Perfectionism is often described as high standards — a commitment to quality, a refusal to accept less than the best. In professional contexts, it is frequently rewarded, at least initially. The perfectionist delivers thorough work, catches errors, and maintains high output.
What this framing misses is that perfectionism is, at its core, a protection strategy. It protects against the possibility of failure, criticism, or the discomfort of uncertainty. If the work is perfect, it cannot be criticised. If everything is controlled and correct, nothing unexpected can happen.
The protection is real. Perfectionism does reduce certain kinds of risk, at least in the short term. The cost is that it also tends to increase others — the risk of paralysis, of never finishing, of exhaustion from the effort required to maintain impossible standards, and of the person becoming a bottleneck in systems that depend on their output.
In organisational contexts, perfectionism often goes unexamined until it becomes a problem. The person is delivering. The quality is high. The cost — to their capacity, to their functioning, to the people around them — accumulates quietly.
Understanding perfectionism as a protection strategy rather than a character trait changes the available options. The question is no longer 'how do we get this person to lower their standards?' but 'what is this protecting, and what conditions would make that protection less necessary?'
This is a more useful question. It is also a harder one, because it requires genuine curiosity about something that may have been operating quietly — and productively, in a narrow sense — for a long time.
Dr Stacey Savage
Psychology for Sustainable Functioning