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: when progress goes unacknowledged, people don’t aim higher. They conclude that nothing they do will ever be enough.
Here are five ways to use progress as fuel (from a recovered perfectionist) that I use with my clients:
1. Winners focus on improvement
Leaders often focus on what’s not working: the gaps, the shortfalls, the distance from where you want to be. High-performing teams ask something harder: what’s getting better, and why? That question changes what the team pays attention to. Asking what’s missing trains people to brace for judgment. Asking what’s improving trains them to use progress as fuel.
Harvard researchers Teresa Amabile and Steven Kramer spent years analyzing diary entries from knowledge workers across multiple companies, tracking what actually drove motivation and performance day to day.
The answer wasn’t pay, recognition programs, or inspiring leadership. It was progress — visible, incremental movement forward in meaningful work. Not big wins. Just evidence that things were getting better.
Jerry Rice is widely considered the greatest wide receiver in American football history, yet he was one of the slowest at his position. His coach shifted the focus: instead of chasing perfection, Rice tracked what was improving: route precision, his ability to create separation the moment the pass arrived, and his endurance late in games when others faded. He retired with 197 career touchdowns, a record that still stands.
Walsh’s teams won three championships. All because they chased improvement, not perfection.
Winners study. Losers get stuck on what’s missing.
2. What gets attention gets repeated
Most leaders spend a lot of time discussing goals, especially when people are not meeting them. They keep telling their team what success looks like, what the numbers should be, what success means by year-end.
But very few discuss what people need to keep doing, or start doing, to actually get there. That gap between outcome and behavior is where performance quietly breaks down.
The type of praise people receive shapes what they do next. Psychologist Carol Dweck found that children praised for being smart (“You’re talented”) became more cautious after a setback. They had a label to protect. Children praised for their effort and approach were more likely to persist, take on harder challenges, and keep going when things got difficult.
Phil Jackson coached eleven NBA championship teams. His edge wasn’t tactics. He paid close attention to the behaviors that made his system work, and he named them. Not just the scoring. The pass that created the scoring. The screen that freed the pass. The player who made a quiet decision that changed a possession. Every team member understood which behaviors drive results. They didn’t need instructions.
Goals tell people where to go. The behaviors you praise show them how to get there. You get what you pay attention to.
3. Progress increases agency
The more progress people make, the more invested they become. Ownership follows. When people can see that their efforts are moving something forward, the work stops feeling like an assignment and starts feeling like theirs. Authorship increases ownership.
Real success is internal: people must own the actions, not just the results. That’s what psychologists Edward Deci and Richard Ryan discovered after decades studying what drives people to do hard things voluntarily. Their most consistent finding: people need to feel their actions produce results. When they can see that connection, they take initiative, push through difficulty, and hold themselves to higher standards. When they can’t, no incentive structure fixes it.
Pixar’s Braintrust meetings work on exactly this principle. Every few months, a film in development is reviewed by a group of peers — directors and creatives working on other projects. The feedback is candid and specific. But there’s one rule that makes it work: the Braintrust has no authority. They can name what isn’t working, what’s missing, what makes no sense. What they can’t do is tell the director what to do about it.
The director retains full ownership. Because of that, the feedback gets taken seriously as input from people who understand the work. Each session builds on the last, making progress visible.
People don’t own what’s handed to them. They own what they build.
4. Progress creates momentum
Momentum comes from visible movement. It’s built one win at a time.
Organizational psychologist Karl Weick called this the power of “small wins.” In a 1984 paper, he argued that large, complex problems are best addressed through sequences of small, concrete actions with real outcomes. One win doesn’t solve the whole problem. It reduces the size of the next step, signals that change is real, and keeps people going when the larger goal still feels distant.
Dave Brailsford took over as British Cycling’s performance director in 2003. The team hadn’t won a Tour de France in 110 years. His method was to find 1% improvements in everything — from nutrition and sleep to seat ergonomics and training. Even the type of pillow riders used at hotels. Each change was invisible on its own. Compounded, they made a difference. The British cycling team won multiple Tour de France titles and a string of Olympic gold medals.
The progress accumulated, step by step, until it was impossible to ignore.
Small wins compound. Each one lowers the resistance to the next, building the belief that change is possible.
5. Recognizing success makes it easier to discuss mistakes
Momentum and ownership change how people respond to feedback. When someone feels their progress is seen, hard feedback lands as information rather than a verdict of their worth. Without that foundation, even well-intentioned critique can make us feel that nothing we do is ever enough.
John Gottman spent decades studying what separates stable relationships from fragile ones. His most consistent finding was the ratio of positive to negative interactions. In healthy relationships, positive exchanges significantly outnumber negative ones — some researchers put the ratio at five to one. The difficult conversations are still there. But they’re held within a larger context of acknowledgment. Without that context, even calm, measured feedback triggers defensiveness. The same dynamic plays out in teams.
The US Army builds this into how it learns from the field. After Action Reviews always examine both what worked and what failed — and naming what worked comes first. It’s not a courtesy. It’s a design decision. When people know their effort will be acknowledged before their mistakes are examined, they stop defending past decisions and start examining them. The quality of the conversation changes because the conditions do.
Recognition doesn’t soften feedback. It creates the conditions for honest conversations to actually happen.
My father taught me a valuable lesson. Something he never intended to, but I'm still grateful. Chasing what's missing doesn't raise the bar. It just frustrates people.
Progress is fuel. Perfection is a tank that's always empty.
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