Why Striving for Perfection May Hurt Your Contracting Business More Than It Helps

October 20, 2020
Category: Achieve Consistent Business Success,Be a Highly Effective Owner,Management

Most owners that I know are perfectionists, or at least they have strong perfectionist tendencies. Does that describe you too?

Perfection is highly valued in America, and we’ve been trained at school, at work, through our parents, and through the media to always strive for perfection. And in fact, your business wouldn’t be successful if you weren’t aiming for perfection. Falling too far short of perfection can hurt your sales, your profit, and reduce customer satisfaction and retention. And that’s a recipe for failure. 

So, being a perfectionist is a great thing, right? Well…not exactly. 

In reality, being a perfectionist can hurt your business as much as it helps. I think that Winston Churchill did a great job of summing up the problem with perfection when he said that “Perfection is the enemy of progress.”  

I want to share with you three common ways that being a perfectionist and pursuing perfection may be hurting the progress in your business and what you can do instead to help move your business forward:

• Perfection can slow implementation or stop it altogether.

The Problem: 

Many perfectionist owners want everything to be perfect before implementing important projects such as launching a new service, putting a new procedure into effect, kicking off a new training program etc. But, waiting for everything to be perfect can significantly slow down the speed of implementation. And sometimes, the thought of getting every i dotted and t crossed can be so intimidating that perfectionism actually stops some projects from ever getting started in the first place! That’s hardly a recipe for progress!

Try this instead: 

There’s a technique from the corporate world called fast prototyping that’s the antidote to the perfection problem. With fast prototyping, you rapidly develop your new ideas iteratively, starting with a rough, very imperfect, “back of the envelope” concept. You then gather quick feedback, revise the concept, gather more feedback, revise, etc.

Mark Twain once said, “Continuous improvement is better than delayed perfection,” and that’s what fast prototyping is all about. Fast prototyping will enable you to quickly develop your ideas to the point where they’re not perfect, but good enough to implement. Once implemented, you can continuously improve them by gathering additional feedback and revising.

• Wanting perfection can hurt your employees’ development. 

The problem: 

I’ve lost count of the number of times that I’ve heard owners say, “I’m a perfectionist, and I’m frustrated because my employees can’t perform up to my high standards!” You’ve never said (or thought) anything like that, have you? No, not you! 

And while it’s good to have high standards, your perfectionist tendencies can hurt your business in two important ways:

• First, you may let potentially good employees go (or they may quit) because they didn’t achieve your high, perfectionist standards fast enough. I have a relatively new client, for example, who has burned through four Operations Managers over the last few years. So, I asked his team what role the owner played in these Operations Managers’ “failing.” Their answer was clear: the owner has unrealistically high expectations of new Ops Managers from day one. When these new Ops Managers don’t perform to the owner’s expectations, the owner loses confidence in them and eventually lets them go. 
• Second, expecting perfection also hurts your effectiveness as an owner. Being a perfectionist makes it hard for you to let go of micromanaging and give your team the independence to do their jobs. As a result, you end up doing your teams’ work, solving their problems, and making decisions that they’re supposed to make, so you don’t get your job done. And because you’re doing their work, you’re not making them better. You’re making them more dependent on you!

Try this instead:
Focus on your employees’ progress and positives, not just problems and perfection. Give them the time and support to develop and be great. It can take several months for field employees to reach a high-performance level and up to a year for your managers. One of my clients, for example, created a 90-day orientation and training program for his field employees, which included weekly feedback, ongoing coaching and training, and formal reviews at 30, 60, and 90 days. The result was that his field employee performance and retention increased dramatically. 

The same extended development process will also work for your managers. I’ve seen remarkable progress over 6 to 12 months in developing shaky managers who were at risk of being fired into independent, solid performers by consistently giving them training, coaching feedback, accountability. And as these managers improved, the owners gradually let go of doing their managers’ work, which gave the owners more time to get their work done. And everyone lived happily ever after! 

The key: Ditch perfectionism and focus on consistent employee development and progress instead. 

• Being a perfectionist can make you a less effective leader. 

The problem: 

Many owners believe that to be an effective leader, they need to show up as bulletproof, fully in control, and have answers to every problem. 

The problem is that trying to show up as perfect makes you less approachable. And it makes your employees scared to tell you that they’re struggling and need help – that they’re drowning in work and can’t keep up, that they’re dealing with a problem that they don’t know how to handle or that they just don’t feel well trained in some aspect of their job.

It’s all about self-protection. They fear that their job might be at risk if they don’t live up to your perfectionist expectations. So, they hide their problems and try to appear bulletproof like you, which hurts your business rather than helping it. And this problem often gets worse as you move up your org chart. 

Try this instead:

Be transparent. Share some of your imperfections and struggles. Let your team know that you’ve had plenty of struggles and have made plenty of mistakes (and still do). This will reduce their stress and make it more likely that they’ll ask for help when they need it. It can also be very motivational for your team to see how you were able to overcome your problems. It’ll give them confidence that they can overcome their problems too.

I’m not suggesting here that you lower your standards and settle for mediocre performance. I am suggesting that you acknowledge to your team that nobody’s perfect (including you) and that it’s ok to ask for help when they have a problem.  By expecting consistent performance improvement from your team instead of perfection, you’ll get better results.

The bottom line: 

Being a perfectionist and focusing on perfection is not the perfect approach for your business. The pursuit of perfection causes a lot of stress for you and your team, and, as I hope you’ve learned in this article, demanding perfection can hold your business back. 

What I’d like you to do instead is change your mindset and approach and accept that imperfection is a natural part of your business. Focus your energy on continuous improvement and continuous progress instead.

For homework:

Yes, I’m a coach, and coaches give homework! Please:

1. Admit that you’re a perfectionist or have strong perfectionist tendencies. Admitting that you have a problem is always the first step!
2. Re-read the three problems with perfection that I’ve outlined here and implement at least one of the solutions.

By giving up on perfection, you’ll end up with a more perfect business!

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