Your manager obsessively checks every step of your work. Or takes a task away from you to do it themselves. Or never assigns you any significant responsibility in the first place. If so, you’re probably working for someone who is hard to please and reluctant to delegate: a perfectionist.
When not managed, perfectionism at work can turn into micromanagement. To executives, a manager who focuses on details and quality may appear ideal, but direct reports know the truth. Leaders who lean too much on perfectionism seem controlling and stubborn. This can leave employees feeling alienated, disempowered, and distrusted. At Hogan, we call this behaviour Diligent.
Signs of Perfectionism at Work
Diligent is one of 11 scales on the Hogan Development Survey (HDS), a personality assessment that measures potential derailers. A derailer is an unsustainable, maladaptive behavioural pattern. Derailment occurs when perfectionism crosses the line into micromanagement.
The HDS Diligent scale concerns a range of behaviour from relaxed, tolerant, and willing to delegate (low scores) to meticulous, picky, and critical (high scores). At their best, managers who have high Diligent scores may come across as organised, detail oriented, exact, and conscientious. They tend to set extremely high standards for themselves and others. At their worst, perfectionistic managers may seem critical and obsessive.
As individual contributors, people with high Diligent behaviour excel in attention to detail and perform at an elite level. They usually accomplish whatever they set out to achieve with excellence in goal setting and progress tracking. However, in leaders, this drive for quality can often come at the cost of relationships with their teams. When they publicly criticise employees’ performance (Miranda Priestly from The Devil Wears Prada) or harangue employees about report cover sheets (Bill Lumbergh from Office Space), their perfectionism at work has gone too far toward detail obsessed and nitpicky.
When Perfectionism Becomes a Problem
Holding high performance standards is a strength, but expecting constant perfection isn’t reasonable. Leaders with unmanaged Diligent behaviours appear rigid and inflexible about quality, details, schedules, timing, rules, and procedures. They embody the idiom about not seeing the forest for the trees: being so focused on details that they miss the broader context. This granular perspective can hold leaders back from succeeding in senior roles.
A Diligent leader’s unattainable standards can frustrate even the highest-performing team members. High Diligent behaviour can also cause a lack of ownership, growth, or development among team members. If a leader struggles to delegate, their team can lose essential experiential learning. A leader who just does the work themselves keeps employees from exercising and developing their skills. Employees may ultimately become disengaged because they simply expect their boss to redo their work. Over time, the Diligent leader might develop a reputation of being hard to work for.
How to Manage Micromanagement
Those who are prone to micromanagement should keep their commitment to quality but moderate their perfectionistic tendencies when needed.
Appropriate delegation is one of the best skills for a perfectionistic leader to practice. Trusting that others will do their work effectively, even if the work doesn’t align neatly with the leader’s personal preferences, is essential for team harmony. Delegation challenges leaders to shift their mindset from controlling processes to building capability among their team members.
Partnering with people who have complementary strengths can help mitigate perfectionism. A trusted colleague or coach, for instance, can interrupt unproductive behaviour or encourage meeting expectations instead of exceeding them. For accountability, leaders can communicate these development goals to the team and discuss responsibility adjustments and delegation.
Finally, redefining perfection will be important. As leaders advance, maintaining control over every detail is both detrimental and impossible. Senior and executive leaders must prioritise strategy rather than tactics and evaluate the results rather than the process. They must stop demanding the right way and learn to accept a good way.
Expert Contributor
Cecelia Gordon, PhD, is an industrial-organisational psychologist who works as a consultant on the talent solutions team at Hogan Assessments.
*This article originally appeared on Hogan Assessments.
