10 August 2024
"Wait, Gene's team still hasn't delivered? What the heck is going on over there?" "Well, Gene doesn't think the code is quite 100% thread-safe yet, so he's insisting the team write some more tests while he's working with Purchasing to get a static analysis tool to make sure there's no deadlocks anywhere. You know how he is." The Perfectionist wants their team’s work to be perfect. Unfortunately, the only way they know is to handle everything personally. They insist on reviewing every code change and design document. All project decisions go through them. When coupled with the Perfectionist’s boss' expectations of them to present updates to upper management and strategize with other teams, it comes as no surprise that the Perfectionist's team is perpetually "almost done".
Context:
The Perfectionist is often promoted entirely because of their "attention to detail" and fierce pride in the quality of their work. In fact, this is often explicitly cited in their promotion announcement, which has the effect of bringing that Perfectionism to a hyper-elevated degree of importance.
Consequences:
The Perfectionist becomes a bottleneck. Because the Perfectionist cannot allow anything to leave the team without their fingerprints on it, all work must funnel through the Perfectionist, who quickly becomes swamped. The typical response of the Perfectionist is to put more hours in, making it even harder for any of the team to meet with them to get that necessary approval to move to the next stage. This leads to project delays and missed assignments.
Team morale (and composition) suffers. The Perfectionist's inability to allow anything to go out without their fingerprints on it leads to deep distrust and frustration. Not only does the Perfectionist's need for involvement
Team member promotion and career growth suffers. By trying to be a hero, the Perfectionist denies the team its own chance to shine, and for individual members of the team to see their own stock grow within the company.
Mitigation:
The root failure of the Perfectionist is that of trust, both in their team and in the organization around them. Because perfectionist tendencies are often rooted in fear, they often feel they not only have sufficient cause, but corporate insistence, on everything being routed through them.
If you work for the Perfectionist. First of all, kindly let go of the large baseball bat you have clenched in your fist--that's not going to help, much as it might feel good. Acknowledge your frustrations, they're legitimate and real, because working for a Perfectionist can be ridiculous at times. (You changed a comment, but not only are they insisting their need to review it, but then they demand you change the formatting of it?!? Really?!?)
Reassure yourself "it's not me". Take a look around and see how the Perfectionist is treating the rest of the team. If they're a Perfectionist, they'll be treating the rest of the team the exact same way, and you can take comfort in numbers here. Realizing that the perfectionism is their problem, and not yours, can go a long ways towards relaxing that frustration and angst.
Realize that sometimes they have a point. Perfectionists are to be hated, for sure, but sometimes... as much as we hate to admit it... they might... actually... have a point. It's a tough bit to swallow, but sometimes the work is actually better after they touch it. Take the opportunity to do the mature, professional thing, and learn what they did, why they did it, and how they knew that was the thing to do. Not only will your own skills improve for it, but the Perfectionist will see you ingesting their "wisdom" and that can create the first glimmerings of trust. They might actually spend less time on your stuff after a while.
If you are the Perfectionist. Time to channel your inner Elsa and learn to "let it go". Maybe in the beginning, when your team was small and new to the tasks, your presence at the center of everything was necessary, but it's time to change it up. Your insistence on being at the center of everything in the team is slowing everything down, and if you keep it up, you're either going to burn yourself out (to a crisp, most likely), your team is going to collectively quit on you, or you're going to find yourself being removed from the team and kicked back to an IC role (at best) or out of the company.
Start handing off little things. Trust is a big issue for you, we get it, but you have to start trusting somewhere, and the best way to do that is to hand off a little thing to the most senior person on the team. More importantly, set yourself limits on the first time you do this--when they submit the work, allow yourself only a few minutes to review it. The second time, allow yourself only a few seconds. The third time, don't review it at all. Wean yourself off of the need for control for that individual, and only get involved when they ask for it. (And they have to ask, unprompted--you don't get to hound them with "Are you SURE you don't want me to review it?" until they give in.)
Ask others to do the review. Is your need for review because you believe you need to review it, or because you don't want work going out without somebody reviewing it? If it's the latter, congratulations, you may not be a control freak after all! Get somebody on your team to start doing the reviews instead of you. For the next half-dozen reviews, do it "paired" with a senior member of your team, so you can train them as to what you're looking for when you review. Then for the next half-dozen, have them "take the driver's seat" and run the review while you stay silent. Then don't come to the review at all. Train up two or three people to do the reviews, and you'll find the work still gets reviewed, without you needing to be the one doing it.
Get off your high horse. A Perfectionist frequently assumes they need to be the one reviewing the work because they are better than the others at doing it. Stop that. You're not nearly as good or as smart as you think you are--and even if you are, a core part of your job now is to being open to new or different ways of doing things. It may have been true once that your way was the best way, but that was yesterday. Your team may actually have figured something out that's better than the way you'd have done it, and your reviews are just getting in the way.
If the Perfectionist works for you. The Perfectionist either doesn't trust their team, they don't trust the organization to allow room for mistakes, or they don't really want to be a maanger. Assuming the latter is not the case, you must begin a two-pronged assault on the Perfectionist's assessment of the trust in their world:
Create trust of the team. The Perfectionist needs to be wrestled out of the process, both figuratively and literally. In drastic situations, they may even have to be forced into taking PTO (and their network access taken away from them!) in order to let the team function without them. If the team they lead is even average, the team will have some successes to show for their time without the Perfectionist's input, which can serve as a first glimmer of realization that the team might not need the Perfectionist's input all the time.
Create trust in the organization. The Perfectionist also needs to know that if the team does make a mistake, heads won't roll. This is up to the Perfectionist's manager to both reassure and demonstrate this before, during, and after any sort of incident. (Of course, if the company does, in fact, subscribe to the idea that someone needs to be fired in the event they make a wrong decision, then the Perfectionist was right all along, and the problem clearly lies far above your pay grade.)
Managerial training. In some cases, the Perfectionist becomes this way because they are a Smartest-Engineer Manager and, in the face of indecision, are doubling-down on what they know well (technical work) and finding comfort in that, which itself is rewarded when the quality of the work is praised. When stressed, they double-down again, until they are insisting all work come through them. By deliberately removing the Perfectionist from the technical work by sending them to some managerial training, two things can happen: one, the team is permitted to work (for a brief, glorious moment!) without the Perfectionist's influence, and two, the Perfectionist begins to gain some tools they can use to help address the managerial side of the job, rather than feeling lost and confused.
Enforce delegation. The Perfectionist must begin to delegate tasks to others within their team. Technical work, such as code reviews and PR approvals, can often be given to the senior-most engineer or technologist on the team. Documentation reviews can be handed off to junior technical staff or even technical writers. Engineers can be given the freedom to make their own localized decisions. Even presentations to other teams can be handed off, freeing up the Perfectionist's time to focus on (a) meeting some of the strategic requests the boss asks for, (b) teaching moments when a decision turns out to be suboptimal, and (c) team member career growth, which will benefit from (and be encouraged by) the various tasks being delegated to them. As their manager, you must enforce the delegation of these tasks, and skip-level 1:1s with the Perfectionist's team members will help you keep the Perfectionist accountable to that delegation.