Never Being Wrong Isn’t Always Right: Strengthening Your Leadership By Abandoning Perfectionism

As we’ve explored in previous blogs, workplace culture is the synergy of shared values, belief systems, attitudes, and sensibilities among co-workers. And the key to a positive workplace culture very simply, is leadership. It is leadership that prioritizes inclusion as essential for avoiding dysfunction and maximizing employee productivity, well-being, and satisfaction. In this moment of unprecedented collective social consciousness, no conscious leader can ignore the increasingly pervasive call for organizations to establish inclusive cultures that realize broader imperatives around equity and provide a supportive environment for individual employees to work and thrive. But where do you even begin? What if such efforts make you personally uncomfortable and/or trigger reluctance? What if things feel confusing, awkward, overwhelming, or stressful along the way? And what if you stumble as you strive towards your ideal culture?

Resistance is the best starting point

These concerns are all perfectly natural, and the fact that you’re worried about them indicates enormous potential. As I’ve discovered in my research, change is impossible without resistance! That said, as an organizational leader, figuring out how to transform your culture into an inclusive one feels understandably tricky because cultures aren’t fixed or static and we can’t always predict what will happen when we introduce a significant change. DEI initiatives are not always popular and some employees will likely be unhappy and criticize you. Understandably, you may not consider yourself an expert in the field of inclusion so it might feel challenging to know where to begin. All this might spark internal resistance and cause delays or avoidance to moving ahead.

With expert guidance, you can learn to notice and describe the dynamics at play in your organization,. All cultures are constantly created and recreated, ever-evolving through a steady stream of interactions and interpersonal behaviors, some quite nuanced. Your work towards inclusion will always be ongoing, as you stay committed to enhancing
your culture.

Certain aspects of culture may be readily apparent, identifiable, and easy to articulate. And others, subtle undercurrents, difficult to discern. Inclusive leadership development entails taking a closer look to what cultural unspoken norms are operating behind the scenes and below the surface. Some of these can become quite entrenched, unless they are identified and lifted from the shadows of assumptions. The idea is to be open, alert and poised to address the unspoken norms that stand in the way of you moving forward.

Perfectionism, paradoxically, is fundamentally flawed

Ultimately, perfectionism will seriously undermine your inclusive leadership and impede your DEI initiatives, sabotaging your workplace culture and preventing your organization from achieving the very success it is supposed to reflect.

Perfectionism, a commonly accepted and often sought-after standard in USA professional workplace cultures, boils down to the notion that being wrong is unacceptable and we should never make mistakes. Our intuitions may tell us that rewarding flawless work and discouraging errors is desirable, justifiable, and motivating. Still, I want to suggest that an overemphasis on getting things right actually has the opposite effect: demoralizing and even harming employees by undercutting morale, perpetuating competition, judgment, blame, shame, and guilt, and contributing to burnout through expectations that are unattainable and therefore cannot possibly result in good performance outcomes. Perfectionism thwarts learning by imposing rigid rules over what experiences are considered permissible and which ones should be hidden from view. As Peter Senge articulates in The Fifth Discipline: The Art Practice of The Learning Organization, in a perfect learning environment all experiences are considered neutral and offer an opportunity to learn and innovate. Perfectionism gets in the way of inclusivity. Research shows that it is inherent to white supremacy culture in organizations. Employees of color tend to be held to higher standards than their white colleagues. In contrast, white workers are given more latitude to blunder and subsequently improve.

Leave perfection behind to reap benefits beyond inclusion

The truth is that, as aspiring and valuable it is, DEI work can at times be a hard and messy endeavor. Perfection may discourage us from taking on the status quo. DEI work requires reflection and identifying lessons learned that could improve practice. It also requires leaders to consider tough questions, grant grace around shortcomings, acknowledge limitations, and invite vulnerability and failures within ourselves and others. All these practices are simply incompatible with idealizing perfection. A challenging yet liberating aspect of inclusive leadership is that it pushes us to grapple with personal and professional imperfections. In one light, our imperfections are cast as flaws to be hidden. In another light, we see reflected the beauty of authentic humanity and its endless capacity for creativity and invention. From this light we harness the promise of opportunities for change and growth, and channel the creative power of diversity.

I invite you to reflect on the following questions:
o How is perfectionism at play in your organization?
o How does it stand in the way of inclusion?