He never once told his team they’d done a good job.
Not because the work wasn’t good. Because in his head, there was always one more thing wrong with it.
This is a real client of mine. A senior leader, smart, driven, genuinely good at his job. And every single piece of work that landed on his desk got picked apart. Not maliciously. He wasn’t trying to crush anyone. He just couldn’t see the 90% that was excellent, only the 10% that wasn’t.
So he’d redo it himself. Stay later. Get angrier when deadlines slipped, because of course they slipped, the standard kept moving. And his team, who were genuinely capable people, stopped trying to hit a target that quietly relocated every time they got close. Nobody on that team had felt a sense of accomplishment in months.
Here’s what I find people miss about this pattern. It isn’t really about the work. It’s about a decision made decades before any of these people had a job.
The Be Perfect driver, and where it actually comes from
In Transactional Analysis, the psychologist Taibi Kahler identified five ‘drivers’, unconscious rules we absorb as children that go on to run our adult behaviour. One of them is Be Perfect. And like the other drivers I write about, including Be Strong, this one is learned. It isn’t who you are. It’s something you decided, as a child, in order to feel safe.
Nobody sits a five year old down and says the words ‘be perfect.’ It’s quieter than that. It’s the look on a parent’s face when the school report had one B on it. It’s praise that only ever arrived alongside a but. The child doesn’t hear cruelty in it. They hear love, conditional on getting it right. So they make a decision, the way children do, fast and without words: if I am flawless, I am safe. If I am flawless, I am loved.
That decision doesn’t stay in childhood. It gets a job, a title, a team. And it starts running the show decades after the person who made it has forgotten they ever made it at all.
What the research says
This isn't just a coaching anecdote. A 2025 study published in Humanities and Social Sciences Communications, drawing on data from 152 leaders and 699 of their employees, found that a leader's perfectionism cuts both ways. It can lift team energy and drive when channelled well, but the same study found that a leader's zero tolerance for mistakes and constant scrutiny breeds anxiety in the team and pushes people towards avoidance rather than honest effort.
Research published in Frontiers in Psychology describes leader perfectionism as a genuine double-edged sword. The same standard-setting that can sharpen performance under the right conditions tips into harm when a team's confidence in their own ability is already shaky.
And a study in PMC went further, linking leader perfectionism to a rise in employee deviance, people quietly pulling back, cutting corners, or disengaging from the relationship altogether, as a way of pushing back against standards they have no real hope of meeting.
None of that is about ability. It's people protecting themselves from a bar that never stops moving.
The bit I don’t usually say out loud
I’m a recovering perfectionist myself. I know this driver from the inside, not just from the coaching chair.
For me it shows up two ways. One is the working, working, working, never quite landing anywhere, because nothing ever feels finished or right. I have genuinely woken up in a hot sweat in the middle of the night, heart going, convinced I’d got something wrong, when there was nothing actually wrong at all. The other side is the opposite and just as damaging: putting things off. Not starting. Not sending. Not because I’m lazy, but because some part of me has decided that if I can’t be sure it’ll be good enough, I’d rather not find out.
Both are the same childhood decision wearing different clothes. One looks like overworking. One looks like avoidance. Underneath, it’s the same five year old, still trying to be safe.
Standards aren’t the problem. Relentlessness is.
I want to be careful here, because this isn’t an argument for lowering the bar. High standards built my client’s career. They’ll probably build yours too. The problem isn’t the standard. It’s the relentlessness, the inability to ever clock the win, say well done and mean it, or let a piece of work be finished rather than merely abandoned.
There’s a useful reframe I use with clients caught in this pattern: this isn’t about humility versus arrogance. It’s about accuracy. Can you see what’s actually true about the work in front of you, the good and the not-quite-there, without the verdict being filtered through a rule you wrote when you were small?
Self-compassion research from Dr Kristin Neff is the clearest antidote I know to this driver. Her work shows that treating yourself with the same fairness you’d offer a struggling colleague doesn’t soften your standards, it makes you able to actually meet them, because you’re no longer spending half your energy on self-attack.
What I’d ask you
If you recognise any of this, in yourself or in how you lead others, here’s where I’d start. Notice the moment the verdict lands, the second you decide something isn’t good enough. Ask what’s actually true, separate from the rule you decided on as a child. And the next time someone on your team gets close to your bar, say so. Out loud. Even if there’s still a 10% you’d change.
Because the goal was never flawless. It was never going to be.
The goal is a team, and a leader, who can feel like they’ve actually arrived somewhere.
If this is a pattern you can see in yourself or in how you’re leading your team, this is exactly the territory I work through with senior leaders inside the Strategic Leader Programme. Get in touch and let’s talk about what’s driving it.
