Colin Powell said, “If you are going to achieve excellence in big things, you develop the habit in little matters . As a Manager, you have a vital role to play in supporting all facets of your team, their mistakes, their well-being, their health. No, of course you are not a doctor, however, it is in your best interest to work at focusing on the levels of stress that overtake your employees by endeavoring to keep stress levels to a minimum.
And how you do this is by emphasizing improvement over perfection. This can be incredibly challenging because employees are used to looking for problems.
If you are aiming for perfection from your team you are setting the team and yourself up for failure. That is a lot of stress. Striving for perfection can most certainly limit your team’s creativity and ability to innovate, which leads to inaction, stagnation and ineffectiveness. Employees will often fail to deliver what you are expecting when your emphasis is laid on perfection.
Perhaps in stressful situations you don’t remain calm. You might tend to yell and threaten. You’re not perfect. When you lose control, you lose control of your employees as well, as your emotions. That behaviors is a sign of weakness, not strength and is not a way to model the behavior you expect from your team members. You, as a Manager should act as positive role model, especially in times of high stress. Improving and growing doesn’t just mean getting better at your job, it also means getting better at helping the people who matter to you. Perfectionism at any level is difficult to obtain.
The way you behave, influences how your team members feel, whether they feel valued or whether they are clear about expectations or confused. You can prevent stress or be the cause of it. You need to be able to tolerate mistakes and failures from yourself and your employees. By allowing your employees to explore and experiment, you pave the way for excellence and less stress.
I invite you to share your experiences or thoughts, or comments. You can email or call me for more information on soft skills/interpersonal skills workshops that can transform employees.