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When Your High Standards Derail Your Success

by Anne Sugar and Karen Walker

No one would argue that having high standards for your work and your team is a bad thing. Yet sometimes, extraordinarily high standards can be unproductive and halt forward movement in your leadership career.

Leadership can be messy. Things often don’t go as planned. Rather than accepting this as a natural part of life, if your standards are too inflexible, you’ll feel perpetually frustrated because neither you nor your team live up to your goals.

In practice, this can look like:

• You and your team don’t seem to be on the same page in meetings.
• Projects never get completed in the timeline you set forth.
• Your manager says, “Eighty percent done is good enough,” ...