The problem with being a perfectionist is that eventually you’re going to run out of time for everything to be perfect. You can get away with fine-tuning the immaculate details of everything for a while and with your own work. You might even get promoted for the quality of that work. But, eventually, as you rise through the ranks, taking your time to ensure everything is perfect quickly becomes a bottleneck of productivity and project completion. Especially if, as you become the manager of others, you demand perfection from them each and every time, and pass the demand that “everything passes through you” so that you can ensure perfection. And, as you wait for perfection to be reached, there’s a growing pile of waiting tasks that is quickly becoming irreconcilable.
It’s often said that “your manager has little idea what you actually do or how you actually do it”; all they know is that it’s getting done, and as long as it isn’t going to cause them problems, then they care very little to know anything about it. Occasionally, however, something will happen that draws the attention of upper management to your department, and at that point, some managers will issue that infamous order to “send everything through them.” This, of course, quickly becomes impossible for the same reason, as there are multiple people taking care of the tasks in the first place. And like with our aforementioned micromanaging perfectionist, they’re going to quickly run out of time and sanity to actually carry through with their request.
In this case, we have a classic example of a new manager whose first great idea was to add more “structure” and “oversight” to their new team members’ workflow. He demanded a detailed daily report, which was to include “Every single task you did, no matter how small.” This IT technician was more than willing to play that game and had the classic response of overloading the manager with information, to the point where there was no way he was going to be able to read every detail.
0 Comments