3 Tips for Applying Equity Strategies to a Hybrid Workplace

With the ever-changing landscape of our employee workspace, creating equity within the workplace is more than a popular topic or initiative, it’s a necessity. Equity can have a lasting impact on an organization like increasing retention, internal promotions, and fostering dedication from employees to their jobs and their company for the long haul.

With the new challenges remote and hybrid employees are currently facing, many employees don’t feel that they are getting the treatment they deserve and are leaving their jobs at record numbers. So, how can we create a more stable and predictable workplace for our employees—one that aligns with the core values of a company, but also with the overall business goals? Managers must learn to effectively manage the dual zone: the hybrid and remote workforce.

It’s not an easy task, especially when, whether we like to admit it or not, remote workers face a greater challenge in avoiding biased perceptions from co-workers and managers simply because of the nature of their unsupervised workspace. This is something we must intentionally address and work to fix within our own spheres of influence.

Here’s 3 tips to ensure your workplace is an equitable one:

1. Use Duties Rather Than Employees as Your Guide

Companies who once operated solely in person now have the difficult task of deciding which roles can be fully remote and which roles require a hybrid work format. The best way to avoid bias in this decision-making process is to first look at the job description of each role. Then you can determine which tasks within that job description are better suited for in-person work versus remote work. When you make it about the tasks rather than the individual contributor, previous judgments about that employee are less likely to cloud your judgement.

What do we mean by clouding your judgement?

Well, naturally, a star employee may be trusted to work remotely more than an average performer, or managers may tend to want to connect more in person with staff who are easier to manage. These biases, often gone unnoticed, can easily creep into the decision-making process when determining which kind of work format an employee will follow.

Tip Impact: When we are intentional about mitigating biases up front, employees are more likely to feel a sense of autonomy and predictability in their work life and the decisions around their workspace (i.e., remote or hybrid) are a result of fair assessment.

2. Remote Employees Need Impromptu Touchpoints Too!

Leaders are responsible for and should be mindful of granting equal access to their remote and hybrid staff. Those who are fully remote consequently don’t get the privilege of natural, impromptu relationship-building moments. Things like lunch breaks, hallway conversations, and the three minutes before a meeting starts all serve to build connections between coworkers and managers that lead to greater trust and a healthy and cohesive team.

How is this possible with remote employees?

If you have remote employees, you’ll need to be more intentional about relationship building time to simulate an in-person experience. These relationship building interactions may need to be inserted into your schedule to ensure they take place. You can build time at the beginning or at the end of meetings for people to share personal moments like binged watch shows, recent sporting or outdoor events, funny family or pet moments, etc. These moments can strengthen a sense of connection and reduce the feeling of isolation by your remote employees.

Tip Impact: These micro-relational deposits can add up to big gains over time. When employees feel a greater sense of trust with their manager, constructive feedback is received more openly. As an extra bonus, employees who have good working relationships with their manager are more likely to feel comfortable communicating their needs, which are important to understand especially since remote and hybrid employee needs are often different.

3. Visibility…A Primary Ingredient for Equitable Opportunities

Your remote and hybrid employees should always receive the same development and promotion opportunities, but there are challenges fully remote employees face in receiving a fair shot. Visibility is the main culprit in the disproportionate promotional opportunities remote employees tend to receive. Oftentimes, remote employees’ work goes unnoticed because their daily efforts go unseen. And though it’s not intentional, unlike hybrid employees, it can be harder for them to gain access to impromptu development opportunities.

How do I level the playing field?

Leaders must find ways to maintain high visibility of remote employees daily. One way is to be intentional about acknowledging their successes in group meetings and publicly recognizing notable contributions they make. When you praise employees out loud, coworkers and managers are more likely to remember their efforts and accomplishments.

Tip Impact: The clearer the path to success, the more committed employees will be. They’ll know that their goals are being acknowledged and will be able to see their future with the company and how to achieve it.

The three tips described above are some of the essential ingredients needed to be successful in cultivating an equitable workplace for both your hybrid and remote employees. If you, as a leader, can set-up your employees for success by being agile and having the necessary resources to meet the individual contributor needs, your teams will be successful regardless of the workplace they inhabit.

How To Create Psychological Safety In A Hybrid Work World

Originally published in Forbes

Creating psychological safety is a foundational step in cultivating a high-performing team culture. Dr. Amy Edmondson, a pioneer of the concept of psychological safety, characterizes this term as a “climate of openness” where team members feel comfortable sharing ideas, admitting mistakes and challenging the status quo. When this kind of safety exists in the workplace, you can imagine that there is room for growth, for innovation and for teams to thrive collaboratively.

In a hybrid work environment, there are clear challenges to creating psychological safety. Hybrid teams don’t have the direct access to one another that in-person teams do. Without as much day-to-day communication, opportunity for calibration and relational comfortability, psychological safety can be harder to build. If you want to foster an innovative, high-performing culture within a part virtual, part in-person team that’s threatened by distance and abnormal communication patterns, you have to be proactive.

Below are four ways leaders can create psychological safety in a hybrid work environment.

1. Create socialization opportunities.

To foster an environment of trust and safety in the hybrid workspace, you must be purposeful about socialization by providing intentional opportunities for your team members to be heard and seen for who they are as people.

In person, you have the opportunity for quick hallway conversations, personal catch-ups in the elevator and other unplanned, yet relationship-fostering interactions. The lack of these human-to-human interactions in a hybrid environment can create a disconnect between people, sabotaging their ability to feel safe with one another.

To create space for these kinds of connections, try:

• Baking in five extra minutes into each hybrid team meeting for catching up

• Implementing regular out-of-work hangouts such as happy hours or team dinners

• Intentionally checking in on remote (and in-person) team members just to see how they are doing

Simply providing an opportunity for your team members to be heard and seen can positively contribute to the collective sense of psychological safety.

2. Communicate effectively.

To promote psychological safety, communication must be a top priority. Only when employees feel heard and included will they feel confident enough to speak up, ask questions and provide valuable knowledge that can propel performance forward.

For remote workers, communication can be especially challenging and with the physical disconnect, they may even experience feelings of paranoia. They may start to read into things that aren’t there or feel that they aren’t doing well enough — that their job may be at risk. There are a few ways to combat this hybrid environment communication challenge. Try:

• Setting clear expectations for timelines, goals and benchmarks for remote and in-person employees alike

• Offering regular employee feedback (positive and negative) to cultivate a sense of security and confidence

• Conducting team calibration by doing regular project check-ins to help eliminate the chance of miscommunication and allow for course correction on the spot

3. Model receptivity to feedback.

Feedback can be a touchy subject, especially for those you don’t often see in person. Working remotely may make receiving feedback from one’s leader seem like a bigger deal than it actually is. To normalize receiving feedback, it should first and foremost be modeled by leaders.

As a leader, recognizing when you’ve made a mistake, asking for productive feedback and implementing that feedback will go a long way in showing your team that you’re serious about creating psychological safety. Because psychological safety is largely about how people are treated when things go wrong, taking responsibility for your own mistakes and showing that it’s acceptable to do so will set the expectation for how your team should react to their own mistakes. This can dismantle the fear of making mistakes and normalize accepting feedback.

4. Practice your awareness.

When leaders are under too much pressure, this threat can trigger the fight or flight reflex resulting in poorly reacting to situations, assigning blame or transferring stress to others. If these responses are occurring frequently, psychological safety cannot thrive. Leaders must be able to slow down enough to become aware of how their stress may be entering a conversation and how their team’s stress is being communicated.

When you’re talking to an employee, pay attention to the effects of your actions, words and non-verbal cues. Observe their body language to determine in the moment if what you are saying is being well received. This may be harder to do with remote employees, but doing regular video check-ins rather than phone calls can help you read their reactions much better.

The challenging part about creating a psychologically safe work environment is that once it exists, it needs to be actively maintained, otherwise it will be short-lived. That’s why, in order to maintain psychological safety in a hybrid work environment, you need to recognize and own when there has been a breach in psychological safety. Seek to understand and apologize for any part you may have played in violating it, and actively work to reestablish it. It won’t be a perfect journey but being open and honest along the way will only reinforce your desire to create a safe environment for your hybrid team.

Activating Resilient Leadership

Resilience is not about being untouched by adversity
or unruffled by difficulties. It’s to play an active role
in how difficulty transforms you.
Kelly McGonigal

Leaders have always been resilient

Especially in these times of a pandemic, seismic cultural shifts and global volatility. Leaders need an extra strong dose of this capability to continue to lead themselves and their organizations. I find guidance from Joshua Cooper Ramo who predicted this kind of environment when he wrote his book, The Age of the Unthinkable in 2009. He offered some important perspectives from history that encourage us to engage in being resilient enough to take more risks to uncover more opportunity and follow the pattern of winners who have always engaged in more change.

How can we get ready for more complexity and adaptation?

We are living examples of our ability to recover from adversity and pursue our goals despite challenges. Let’s imagine, for a moment, that we are more resilient than we give ourselves credit for. Perhaps this happens because we have a natural instinct to focus on problems instead of what is working. Our brains are hardwired to pay attention to differences in our environment and therefore, we experience disruption as a threat.

Resilient leaders say “Yes” to 5 Questions

In my workshops I often ask people to think about a time in their lives when they faced adversity and restored their resilience. Over many years a shared pattern has emerged where they describe actions that affirm each of these following questions.

Did you make sense of what was happening in a meaningful way?
Did you go beyond your limits?
Did you take direct action on things that you could control?
Did you calm your body and mind?
Did you feel connected to and supported by others?

Most often they indicate that a number of the above responses were taking place, often at different levels of awareness and engagement. This exercise validates a “map” of five mindsets/practices/approaches that have been shown by research on people who have sustained their courage and stamina to regain their lives and those that thrive through the life cycle.

The 5 C’s

I represent the 5 capabilities of resilience as the map at the top of this post. Viewing this as Resilience Land encourages the spirit of adventure and complexity in navigating complex environments. Each of the 5 C’s represents a territory with its own challenges and set of approaches. All of these competencies are important to sustaining resilience as a person, team member and leader.

Coherence, Control, Centered, Challenge, Connection

The Discovery of Resilience Land

My research began with a curiosity to explore what primary care physicians do to overcome burnout and stress in high demand environments. I drew on prior research on hardiness, burnout and stress prevention and risk reduction. The focus initially was on enhancing stress management skills and practices and buffering individuals to cope more creatively with high demand situations. All that time the environmental conditions/structures in which they worked was not actively considered to be involved or a target of change.

As my experience with organizations grew it became clear to me that the interaction between the environment (culture, practices, policies, leadership) and the levels of stress in the professionals was connected. My practice shifted from “buffering” the individuals to engaging more systematically with leaders to shift the working conditions/culture as a vital source for change.

5 C’s serve as a Personal and Organizational Compass

Over the years these 5 C’s have served as a useful framework for leaders to increase their personal capacity and assess and prioritize ways to navigate strategic redirection and enhance renewal and transformation for their teams and organizations.

Applications for Individual Resilience

Resilience can be built, like a muscle, overtime with practice, attention and feedback. Individual leaders can use the 5 elements as a framework to articulate developmental areas and acknowledge unidentified capacities.
Applications for Resilient Leadership

Each of the 5 elements that support individual resilience can be used to create the conditions for teams and organizations to thrive. They give guidance for balancing and buffering areas that are impacted by turbulence and provide a way for the leader to focus on actions that will provide renewal and resilience.
Coherence-Understand your strengths and acknowledge what you have already accomplished. Own your history. Begin to create your future capabilities. Identify milestones that will indicate success and satisfaction for you. Reframe past and current experiences as opportunities for growth and purpose fulfillment.
Coherence– Talk about the future in a way that makes sense and has a way for everyone to participate. Describe what you see ahead, share milestones to indicate what is worth working toward. Give others the time to make sense of what is happening. Affirm core values connecting to past performance. Engage in redefining what success and satisfaction would look like, reset expectations.
Control– Identify areas that you can and can’t control, experiment with exploring possibilities for influence. Reestablish patterns that help you create momentum and a sense of accomplishment. Make choices where you can and participate to explore options. Deepen your self-care practices.
Control– Talk about what has not changed, reestablish patterns, rhythms, and workplace rituals. Identify what you know, what are the opportunities for choice, involvement and participation. Help to focus on what can be done now, with the choices available. Identify what they can count on you for.
Challenge– Identify your self-limiting beliefs and reframe positive outcomes. Stretch your capacity to see options and experiment with being uncomfortable. Build momentum with step-by step actions with thing you can do better. Acknowledge your increasing confidence and support others to do more of what is working.
Challenge– Encourage stretch in areas of strength, build on what is already working. Support risk taking in the direction of where adaptation is needed. Identify opportunities for improvement and innovation, build confidence and comfort for trying and learning.
Connection-Acknowledging others who have helped you along the way. Recognize and affirm the importance and impact of other support and encouragement during challenges. Repair and rebuild relationships that have been disrupted, express your appreciation and gratitude for others.
Connection-Affirm shared experiences and express your appreciation and gratitude for others. Make time to connect with others before jumping into work talk. Acknowledge what has brought you together and listen to their concerns. Cross functional boundaries to create relationships to gather useful insight and feedback.
Centered-Having the capacity to calm your body and mind when confronted by complexity and volatility. Practice being able to shift mental and physical experience in face of threat and stress. Know how to access calm and balance in mind, body, feelings when clarity and empathy are needed. Having a set of self-regulation practices to use in the face of threat and stress.
Centered-Encourage others to shift their mental and physical experience in face of threat and stress. Support others to access calm and balance in order to create time to find clarity and empathy. Engaging others in practices that help them pause, gather, settle and focus to find realistic optimism.

Resilience is the new core competency for leaders

The capability of resilience has long been an underlying marker for leaders who create success over and over again. Resilience can be learned and developed to provide a strong framework for making choices for personal and organizational actions. The synergy of connecting the resilience of the leader to create a positive impact on employees and organizational culture is emerging from our current experience and can be passed on to the next generation of leaders.

Executive Coaching – A Thorough Approach to Goal Setting

An organization has retained a coach for one of its executives. Everyone — the coach, the organization’s sponsor, and the executive — has reviewed the parameters of the engagement and feels comfortable with it. Self-assessments and 360s have been gathered to provide data on the executive’s areas of strength and opportunity, and to reveal insights into current performance. The executive is ready and eager to begin.

What’s next? Setting goals.

It’s not an overstatement to say that how a coach and executive handle goal-setting is the biggest indicator of success throughout the engagement.

When compiling a list of possible coaching goals, the executive and coach must first answer the question, “Whose goals?” There are several possible directions:

Goal type 1: Executive-led

Goals may be set by the executive herself. These might arise from her understanding of the self-assessments and 360s, both of which suggest areas of developmental focus. They might also stem from self-awareness and insights she already had. And in cases where she has ideas that aren’t fully formed yet, having a coach’s open support to explore those areas might be all she needs to shape them into goals.

Goal type 2: Joint

The executive and the coach may also work together to set goals. By considering data in the context of the executive’s role, they can collaboratively identify possible explanations about why the assessment and 360 results are the way they are. From this shared understanding, they can generate goals to address areas for improvement.

Goal type 3: Sponsor-driven

The executive’s organization might suggest or mandate particular goals, often as part of a performance improvement plan, last-chance agreement, or other remediation. Goals established by the organization will likely be top priority, and possibly the sole focus of the coaching. It is crucial the executive understands that the organization is driving goals and will hold him accountable.

Regardless of how coaching goals are determined, any potential goal should satisfy a set of fundamental criteria:

Goal criteria 1: Business focus

A coaching goal should satisfy a business objective. This might include helping the executive perform better, developing skills (her own or those of her team) that contribute to organizational success, and leading more effectively. Developmental goals that do not have direct links to business objectives are best left to other kinds of efforts, such as psychotherapy.

Goal criteria 2: Attainable

While a goal might be a stretch, it should not be unrealistic. If the executive finds it nearly impossible to make progress, it will sap his motivation and turn coaching into a grind. Instead, ensure selected goals have short-to-medium term payoffs to keep him engaged in and committed to continuing the coaching process.

Goal criteria 3: Actionable

A coaching goal needs to be specific and actionable. To determine if it is, start by translating a goal into a set of observable actions. If you identify a behavior and it could be captured on a recording, then that’s a behavior worth using. However, if it would be impossible to capture that behavior on a recording, then either come up with a different behavior or identify a different goal.

There are four types of behaviors to consider: Behaviors that the executive is not doing now but needs to start doing; behaviors that the executive is doing now but needs to do more; behaviors that the executive is doing now but needs to do less; and behaviors that the executive is doing now but needs to stop doing.

Goal criteria 4: Measurable

Lastly, a goal needs to be measurable so that you can show if it was achieved. Measurements can be quantitative (ex. achieving a tangible, objective “X” number of events over “Y” period of time) or qualitative (ex. achieving subjective milestone targets regarding professional development, customer satisfaction, leadership skills, or strategic contributions).

Following these guidelines at the start of an executive coaching engagement–establishing clarity about the purpose of coaching; knowing the executive’s coachability; determining who is setting the goals of coaching and why; and selecting goals according to a how well they fit a common set of criteria–maximizes the likelihood of achieving overall coaching success.

These guidelines are similar to the SMART Goals model that has been around since the 1980s. However, within this traditional conceptualization of goal setting in coaching, there is a piece that is missing. This piece has to do with a fourth type of executive coaching goals: Emergent goals.

Occasionally new goals emerge during coaching, sometimes well after sessions have begun. It is incumbent on both the executive and coach to keep their collective “third eye” open for new issues, ideas, awareness, and insights that organically surface. This emergent material can serve as the basis to generate new coaching goals for the executive.

Of course, there may be real-world reasons that prevent adding emergent goals to the current engagement. Perhaps there isn’t enough time, funding, latitude, or resources to address them adequately at this time. But where possible, incorporating emergent goals — either as extra goals or as replacements for lesser goals or goals that have that have been achieved — adds value to a coaching effort.

Taken together, these guidelines lay out a roadmap for the executive and coach to follow throughout a coaching engagement. As coaching sessions proceed, the executive and coach can reliably track progress on achieving selected goals and make mid-course adjustments and corrections as needed. With some hard work and diligence, both she and her coach will hopefully be able to celebrate goal completion and coaching success at the end of their engagement.

About: Paul Bayon, Psy.D., is Principal at DILAN Consulting Group.

Organizational Values: The Most Underutilized Corporate Asset

After over 30 years of working with organizations globally, I can confidently state that most companies don’t fully understand and embrace organizational values. Further, those that do have a competitive edge.

You only have to read the headlines to see abuses of power and corporate malfeasance: Wells Fargo, Amazon, NBC, Uber, United and The Weinstein Company, among others. Most of these companies say the right things. Unfortunately, they fail to act accordingly.

Take Wells Fargo. One of their values reads: “What’s right for customers. We place customers at the center of everything we do. We want to exceed customer expectations and build relationships that last a lifetime.”

Yet, they’ve often done the opposite. Story after story documents how Wells Fargo has systematically betrayed their customers’ trust. This is no way to build relationships that last a lifetime.

Not all value breeches are sensational enough to make headlines. But, make no mistake, they are equally damaging. Everyday violations eat away at morale, decimate employee engagement, and undermine your brand and bottom line.

I don’t think most corporations intend for this to happen. I believe they simply don’t know how to reinforce values while negotiating complex day-to-day demands.

Definitions

So, what to do? First, let’s make sure we have a shared definition of “corporate values.” Here are two I like:

The first comes from BusinessDictionary.com: “The operating philosophies or principles that guide an organization’s internal conduct as well as its relationship with its customers, partners, and shareholders.”

The second comes from a pioneer in the field of organizational development, Edgar Schein: “The rules of behavior. It is how the members represent the organization both to themselves and to others. This is often expressed in official philosophies and public statements of identity. It can sometimes be a projection for the future, of what the members hope to become.”

Reading these, it’s not hard to imagine how values might be applied to guide and influence nearly every aspect of organizational life.

Yet, more often than not, values are relegated to a page on a website or in a binder. In fact, most leaders and employees can’t even recite their organizational values, so it’s no mystery they don’t apply them. This is a huge missed opportunity.

Diagnostics

Is your company walking the talk? This is a question that needs to be asked regularly. Reflection is an essential precursor to calibration, learning and growth.

To assess your current state of effectiveness, ask yourself if any of these statements are true for you or your organization:

You

You have difficulty recalling your organizational values.
You feel drained, unmotivated or burned out.
You have difficulty meeting objectives or feel unfulfilled even when you do.
You find yourself procrastinating.
You feel misunderstood, disempowered or resentful at work.

Organization

The organizational strategy is unclear.
Trust in leadership is low.
Decision-making processes are opaque and/or decisions don’t stick.
Morale, engagement and/or productivity are low.
The board or leaders think the values don’t apply to them.
People are promoted or rewarded even when behaviors contradict values.
Inappropriate (bad) behaviors are not addressed effectively.
Employees tend to keep their personal and work lives separate.

If a few or more of these statements are true, you probably have a values gap. Either your organization isn’t living its values, or your personal values aren’t aligned with your organization.

The Fix

A commitment to organizational values and personal alignment with said values can be a huge business differentiator.

You can draw a straight line from values to performance. When employees see leaders acting with integrity, trust in leadership strengthens. This improves morale, which correlates with employee engagement. Engagement generates productivity and ultimately drives strategy. In addition, values-driven leaders shape culture by creating a critical mass. Never forget that culture eats strategy for lunch.

Here’s how great companies implement values:

Values guard culture. Values should be visible in how you treat each other internally, and how you engage with everyone in your extended community. Every relationship matters and builds (or undermines) a values-driven culture. This is especially true for leaders. They are the most important stewards of culture and must embody the values in everything they do or say. Also, consider whether your organizational structure and employee development initiatives support your stated values.

Values are embedded and celebrated. Every day, values need to be called out, modeled, discussed and celebrated from the top down. For example, choose an employee of the month for being the best role model of values. Informal reinforcements might look like taking a great employee to lunch or showing public appreciation.

Values are a part of all performance discussions. Too often, we evaluate and reward employees for business deliverables without consideration of values. This communicates that values don’t matter, especially if the same person has exhibited poor behavior. Instead, send a message that values do matter by collecting feedback through 360 evaluations, upward appraisals and customer satisfaction surveys.

Values guide decision making. Revisit values at the start of any decision-making process. Later, use them to gauge the effectiveness of your decision-making process and to ensure that decisions are congruent with your stated ideals.

Values are user-friendly. One organization I worked with had 10 values and 2-3 behaviors for each value. The consequence was no one remembered them. We recommend four values with associated behaviors to ensure that they are succinct and memorable.

Values are revisited. Revisit, edit and recommit to your values annually. As companies change, it is essential to ensure that you are still focused on the right ideals and behaviors.

The word “value” is defined as the importance, regard or worth that something is believed to deserve. If you make a point to genuinely embody your organizational values by embedding them in all your processes and discussions, then surely you will be telling everyone that they truly matter, and your company will reap the benefits of setting clear expectations in an environment where people are held accountable.

In other words, if you want your values to matter, you need to keep them front and center.

This article was first published at Forbes.com (April 2018).

Perfectionism in the Workplace – A Rising Challenge

By Bart Magee, Ph.D.

Perfectionism is on the rise in society and in the workplace, meaning that business leaders need to be more prepared to manage employees with perfectionist attributes. An excess of perfectionism in the workplace leads to a number of negative results including poisonous stress and anxiety, difficulty building teams, avoidance of feedback, indecision, employee dissatisfaction and burnout. Fortunately, there are a number of effective strategies that organizations can adopt to address the challenge.

An important study published recently documents the rise in perfectionism among young adults over the past three decades. The study, authored by Thomas Curran and Andrew Hill and published in a major psychology journal, analyzed the responses from 41,641 college students on a psychological measure called the Multidimensional Perfectionism Scale. The measure has been given to students across several decades in the US, Canada, and the UK, providing the researchers with a robust, longitudinal sample. The scale’s three dimensions of perfectionism are: 1) Self-oriented perfectionism: striving to attain perfection and avoid failure, 2) Socially-prescribed perfectionism: perceiving excessive and unfair demands of perfection from parents, peers and the social world, and 3) Other-oriented perfectionism: setting unrealistic standards for others and treating them with hostility and distain when they fail to meet them. The results were dramatic. Between 1989 and 2016, self-oriented perfectionism scores increased by 10 percent, other-oriented perfectionism increased by 16 percent, and socially-prescribed perfectionism increased by an incredible 32 percent. This last finding is the most worrisome one as socially-prescribed perfection is the most debilitating of the three and is associated with greater increases in major mental illness, including depression, anxiety, and suicidal behavior. These dramatic results are a challenge social scientists and mental health providers to address a growing social problem. The findings should also be a wake-up call to business leaders and human resource professionals, as they point to the need to adaptively respond to the new cohort of perfectionist employees now entering the American workforce.

What does this mean for the workplace? First of all, it means it’s time to dispense with the widely held myth that there are good and bad sides to perfectionism. For too long, business leaders have tried to have it both ways. They have attempted to nurture the “good” qualities of perfectionism (high-achievement orientation, attention to detail and self-motivation) while tempering the bad ones (anxiety, black and white thinking, difficulty with feedback, avoidance of risk). Businesses do this by setting high expectations for employee performance, constantly monitoring and measuring them, and providing them incentives and reprimands. These are coupled with workplace practices supporting employee self-care, team work and development of soft skills. But every employee knows which standard comes first and the perfectionist’s response to soft support is to assume they are not serious at best, a trap at worst. As a client of mine recently told me upon hearing that her employer was changing to an “unlimited” vacation polity, “I guess that’s the end of my ever taking a vacation.” As long as perfectionism is buoyed by workplace culture no amount of counter supports can temper it.

Assuming there are “good” sides to perfectionism also presupposes that you can’t be a high-achiever without perfectionist qualities. In fact the research shows that the opposite is the case. High achievers possess qualities that are mostly absent from the perfectionist mindset. Truly high achievers are decisive, confident, not afraid of risk, seek feedback, don’t avoid problems or difficult conversations, can easily delegate, and enjoy mentoring others. Perfectionists work hard to look confident, but underneath are driven by fear of failure which is why they often have difficulty making decisions and shy from risks. Feedback isn’t something sought after, as recognizing one’s shortcomings, for them, isn’t an opportunity growth, but a source of shame. And the anxious focus on one’s performance above all else leaves little room to address the needs of others, hindering one’s ability to effectively supervise, delegate and mentor.

The second important take-away from the study is that given the rising perfectionism among the younger generations, workplaces need to change the way they manage employees, set performance expectations and give feedback, as common practices easily exacerbate the problem and lead to decreased performance, burnout, and mental health problems.

What are some workplace practices that can temper perfectionism and promote a healthier orientation toward performance and achievement?

Reasonable goal setting. A good place to start would be to use the SMART goals guideline. The SMART mnemonic stands for Specific/Significant, Measurable/Meaningful, Achievable/Actionable and Timebound/Trackable. Not only does this model have empirical support, but it can help keep goals realistic and grounded in reality. Recording and tracking progress is a good counterbalance to the perfectionist tendency to seeing a never-ending horizon of impossible-to-meet expectations.
Model learning from failure and experience. This one can be one of the most difficult changes for organizations to implement. While there is considerable evidence that recognition of one’s limits builds learning and growth, it’s hard to shake the feelings learned in childhood that failure is bad, shameful, should be avoided, and quickly forgotten. To change this, organizations need to create a sense of safety around mistakes and an environment where leaders model their own failings, where coming up short is recognized as part of the process of testing out new ideas and inevitable in a world where some variables remain out of control. Rather than reacting to failure as with a “whose to blame?” attitude, the response should be one of curiosity: “What happened?” “What can we learn?” This can help address the perfectionist’s avoidance of risk and difficulty with decision-making.
Create a collaborative environment. A team-based culture can go a long way toward diluting the overly self-focused mindset of the perfectionist. Effective teams, 1) share common goals, 2) act in concert, 3) depend on one another for results, 4) achieve more together than they would individually, 5) see the team as a primary source of commitment, and 6) account for performance collectively.
Recognize employees’ need for emotional support and an environment that is not unduly stressful. This means a real commitment to emotional well-being and minding workplace culture. Once again, there is ample evidence that the best performance comes from an optimal state of engagement that is focused and motivated to reach personal and professional goals, but is free of stresses caused by work overload, lack of control, lack of real feedback and reward, a breakdown in community, an absence of fairness, and conflicting values (Maslach, 1997). In other words, the work environment matters and can mean the difference between employees who are engaged, growth-oriented, and collaborative and ones who are overly self-focused, anxious and difficult to manage.

The team at DILAN Consulting Group has extensive experience helping organizations develop themselves utilizing effective models and strategies to transform workplace cultures, enhance leadership skills and build effective teams. A guiding principle of our work is that effective organizations are cohesive, flexible and responsive to both internal and external demands. Organizations that work to respond to internal human needs and manage change effectively are also best at adapting to evolving markets and dynamic business environments. The many challenges around perfectionism are just the kind of internal demands that if effectively addressed will result in a more resilient, responsive and ultimately successful business.