))
A weekly podcast featuring the leading thinkers in business and management.
Perfect Is the Enemy
Manage episode 219006246 series 1952530
By Harvard Business Review. Discovered by Player FM and our community — copyright is owned by the publisher, not Player FM, and audio is streamed directly from their servers. Hit the Subscribe button to track updates in Player FM, or paste the feed URL into other podcast apps.
If you’ve worked your way up in a competitive field — or are anxious by nature — you may have perfectionist tendencies. Maybe you’re a hard-driving, obsessive worker who thinks a task is never quite done. Or maybe you’re avoidant, struggling to start a project because you want it to be done just right.
We all know society holds women to a higher standard than men and rewards us for not making mistakes. But internalizing other people’s expectations — or what we think they expect — will only burn us out. To keep rising in our careers, we need to get in tune with our own standards for what’s a good, or good enough, job.
It is possible to keep our perfectionist tendencies under control. We talk through tactics with Alice Boyes, a former clinical psychologist turned writer and author.
Our HBR reading list:
“How Perfectionists Can Get Out of Their Own Way,” by Alice Boyes
“How to Focus on What’s Important, Not Just What’s Urgent,” by Alice Boyes
“How to Collaborate with a Perfectionist,” by Alice Boyes
“Perfectionism Is Increasing, and That’s Not Good News,” by Thomas Curran and Andrew P. Hill
Get the discussion guide for this episode on our website: hbr.org/podcasts/women-at-work
Fill out our survey about workplace experiences.
Email us: womenatwork@hbr.org
Our theme music is Matt Hill’s “City In Motion,” provided by Audio Network.
57 episodes
