One of my absolute favorite books is Don’t Sweat The Small Stuff…and it is all small stuff by Richard Carlson PhD.

It is LOADED with useful tips for a less stressful life. I was rereading it the other day as I was writing a new speech and it was great to rediscover so many pearls of wisdom. The title of the book is one of the pearls of wisdom, the title of this blog posting is another.

Carlson explains that he never met a perfectionist whose life was filled with inner peace. Rather than focus on all the things that are going right these people look for what is not right.

I find managers have problems like this when it comes to delegation. They all know they should do it but they dont do it as well, or as often as, they might. One of the reasons is they are not at peace with imperfection. Even moreso, they are not at peace with someone doing something differently than they would do it. To these managers, I ask the question, Do you want someone to accomplish a result or follow a method? Of course, the answer is to get the result but in practice they micromanage in the pursuit of their definition of perfection and the workplace suffers.

Articulate a resonable standard and let people meet it. The work may not be perfect but it will meet the standard. If it needs to be perfect, then tell them that. But let’s face it, most of us aren’t doing brain surgery or some other life or death activity (and even in those there is some margin for efforr) so imperfection may be fine. (I didn’t say poor or substandard)

Next time you find yourself frustrated with an employee, the clerk at the store or a family member, remember to make peace with imperfection.

This entry was posted on Wednesday, July 30th, 2008 at 1:06 am and is filed under Uncategorized. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.