I recently had a catch-up with a former teammate of mine. She had been a phenomenal individual contributor. I could assign her a few messy slides of notes and she would turn it into a flawless, perfectly polished presentation. Now, in her new role leading a small team, she’s miserable.
I’ll paraphrase slightly for dramatic effect, but her confession sounded something like this: "I feel like I'm still the team's editor. The presentations are getting out the door, but it’s because I'm pulling late nights rewriting sections and polishing the design. I don't have time to actually lead."
This is the classic trap. You were excellent at your old job, so you assume leadership means being excellent at everything your team does, too. You try to maintain your old output standards while juggling new responsibilities.
It doesn’t work. It’s the skill that kills your leadership potential.
The Perfection Paradox
Smart, high-performing people fall into this trap because their success has always been tied to their own output and perfection. They’ve been rewarded for being the best individual performer and for delivering flawless work.
When they move into a leadership role, they bring that same mindset. They feel a deep, almost physical aversion to anything that's less than perfect. They see a draft, and instead of giving feedback, they just rewrite it. They see a team member struggling and, instead of coaching them, they just take over the task themselves.
This obsession with perfection plays out in a few common patterns. You've likely seen them yourself, or even fallen into one:
The "I’ll Just Do It Myself" Trap: You believe it’s faster and better if you handle it personally. It usually is, if you are thinking in the short term. But you bottleneck your team and stunt their growth.
The Micromanagement Habit: You hover over every detail, unable to trust work that isn't executed exactly your way. Your team stops taking initiative and waits for your approval.
The Exhaustion Cycle: You burn out trying to maintain your old individual contributor perfection and lead. You neglect strategic thinking and team development because you're too busy pushing pixels or reviewing lines of code.
This isn’t leadership. It’s an expensive form of individual contribution, done badly.
My "Good Enough" Reframe
Think of it this way: your job isn't to be perfect at everything anymore. Your job is to enable your team to be effective. And effectiveness, in leadership, often means embracing "good enough."
This isn't about lowering standards, though. It's about setting clear, realistic standards, empowering your team to meet them, and trusting them to deliver. It’s about prioritizing progress and impact over flawless individual output.
It means accepting that the work your team produces might not always be exactly how you would have done it. And that’s okay.
Your value isn't in your personal perfection, but in the clarity you provide, the obstacles you remove, and the environment you create for your team to thrive.
What to Try Instead
This shift won't happen overnight, but you can start by changing how you approach tasks and trust.
1. Define "Done," Not "Perfect": For every task you delegate, clarify what "done" looks like. What are the non-negotiables? What’s the expected outcome? Emphasize meeting those requirements, not exceeding them with unnecessary polish. Give them a clear target, not a moving one. This means accepting that a good enough solution delivered on time is often more valuable than a perfect one that’s late.
2. Delegate the Whole Problem: Instead of giving your team small, disconnected tasks, give them the full context of the problem and the desired outcome. Then, let them figure out how to get there. For your next meeting, replace the status update with a discussion about how they plan to tackle the challenge.
3. Coach, Don't Correct: When someone brings you work that isn't quite right, resist the urge to fix it yourself. Ask open-ended questions: "What was your thinking here?" "What potential risks do you see?" "How might we achieve this outcome more efficiently?" Guide them to the solution.
The Bottom Line
This requires courage. It means letting go of the control that made you successful as an individual contributor. It means being okay with things being a little messy sometimes. It means trusting your team and accepting that their mistakes are part of their learning, and therefore, part of your job.
The leaders who succeed aren’t the ones who can do everyone’s job perfectly. They’re the ones who recognize that their new job is to make everyone else good enough to succeed.
That’s all for this week.
See you next Tuesday.