Perfectionism in Leadership: Why Waiting Until It's Perfect Costs You

...and why I launched an imperfect system on purpose

We built something recently that I would have refused to launch a few years ago.

Many of our providers had gone to talks learning about expanding scope of practice within teams to help cope with the backlog within our clinical environments. We had ideas around improving preventative care measures that didn’t rely solely on physicians. To implement these ideas, we had to build the pathways that our nurses and medical office assistants would follow. Every step, every decision point, mapped out.

We asked other clinics in similar environments how they did it, and planned to model off of what they did. Their pathways were a start, but they weren't perfect. I knew they weren't perfect when we launched them and that there were going to be details that we missed. But we launched them anyway.

Here is what happened.

Once real people started using the pathways, we found problems I could never have seen on paper. The kind of thing that only shows up when a workflow meets an actual clinic on an actual Tuesday, with real patients and real interruptions and all the small frictions you cannot predict from a desk. So we changed them. Then we changed them again. Each version was better than the last, shaped by what we could only learn by doing. From a quality improvement perspective, it was utilizing the PDSA cycle without truly naming it. We planned something, did it, gained feedback on it, then did something different.

The version we use now is far more powerful than anything I could have designed alone in my office, trying to get it flawless before anyone saw it. It got good precisely because we let it be imperfect first.

I want to sit with that for a moment, because I know how hard it is to do.

I have spent a good part of my life believing the thing had to be right before it could be seen. That launching something with kinks in it was the same as admitting I was not good enough. That the safest move was always to keep polishing, keep refining, keep it in my office where nothing could go wrong and no one could find the flaw. If you lead, and if you have ever been the person everyone assumes has it handled, you may know the feeling. The fear is not really about the work. It is about being found out.

But here is what the project reminded me. Nothing gets better sitting in your office. It gets better in the world, in motion, once it is real and once other people are in it with you. The imperfect version that ships and adapts will always beat the perfect version that never leaves your head, because the perfect version does not exist. It was never going to. You were just going to keep it safe until you ran out of time or someone else beat you do it.

Perfectionism does not usually look like failure.

It looks like caution. It looks like responsibility. It looks like one more revision, one more week, one more check before you are ready. That is what makes it so hard to see, and so expensive. It quietly costs you the projects you never start, the ideas you sit on until someone else has them, the version of your leadership that only exists on the far side of starting.

The way out is not to lower your standards. It is to move your standards to where they can actually be met, which is out in the open, in practice, in the doing. You launch the thing knowing you will change it. You let real life show you what you could not have known. And you find, almost every time, that it was the starting, not the perfecting, that made it good.

This is a lot of what we work on when I take a group of women leaders to the coast of Italy. Not in a chair, grinding a problem down until it gleams. Out walking, in motion, learning to launch the thought before it is finished and let it change as we go. It turns out the same thing that is true for a clinical pathway is true for a leader. You do not become who you are through perfectionism. You become it by starting somewhere and taking a leap of faith.

If that is something you want to do differently, you can read about the retreat here.