From Perfection To Priorities: When The Boss Adds Too Much Value

Every high achiever can relate to this trainwreck: You worked tirelessly all weekend to deliver the impossible—a complex issue that demanded your full energy and loyalty to the company. But when you proudly presented your report, your boss publicly pointed out punctuation errors. His serious tone suggested that formatting flaws might reflect deeper issues in your data. Even if he thanked you at the end, you barely heard it, feeling demoralized and disrespected. His minor critiques, intended to “add value,” instead violated trust, killed morale and sucked out all the oxygen from the room.

We see this every week in the C-Suite, particularly among CEO/Founders accustomed to excelling as individuals. Indeed, Mark admits he stumbled in his first C-Suite executive leadership role by carrying forward habits that served him well earlier in life. As a Stanford graduate student, he garnered praise for perfect test scores and flawless grammar. However, when he became Chief of Staff for Charles “Chuck” Schwab, he had to shift his source of pride from personal excellence to team leadership. He failed completely. His obsession with precision on small details made him seem arrogant to high-achieving executives. His input on minor details appeared to the staff and peers around him as attempts to prove he was the smartest in the room. Much to his surprise, his tweaks slowed the team’s progress, fostering caution instead of their courage and commitment.

Mark was seduced by a common affliction: the temptation to default to the convenient role of editor-in-chief rather than as team leader. To make matters worse, Mark mixed frustration and delight in finding “minor” edits—most of which unwittingly came at great cost to his relationship with the team. Your self-awareness around this necessary shift in perspective is essential: As a leader you must prioritize what helps the team gain confidence to drive results. Only micromanage details that are existential. Give the team as much satisfaction in driving important work as you possible can and forget the rest.

But Why Are They Still Calling Me a Control Freak?

As a new CEO, you may still face criticism for old habits. People may say you fail to appreciate their effort, and that you demand input on every decision, refusing to delegate. The issue? You still equate perfection with effectiveness. You think that it’s efficient to “just mention it now while we’re on that slide.”  Well, that’s neither as efficient nor as effective in dealing with human beings on a team. Former GlaxoSmithKline CEO J.P. Garnier captured this when he said, “Before I speak, I should stop, breathe and ask myself, ‘Is it worth it?’” Leaders’ suggestions are often perceived as criticism or orders, which can stifle initiative. This principle is crucial for CEOs and executives who struggle with accusations of micromanagement because that is how it lands on your team. The tendency to weigh in on every detail, with good intentions, often backfires, leading to hesitation rather than empowerment. As CEO, perfection can no longer be your reference point for everything. Instead, you must focus only on high-impact decisions. Scaling an organization means delegating 95 percent of the details and avoiding tasks best left to others. Leaders who micromanage create a culture of learned helplessness rather than ownership.

The Cost of Perfectionism: When “Adding Value” Backfires

Some founders worry that reducing attention to detail will harm company culture. The reality is the opposite: refusing to delegate minor decisions creates a toxic culture that stifles growth. Perfectionism, if applied universally, is counterproductive. Instead of prioritizing mission-critical execution, leaders demoralize teams by nitpicking minor details.

Consider your role in naming a program, job title, department or product. The team seeks your input, but is it necessary? Can they get those things 80 percent right without you, or more likely, they know better because they do those things all day and you don’t. Your real value is in empowering the team to make these choices, not for your taste always to prevail. Chances are the decision is much more important to them than it should be to you—and you’ll get disproportioned commitment, creativity and energy by letting them have their way. They will be shocked that you shifted from your POV to their priority, focusing only on decisions that truly impact results. Execution must be flawless in life-saving areas, and it is your job to save all your bandwidth for that. But everything else—like naming something, for example—should not consume you.

When starting Pinterest, the two brilliant, creative co-founders Ben Silbermann and Evan Sharp initially overcompensated by micromanaging legal and finance decisions, reading textbooks believing they needed expertise in every field. Silbermann earned a BA in Political Science from Yale and Sharp received a bachelor’s degree in history from the University of Chicago and later studied architecture.  It was hopeless to think they could be an expert at everything, they soon realized. More importantly, the brightest leaders are lucky to know a lot about one thing, not the full span of skills necessary to drive a company. When they reached out to Mark as their coach, they realized their primary objective was to recruit, develop and lead other experts to grow the company. To do otherwise slowed progress instead of driving innovation.

Picking Your Battles: Separating Problems from People

Psychological safety, as researched by Amy Edmondson, isn’t about avoiding hard conversations—it’s about fostering productive debate. But here’s the problem: If you’re like most perfectionist high achievers, chances are you sort of shoot the messenger with your reaction to problems. You must be extra careful you don’t sound like a hypocrite for saying you welcome tough news as you bristle with your body language and become emotional hearing bad news. As a leader, you must take a breath, then carefully respond so that you separate problems from people, ensuring team members feel safe delivering bad news and tackling challenges rather than avoiding difficult discussions. Edmondson laments that most teams use “safety” as an excuse for lack of accountability. To the contrary, the moral commitment on everyone on the team is to ferret out and resolve sticky complex issues. The task is to objectively elevate problems, then fall together as a team to solve those problems rather than fall apart. And it’s your job as a leader to encourage folks to do that but you must be carefully nuanced in your behavior not to undermine your objective.

Why Your Team Doesn’t Take Initiative to Drive Innovation

Ultimately, leadership is about making people winners, not winning yourself. That is the secret to building their confidence to speak up and increase their commitment to continuous improvement. Are you still marking punctuation errors in a well-structured proposal? Editing slides for perfection instead of focusing on strategy? If so, you’re undermining your team’s ownership and initiative. As a leader, your mantra must shift to overemphasizing gratitude.

Your first and final words should be: Thank you! Celebrate your team’s efforts and help them believe that they should trust you to allow them to take ownership.

Shift from Being Right to Being Effective

Leadership is about making others successful, not proving you’re the smartest in the room. In a fast-growing organization, perfectionism slows everything down. When Mark led Schwab.com, his perfectionism delayed progress. He weighed in on everything—PowerPoint slides, product names, memos—mistaking efficiency for effectiveness. His micromanagement taught his team to wait for his decisions rather than take ownership.

Effective leaders focus only on what truly matters. Execution must be flawless where necessary—but for everything else? Let it go. Your team and company will grow faster and stronger when you do.