makes sense yeah completely and there's also of course the question of resources sometimes it's not possible because we don't have the resources right now so what about because because someone who's not a perfectionist at all i'm thinking what about the opposite same same which is not being perfectionist uh not having any of those sentences uh you know can also it's great it's very relaxed as in because it's less stress 100 that's fantastic is there a downside but it does i mean i i know from the wasted potential the wasted potential yeah i mean i've done things that i thought were just like well yeah we could work hard and make it more perfect but you know what we're just going to do it and actually i've probably regretted it later that i didn't yeah because i could see i'm not perfect i can see when things can be better and also sometimes actually it's not good enough to be a perfectionist if you don't know how to solve it because i've been in situations like that where i've been doing something that i was in charge of the final thing and whether it was on my own or with other people i knew that it wasn't as good as it could be and it's not even perfect but as good as it could be and i just didn't know how to solve it that's not a very nice place to be in actually it just happens but i think if you give yourself the grace to just deal with it this is it right because and sometimes you just have to take the loss uh and that i think is one of the issues with perfectionism in my mind it's a chasing a well the way i most commonly see it at work is it's a shorter term mindset you know i might be discrediting perfectionism because i think if you've got a long-term you know a long-term strategic goal trying to get to a future that's like that can be super positive and then if you're really strategic and pragmatic about how you get there but i think that could be a huge positive but i've generally seen it as overdoing the little things and missing the chance to move forward and move on to the bigger things but the counter to it is that to your point you don't do enough or you accept mediocrity which is not good and in fact having said that like i don't become perfectionist by any stretch no one would suggest that but there are some tasks where if i feel that perfection is attainable it's very pleasurable to try to get it and so maybe that's part of it is to realistically say it is perfection possible here because you can spend a lot of effort getting there and it can be super rewarding if you actually do you know like think about something where you actually oh no oh he's gone and this is a bit where our coffee disappeared into the ether of the internet and tim's internet dropped so we will pick up as best as we can listeners we hope you're still with us and sipping your coffee or tea or chai latte or hot chocolate that's weird i don't know what happened the wi-fi has totally gone down at home i can have to reboot it i guess yeah i could see i saw you starting to look at things and a few little things popped up oh there's a delay it's quite a delay hold on let me try turning the camera off is that better can you hear me yes i can hear you oh there's a long delay i can hear you but i don't know if there's a delay if i say one two three four five i don't think you how much of a delay do you think there is a delay do i think there is about three seconds not easy to work with how far were we in that episode i think we could wrap up yeah let's do that then whatever you were saying will have been recorded i hope so i can't remember what it was i couldn't hear you let's talk about perfectionism that bit i know i know i know it had to happen in the one okay if we go wrap up i think i'd be curious for people who could we consider themselves to be perfectionists have they found that it's helped or hindered them as a manager like how they managed to adjust to that because i think for you and i as non-perfectionists i find it easy to see the shadow side of it but i wonder whether whether we're missing more of the strength there yeah that would be really useful someone who who is yes i think i agree so listeners if you have perfectionistic tendencies it would be great to hear from you especially how you've navigated working with people who by nature are not perfect and what you've done about it and how you balance that building the relationships i think in the team with that perfectionism uh so uh management cafe podcast gmail.com managementcafepodcast.com for your contact form this episode is by far it's far from perfect but we're not going to re-record we'll leave what we have we will we've got at the moment we've got quite a delay we leave what we have here because the important thing is that we showed up today so listeners coffee is over for us now it's over to you uh i just got it you said it happened in this episode i just realized you're talking about perfectionism and that's a minute so you said it thank you for joining us for this episode of management cafe you've been listening to tim burgess and pilar ortiz remember to subscribe to the show on whatever podcast art you use and if you want to get in touch you can do so over at managementcafepodcast.com coffee's over for us now it's over to you thank you for listening you