I hope you are having a great week and giving it your all. Or at least 95%!

I ran my leadership skills workshop on Friday and was really pleased to receive an average feedback score of 94.3%.

The problems with perfectionism

During the workshop, ironically, we had been talking about personal constraints, with one of these being perfectionism. I related to the fact that I have worked with some perfectionists in the past and helped them move to a more practical approach where 5 tasks get done 95% rather than one 99.9% and the others neglected.

You see things are never perfect, but we sometimes wait until we feel they will be. So websites don’t get implemented or updated. Profiles don’t get changed. Marketing pieces never get finished.

It makes us less productive and raises the stress levels.

The 95/5 rule

You have no doubt heard of Pareto’s 80/20 law (80% effects comes from 20% of the causes), well I am an advocate of the 95/5 law. Get the things you are working on to 95% and then get moving, don’t wait for perfection.

It's better to get 5 tasks done at 95% - the problems with perfectionism

Apply this almost everywhere. There are matters that are critical or where safety is paramount, where striving for 100% is totally understandable, but in most areas surely 95% will be of extremely high quality and will allow things to get moving?

How can you give more than 100%?

The other area that drives me a little crazy is when I hear people say that are going to give something 110%, 120%, 150%, 200%!! What does this actually mean? We can only give 100% maximum and we are setting ourselves up to fail if we plan to achieve even 100%. There is always something that could have been better, that we could have improved slightly?

Keep making small improvements

My recommendation to you is to get things to 95%, get them out there, get valuable feedback and keep improving.

When I run my 2nd workshop with the same organisation, I will be taking on board the feedback, making some changes to improve the workshop for them and aiming for 95%+ feedback scores! That will feel like excellent progress.

If you need help in creating plans and getting things moving, you can join us at our PI Leadership Discovery Workshop on May 16th.

Or please feel free to call us on 0115 903 3133 or email at lead@theleadershiptrainingworkshop.com and we can discuss how we can help you in any way.