Business owners are swamped with advice on how to be successful. If you’re not careful, all this advice can drive you to a mindset of perfectionism. And instead of helping achieve your goals, striving for business perfection can sabotage productivity. Ask yourself if business perfectionism is causing any of these problems for your business, and take steps to get back on track.
When you’re a perfectionist, every detail has to be finalized to your satisfaction before moving forward. This slows down everything from marketing campaigns to product launches as you strive to iron out all potential problems. Even when you feel the project is ready, you could wind up falling behind the competition as you wait for exactly the right moment to reveal your work.
Creativity requires a flexibility absent from the perfectionist mindset. Thinking and working in a flexible way means being comfortable with potential setbacks and open to new ideas. If you’re constantly worried about getting something wrong, you run the risk of missing out on the unique concepts revealed in unstructured brainstorming sessions. Your team will sense your anxiety and will likely hold back suggestions they feel aren’t in line with your specific plan.
Details can be big distractions when you’re working on a business project. Instead of buckling down and doing what needs to be done to finish the biggest tasks, you get sidetracked by specifics unrelated to the larger goal of what you’re working on. Perfectionism is by nature a mindset in which nothing is ever truly “ready,” and you will often find yourself going back over the same tasks multiple times. Getting caught in this endless cycle of changes means fewer projects are completed and productivity suffers.
In pursuit of perfectionism for each job, it’s easy to feel as though you have to take care of everything yourself. Fear of someone else “doing something wrong” and threatening your perceived outcome of the project leads to micromanagement, causing undue stress for both you and your employees. The dynamic nature of collaboration is lost as your team realizes they have little or no say in or control over their work.
The fear and obsessive attitude characteristic of perfectionism has a way of being contagious. When you expect perfection from yourself, you impose the same ideals on your staff whether you realize it or not. Even the most creative employees will begin to feel as though their ideas aren’t quite good enough for your standards, and those who were already worried about their contributions are likely to feel threatened by your attitude.
Any of these problems of business perfectionism can make it difficult for your business to grow. Recognizing what you’re obsessing over and changing your approach to favor improvement over business perfection puts you and your employees in a mindset better suited for success. By identifying the problem, you’ll be in a better position to move forward and focus on growth.
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