Coach-Soch: Is a founder’s quest for perfection overrated?
KV Prasad Jun 13, 2022, 06:35 AM IST (Published)
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Summary
A short business narrative (of a 3 min read) that sets the context, challenge(s) faced, the type of leadership involved and the questions to ponder about, to solve for the issues. This is not to give answers; for business & life in general is not like a school-guide-book. This column is to provoke the reader to think more. And to sensitise that each individual or organisation are unique, and the answers would depend on the situation, difference in organisational culture, context, etc.
To question, is to think. To think, is to introspect. To introspect, is to seek. To seek, is to be aware. To be aware, is when the journey begins.
Chasing perfection – Founders’ angst
Are you a founder or senior member of the founding team?
Are you one of those who are obsessed with perfection?
Are you one of those who wake up with every phone ping in the night to respond to emails?
Are you one of those who fly off the handle at the slightest imperfection at work?
Are you always thinking of work projects, their time schedules, and delivery pressures even when with family?
Well, if the answer is yes to most of those, welcome to the high-pressure life of a Founder.
The good news, from learning from successful ventures, is that you don’t need to be obsessed with being perfect all the time.
Is perfection overrated?
In most startups and new ventures, the founding team members do almost all the jobs. They are probably the first admin team. They even get all necessary approvals and permits for the business. They are the first receptionist, accountant, sales manager, pantry head, and so on.
While these core team members did not join the venture to do these jobs, still did it out of a passion to kick-start that venture. No job was small or mean or beneath their position. And importantly, the venture was bootstrapped and they could not afford to spend additionally to have separate resources for those tasks. In many founders’ journeys, they started as a ‘Team of One’.
Also Read: Coach Soch | Co-founders and their Conflicts
But it is just that such minutest work also becomes an obsession for most founders. They start looking at every error with the same importance. They anticipate that every error could become a disastrous outcome if they don’t personally intervene. That’s when the trouble starts.
Perfection, a problem?
How can perfection or wanting to be perfect be a problem?
It can, because it hinders your ability to delegate and to end up micro-managing. Successful leaders establish boundaries that they offer to their teams, and within those boundaries, they also have tolerable levels of mistakes and errors to be acceptable. If every founder jumped to do every job in the company, the venture simply would stall and fail.
This perfection syndrome is also built by the process of starting up a venture. The founders saw most tasks or almost every task through their method, they knew the outcomes, which formed their opinion on how to do, what to do, when to do it, and what the outcome should be.
And measurement leads to higher expectations in expecting everyone to have gone through a similar learning curve.
Do you use phrases like “it’s ok. Forget it. I will do it myself” or “I don’t have time to show you” or “you will never learn”?
Well, then it’s time to loosen up and unlearn quickly. You are probably on the way to becoming an overbearing perfectionist. You should focus on large impact projects where such perfection is needed.
Room for others and other styles
Simply hire the right people, train them to do the work, show them what excellence – not perfection – looks like, and allow them to work. Allow them the leeway to err.
As a founder, you might shift between perfection and reality-staring-in-your-face. It’s a good battle for you to have, but to win or lose does not matter.
Also Read | Coach Soch: Reverse mentoring and leaders
With peer pressure and even investors’ pressure, many founders feel the need to be better, faster, quicker, more valued, sought-after, leaner, smarter, and all the other superlative adjectives. Perfection comes at a cost – monetary, mental issues, physical stress, anxiety, emotional battles, inter-personal issues at work and home, amongst many others.
Do the trade-off between chasing perfection and embracing reality.
For there is no one right answer. It has to just work for you!.
In the process, don’t lose people, just because you have become overbearing.
– The author, Srinath Sridharan is a Corporate Adviser and Independent Markets Commentator. For other articles in the Coach Soch series, click here.
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