The Perils Of Perfectionism In Organizations

Lisa Bradburn is a guest author, from The Org’s Panel of Expert Contributors. She is a Toronto, Canada-based Agile Coach and Gestalt Psychotherapist-In-Training. Lisa writes about organizational design, systems thinking, and the agile manifesto's value of people over process.

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"Perfectionism may be the ultimate self-defeating behavior. It turns people into slaves of success — but keeps them focused on failure, dooming them to a lifetime of doubt and depression. It also winds up undermining achievement in the modern world." — Hara Estroff Maran, Editor at Large, PsychologyToday.com

Perfectionism stifles creativity, innovation, and spontaneity. While the phenomenon is rising with the advent of helicopter or bulldozer parenting, the trait is also becoming more present in the corporate realm.

We will look at perfectionism through the lens of Julia, a Product Owner who suffers from debilitating tendencies, followed by examples of perfectionism's health and psychological effects. Next, we will explore the difference between perfectionism and excellence. And finally, the article concludes from the agile perspective and how metrics, precisely cycle time, can be used to reveal undesirable behaviors, leading the way for constructive dialog and the creation of an action plan between the Coach and the perfectionist.

A Common Scenario

The following situation illustrates how perfectionism in the workplace impacts the individual who embodies the tendencies and has a ripple effect across the organization.

Julia is a new Product Owner joining a financial services company on a forming Agile Delivery Team. She is eager to get started and show her capabilities, to prove to herself and Victor, her Director.

Once the Agile Team formally kicks off, a significant initiative becomes prioritized by the business. Julia is the designated Product Owner to perform the feature and story mapping exercise in partnership with the business and identify MVP deliverables.

Four weeks pass, and the features remain incomplete. Victor is concerned with the slow pace and doesn’t understand the hold-up. When he speaks with Julia, she confirms she is still gathering requirements and is not at a point where she can meet with the business to finalize mapping.

While Julia’s intentions are good, she seeks to understand and document every requirement by going down rabbit holes. Her bottom-up approach in capturing each fine detail is derailing the initiative, frustrating internal clients, and leaving Victor feeling he may have hired the wrong person for the Product Owner role.

After Julia’s video conference call with Victor, she rushed to the washroom and broke out in tears, unable to contain an overwhelming fear of failure. When she arrived at the following video call, her coworkers asked if she is OK and noticed she appeared rattled. Not wanting to show a sign of weakness, Julia blows off her emotions and claims she heard regretful news about a family member.

*What is the root cause of Julia’s behavior, and why is she struggling to ‘let go’? *

Perfectionism On The Rise

In a 2018 BBC Future article titled Toxic Perfectionism On The Rise, the piece concludes how perfectionist tendencies start in youth and are becoming more prevalent in society:

Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill’s recent meta-analysis of rates of perfectionism from 1989 to 2016, the first study to compare perfectionism across generations, found significant increases among more recent undergraduates in the US, UK and Canada. In other words, the average college student last year was much more likely to have perfectionistic tendencies than a student in the 1990s or early 2000s.

With perfectionism becoming more pervasive in our culture, decision-makers in the organizational hiring process face a more significant number of candidates with perfectionist personality traits — and may not be consciously aware of the difference between an achiever versus perfectionism.

Health, And Psychological Impacts From Perfectionism

A laundry list of potential stress-related health problems, psychological self-limiting, and social inhibiting behaviors develop from perfectionism. With any spectrum, the longer a person strives toward perfectionism, their conditions and manifestations may become more severe, resulting in graver impacts.

Physical Health

• Headaches
• Chest pains
• Exhaustion
• Impotence. Yes, you read correctly.

__Psychological & Mental Health __

• Depression and anxiety.
• A steady intake of negative emotions.
• Disengagement from challenging experiences.
• Inability to discover likes and dislikes.
• Hindrance to create an identity.
• Reduction in playfulness.
• Reduction in the assimilation of knowledge.
• Reduced creativity and innovation.
• Inward focus on personal performance and perpetual self-evaluation.
• Increased defensiveness of self.
• Lowered ability to take risks.
• Avoidance of negative evaluation from others.
• Continual concern over making a mistake.
• Interprets mistakes as failure.
• A belief that failure will result in a loss of respect from others.
• Placement of unrealistic high standards and expectations.
• Self-doubting one's ability to accomplish tasks.
• An emphasis on creating an order.

As you may note from the lengthy list, there are no real positive long-term benefits to perfectionism, especially as a person becomes more self-involved with the trait.

With Julia’s scenario, we see the signs of depression, self-doubt, and a desire to avoid negative evaluations from her peers. Her holding onto requirements indicates a reluctance to consider the task complete and demonstrates a personal intolerance for uncertainty, all of which causes an internal anxious state of being.

The Perfection Paradox

“There’s a difference between excellence and perfection,” explains Miriam Adderholdt, a Psychology Instructor at Davidson Community College in Lexington, North Carolina, and author of Perfectionism: What’s Bad About Being Too Good? Adderholdt continues:

"Excellence involves enjoying what you’re doing, feeling good about what you’ve learned, and developing confidence. Perfection involves feeling bad about a 98 and always finding mistakes no matter how well you’re doing. A child makes all As and one B. All it takes is a parent raising an eyebrow for the child to get the message."

Another way to consider perfectionism is to consume more and more of the self in defeating patterns. The constant worry about mistakes will cause individuals to undermine their performance. Canadian psychologists Gordon L. Flett and Paul L. Hewitt studied the debilitating effects of anxiety over perfect performance. They uncovered “the perfection paradox.”

Even though certain sports require athletes to achieve perfect performance outcomes, the tendency to be cognitively preoccupied with the attainment of perfection often undermines performance.

And when perfectionists devote an excessive amount of time and energy to the self, patterns of behavior are ultimately destructive, unhinging a persons’ psychic resources.

Impacts of Perfectionism on Organizations

Dr. J. Clayton Lafferty, a pioneer in the psychology of achievement and human effectiveness, conducted a study looking at the lifestyles and personalities of 9,211 managers and professionals. His conclusion: striving for perfection is likely to harm employees and companies alike. PsychologyToday.com reports:

Perfectionism has nothing to do with actually trying to perfect anything. It is about illusion, the desire to look good. Because they equate their self-worth with flawless performance, perfectionists often get hung up on meaningless details and spend more time on projects than is necessary. Ultimately, productivity suffers.

In the example with Julia, we see how she strives to show Victor her value as a new employee yet dives too far into the details.

Now that we understand perfectionism is on the rise, the personal impacts and ripple effect across organizations, how can Agile-centric companies identify when perfectionists are in their midst and pivot the culture away from the restrictive and unproductive behaviors?

An Agile Response To Combating Perfectionism

Agile Coaches are not therapists; however, the role entails listening to the system. And when perfectionist behaviors proliferate within a team or program, it is the Agilist’s role to expose organizational challenges to remove impediments and help the team iterate and progress.

Here are three ways Agile Coaches can identify perfectionism and help individuals understand the implications of their behaviors within an agile team.

Metrics Reveal Perfectionist Patterns

Let’s continue to use Julia as an example. If the Product Owner continues to hold onto features during the analysis phase, the cycle time, or how long a task accumulates from start to finish, will reveal a longer than usual shelf-life. And suppose Julia continues to analyze each feature for long periods. In that case, the pattern of behavior will become evident in metrics, especially when compared to similar, historical features that exhibit an acceptable range.

The challenge is that this type of detection usually requires an experienced Agile Coach who can listen to the system and identify the true nature of the perfectionist holding patterns.

__Develop Personal Awareness __

Here is an opportunity for an Agile Coach to meet with Julia in a one-on-one empathetic yet logical coaching conversation to reveal the metrics and ask powerful questions. The purpose of the discussion is to verify if Julia possesses enough self-awareness to understand how her actions impact herself, the work, and the team.

By highlighting the issue with data and facts, Julia may be persuaded to change her behavior. While Julia may not be ready to change ingrained personality traits, keep in mind that perfectionists do not want to be seen negatively by their peers and will do everything possible to change the conversation in a favorable light. The Coach's role is to expose what has come up in the system and develop a correct course of action.

Establish Accountability And New Behavioural Patterns

Once the impacts of Julia’s behavior are revealed through metrics and discussed in a safe, supportive environment with the Coach, the next step is to develop a mutually agreed-upon action plan. Regardless if Julia is ready to admit her challenges, (again agile coaching is not therapy), some level of personal accountability is required to shift behaviors.

Julia’s challenge is an opportunity for a Coach to provide mentorship with the intent of establishing a new mindset, one where she will understand it is OK not to know every finite detail upfront. And it is equally essential for the Coach to help Julia create patterns of work based on a drip effect, writing business user stories as the information becomes known and immediately freeing into the workflow. While the mentorship between the Coach and Julia may continue for a long duration, in time, Julia may be comforted when she sees the positive shift in metrics, and Victor, her Director, is pleased with her outcomes.

With the rise of perfectionism in today’s society, now is the time to raise consciousness regarding the interpersonal conflict many people face. There are more Julia’s out there than we realize. And when we bring our “whole selves” to work, we also bring our neurosis and self-defeating behaviors. All our attributes, including perfectionist tendencies, cause a ripple effect in organizations.

While Agile is not a cure-all for perfectionists like Julia, who arguably require more profound interpersonal work such as behavioral therapy, the system is set up to expose challenges in the workflow. Established metrics like cycle time provides insights into time spent on a specific track of work. The numbers don’t lie. Data opens the door for a Coach to have an honest and insightful conversation with the perfectionist and gain the trust required to encourage the person to take a risk and break the mold.

Resources

• www.psychologytoday.com/ca/articles/199505/perfectionism-impossible-dream
• www.psychologytoday.com/ca/articles/200803/pitfalls-perfectionism
• Perfectionism: What’s Bad About Being Too Good

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