Is Anything Ever Good Enough?
If your team is capable but keeps waiting for you to tell them what to do, it may be because they're working under the same standard you hold yourself to, one where nothing is ever good enough. I know because I led that way at Kasina, the first company I started, and it took me years to see where it came from.
I hired people because I believed in how they thought, then shut them down whenever they disagreed with me. I made it clear my thinking was right and we were moving on, and only later understood why I needed to win those arguments. Being right was how I proved I was good enough, so I didn't even let myself consider that I might be wrong, or that someone else's idea might be better than mine.
Where the push comes from
That need started long before Kasina, with parents I could never please. Nothing was ever good enough, so I worked hard to win their love, and by the time I was a young adult, I believed that to feel whole, I had to perform. I no longer needed anyone to push me because I pushed myself, and if I'm honest, I still do.
For a long time I thought of it as having high standards. Looking back, a lot of what I called standards was the voice I'd grown up with, and I was using it on people who hadn't done anything to deserve it.
What your team hears
What I didn't see was what my team heard. Every time I dismissed a proposal, they got the same message I grew up with: what they brought wasn't good enough. Over time, it became easier for them to follow my lead than to argue for their own, even when they still believed they were right.
I see this in almost every senior leader I coach. Maybe you've sent a deck back for a third round when the second one was fine, or rewritten someone's email before it went out. It feels like high standards, but your team is learning that nothing they bring is finished until you say so. They stop bringing you ideas that aren't fully formed, problems reach you late, and your best people start looking elsewhere.
Most of the leaders I work with don't think of themselves as hard to work for. They think of themselves as hard on themselves, and they assume that stays private. The people who report to you notice how you respond to yourself when something goes wrong, though, and if you pick apart your own mistakes for days, they figure you'll do the same with theirs.
The fear of letting up
When I raise this with clients, they tell me the pressure is what makes them good, and if they let up, they'll get sloppy. I had that fear too, but the research doesn't back it up. Juliana Breines and Serena Chen, two psychologists at UC Berkeley, gave students a hard test they were set up to fail, then encouraged some of them to be kind to themselves about it. Those students spent more time studying for the retest than the ones who had been encouraged to boost their self-esteem or who got no encouragement at all. Being easier on themselves made them want to do better.
Carl Rogers put it this way: "The curious paradox is that when I accept myself just as I am, then I can change."
I don't think the answer is to lower the bar. The work I do with clients is about changing why the bar is there. Wanting a deck to be excellent because the board decision matters is very different from sending it back because good enough has never felt safe. From the outside, the two can look identical, and your team can usually tell which one they're getting, even when you can't.
What I'm practicing
What changed things for me was a question I learned to ask when someone disagreed with me, and I could feel myself getting ready to shut it down: what if this person is right, and what could I learn from that? When I asked it, people brought me ideas I wouldn't have come up with on my own, and they took risks they hadn't been willing to take before.
With clients, the question I use is a little different because the pattern shows up differently. Before you send a piece of work back, ask whether you're asking for changes because the work needs them or because you're uncomfortable calling it done. Some weeks it really is the work, and more often than most leaders expect, it isn't. It also helps to start telling people when something is finished, which can feel strange the first few times.
I'm still practicing this. I still feel guilty on a slow Sunday when I haven't done anything, and I still notice myself wanting to impress someone the moment they ask what I do. What helps is remembering that I picked up the need to perform as a kid trying to win love. It was never a truth about who I am, and it isn't a truth about the people on my team either.
Two questions I've been asking myself:
Whose voice is it when you tell yourself, or your team, that it should be better?
What would your team's week feel like if they had nothing left to prove to you?
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