CASE STUDY
We were engaged recently by an organisation to help their senior leaders be more enterprising and creative in pursuit of commercial performance. We did a behavioural diagnostic on the senior leadership group of 50, which showed mass perfectionism!
The perfectionist fears getting things wrong. When we followed this up with in-depth interviews to probe more deeply into this, people typically said that they were more focussed on doing things right and had not got the mental space or the time to be more creative or original in their approaches to problems.
They were in service of their perfectionism, of getting things right, more than adopting a more creative mindset to achieve commercial goals. Perfectionism high, agility low.