Progress Is Fuel: Why Perfectionist Leaders Never Win
Five ways leaders can turn small wins into lasting change
Many leaders confuse high standards with never being satisfied. They constantly raise the bar, yet create the opposite effect.
When I was a teenager, my dad had a habit of moving the goalposts.
Every time I came back from a rugby match, he would ask me how it went. If my team lost, he would call me a loser. He’d tell me I wasn’t playing well enough. I had to try harder.
Winning didn’t make him happy either. “The other team might have played badly,” he’d tell me. He never came to a single match, yet he had opinions about all of them. Nothing ever seemed good enough.
That experience stayed with me longer than I expected. When I became a leader, my father’s voice echoed in how I ran my teams. I fixated on what was missing or what wasn’t good enough. I thought I had high standards. I had a blind spot.
I see the same pattern in many of the leadership teams I work with. Not because they don’t care but because that’s how they were raised. The cost is real: w…
