The Yellow Highlighter Rule

I recently joined Tshidi Madai on 702 during Clement Manyatela’s World of Work segment to discuss “perfectionism in the workplace” and it proved to be a real conversation-starter. I refer to myself as a recovering perfectionist because for lot of my career I was a hyper-driven, classic Type-A personality and perfectionism was my singular focus. Several things influenced my personal growth around letting go of perfection, none so profound as becoming a mother, and one of my biggest learnings is that I am a nicer person for it. 

Perfectionists, sit down. No one is saying you aren’t nice.  

Besides the obvious flaw in perfectionism, that of never being able to achieve perfection because we keep raising our own bar of expectation and success, the real problem with it is that it often creates conflict and distrust between the perfectionist and those around them because a natural outcome is micromanagement. Perfectionists tend to be poor delegators because “no one does it better than me” and low morale influencers because “I should have done it myself’” and this mindset cultivates a need to micromanage everyone around them. 

Being a perfectionist in the workplace proved to be an incredibly stressful experience for me personally because I was literally expecting hundreds of people around me to adhere to my {perfect} way of doing and thinking and when they didn’t or couldn’t, I was taking this as a personal affront to my competence. While perfectionism can be a superpower in many ways, such as excellent attention to detail, textbook perfect plans, and a highly energised doer, there is a dark side to perfectionism that is eroding teams and organisations everywhere. 

When a leader is a perfectionist and their role-based expectations stem from perfection, they often remove the opportunity for their team to demonstrate individual creativity and capability. A toxic leader will create a culture where team members fear doing something wrong, are demotivated because their efforts never meet the leader’s unrealistic expectations, and ultimately, the team becomes entirely disengaged. Perfectionists tend to gatekeep information to maximise control and influence, whether intentionally or not, and this creates bottlenecks and unnecessary obstacles hindering the team’s progress further. 

So where does the yellow highlighter fit in? 

A few years into my role as HR, I began to understand that people weren’t intentionally disregarding my expectations and instructions, but they weren’t actioning them as I wanted or needed because they didn’t have all the context. HR is an information-heavy function, and misaligned expectations quickly lead to disengagement.  

I started highlighting key phrases/words in my communications under the assumption that around half of my target audience will only glance at my mail, but the yellow highlighter will stand out and convey my key points. This way I achieve the outcomes I required without waiting for the perfect outcome of 200 people reading my email from subject line to signature. It worked and this is how I became a nicer person.  

I could see a notable increase in the desired outcomes of my role from my audience and there was significantly less conflict due to missed expectations. This established much better trust between us all within the organisation. When I parked my internal desire for perfection, I made room for progress, and this gave my team and colleagues the space needed to demonstrate their own capabilities and creativity.  

I have shifted my mantra from “it has to be perfect” to “progress over perfection”. Don’t get me wrong – I am not settling for half-assed anything, ever! But I am consciously ensuring that my desire for perfect is not the benchmark for those around me and I am not fostering unreasonable and unachievable expectations for myself or my team.