Personally speaking, had I listened to my overly critical self-evaluations or to all of the voices telling me that I had to be a perfect partner, mother, business owner, friend and the list goes on, I wouldn’t have the level of success I enjoy today. Professionally, Perfectly Blended was never about perfection, but about driving performance and outcomes through bespoke, blended learning solutions that facilitate people growth. In whichever domain – be it the workplace, intimate relationships, and friendships – perfection entails striving for unrealistic or unattainable goals, often followed by deep disappointment when we don’t achieve them. It’s an illusory, often counterproductive target with an ever-expanding finish line that has ‘not good enough’ written on it . But growth is its own reward where the start and finish line hold less importance. Although our approach to learning and development remains the same, our new name, Purposefully Blended, better reflects who we are. 

'We've Been on a Journey'

‘I’ve been on a journey’ has to be one of the most well-worn phrases of the twenty-first century. It trips off the tongues of would-become prime ministers, celebrities – and learning and development specialists! Yet our lessons don't come from the destination we arrive at, but from the twists and turns we make along the way.

Perfectionism Is Prevalent

The BBC article Toxic Perfectionism On The Rise concludes that perfectionist tendencies start in youth and are becoming more prevalent in society. In a fascinating meta-analysis of perfectionism rates, which I’ve read so that you don’t have to, researchers found significant rates of perfectionism in the United States, Canada and the UK – countries that emphasise competitive individualism, where the drive to perform is very high. Interestingly, researcher Andrew Hill notes that ‘the belief that other people expect you to be perfect has increased the most’.

The Cost of Perfection

Socially prescribed perfectionism describes the demand for excellence often placed on people in jobs that require a high degree of precision – surgeons, for example. Individuals in these professions experience a greater sense of hopelessness and are at a greater risk of self-harm due to the extreme pressures of their work. It also applies to those held to high cultural or societal standards and who strive to meet unrealistic goals. Teenagers or adults who feel under societal pressure to acquire the perfect body or who groan under the weight of parental expectation are an obvious example. (Who can relate?)

Feeling defensive about feedback; fixating on mistakes rather than finding better ways to drive performance; feeling pushed towards goals by a fear of missing them rather than being pulled towards the prospect of reaching them; wanting to control situations to avoid negative judgment – these are all colours of perfectionism.

Meet Richard

Much of the training his team is asked to deliver is ineffective: in purpose, timing and content. Richard and his L&D colleagues are considered little more than experts in training delivery – despite their potential to contribute valuable strategic insights that drive performance. Relationships between them and their operational stakeholders are reactive and transactional. Twice last year, Richard expressed his concerns to his department lead, which drew little more than empathetic nods and redirection to focus on 'the day job'. With no support elsewhere in his organisation, Richard has retreated. He lacks the motivation to take up the issue again. The L&D team continues to signal their worth by meeting KPIs that neither drive performance nor focus on the business or cultural impact.

Richard is a composite, drawn from the experience of learning and development professionals around the world. 

His experiences are common in organisations with a perfectionist culture where there is a laser focus on doing the same things perfectly, even if they don’t drive performance. Yet a vast meta-analysis of 30 years of studies into perfectionist organisations, conducted at the Georgia Institute of Technology, found no evidence of perfection driving performance.

Perfection is the default setting in many organisations, but the cost is high. A perfectionist culture is less likely to gather and leverage the best ideas in the organisation. A perfectionist culture is more likely to find it hard to adapt and change in VUCA world. A perfectionist culture does not encourage the broadening and deepening of knowledge to respond effectively to the world as it inevitably changes.

The Perfectionism Spiral

In perfectionist organisation cultures, it isn’t OK to say you don’t know something. So you’ll operate from what you think you know, which makes it more likely that you will make errors – ironically, what you’re trying to eliminate. This way of being tends to get more pronounced the higher up people get in their organisations because the criteria for success are stringent and the margins for error are small.

An adjacent issue is that those below you in the hierarchy want to please you, and can’t be relied on to provide you with an accurate picture of what is happening in the organisation. In a perfectionist culture, any error is a deal-breaker (because errors kill perfection), so seeking frank feedback will be difficult to get. This state of affairs doesn’t drive performance, it stunts it.

The smartest of us makes mistakes. 

• We have cognitive biases. Our cognitive biases are great at explaining how our evolutionary programming causes us to make poor decisions, but knowledge of these biases doesn’t stop us from going astray. Everyday situations like exhaustion, being overly focused on a task, being distracted, and peer pressure negatively affect our performance.

• We’re increasingly distracted. Our attention is more divided than ever. Attention residue is the idea that there is a cognitive cost to shifting your attention from one task to another. When our attention is shifted, there is a ‘residue’ that remains in the brain and reduces our cognitive performance on the new task.

• We have the wrong inputs. When we make decisions based on faulty assumptions, we’ll struggle to achieve our desired outcomes. Similarly, we can use incorrect mental models (our worldview or explanation of how things work) to make our decisions; for example, we can use models that are false, incomplete or irrelevant. The chance of using the wrong models increases as the pace of environmental change increases.

• We fail to learn. It’s easy to tell people that we have 10 years of experience, but is that the first year repeated 9 times? If we don’t understand how we learn, we’ll make the same mistakes repeatedly.

• We put a premium on looking good. Our evolutionary programming is set to ‘easy’ versus ‘doing the right thing’. That’s why it’s easy to virtue signal rather than be virtuous. As a result, we make choices based on how we’ll look and feel. We don’t want criticism; we want validation of our peers and superiors first and driving performance second.
  

At Purposefully Blended, we use our extensive behavioural science toolkit to create blended learning solutions for our clients that drive performance and desired outcomes.

We’re realists: we believe in taking advantage of how the world works. For example, it doesn’t matter how brilliant you are if you’re unable to identify where things have an additive effect and where they have a multiplicative effect. The multiplicative effect illustrates this self-evident truth: anything multiplied by zero will be zero, no matter how extensive the string of zeros preceding the number. It means all your brilliance may still be worth nothing if there is a weak link in the chain. The  additive effect is more generous: systems add to one another to create a result.

Our signature IMPACT^TM leadership model was specifically designed to help organisations achieve sustainable, transformative change by addressing the interrelationships between the six core dimensions of leadership. You cannot, for example, transform an organisational culture if you have no way of measuring the impact of your interventions. In my fictitious case study above, Richard was unable to influence outcomes in meaningful way due to his lack of skill in influencing stakeholders. As a result, he feels demotivated and frustrated in his apparent inability to effect the changes that will drive performance.

We’re enablers: drivers of individual, team and organisational performance. Our work entails supporting our clients to align the cultural and strategic realities of work to respond to the needs of an ever-evolving business environment. Broadly, this entails the following:

• Developing mindsets for leadership. Whilst there is much-warranted support for a growth mindset, the complexity of what leaders need to drive performance can't be understood by a singular mindset. Growth leaders share a common series of mindsets and behaviours, and those that display just three out of the key growth mindsets are 2.4 times more likely to profitably outgrow their peers.

• Blended learning solutions. Our high-impact solutions incorporate both formal and informal learning opportunities for growth and drive performance.

• Coaching. To drive performance, we believe coaching is the most powerful leadership capability. It’s worth adding that ‘an effective manager-as-coach asks questions instead of providing answers, supports employees instead of judging them, and facilitates their development instead of dictating...’

• Creating the right learner pathways. We subscribe to the 70-20-10 model for Learning and Development that describes the optimal sources of learning by managers who have a track record of success in driving performance.  Per the model, individuals acquire 70% of their knowledge from job-related experiences, 20% from interactions with others, and 10% from formal educational events.

• Our signature IMPACT^TM system. Our signature model is the secret sauce behind our transformations. Designed for leaders, it comprises 6 core dimensions of leadership and equips leaders with the capabilities they need to drive exceptional performance, whether that is through learning partnership or ‘on the job’ coaching.
  

Driving Performance Through Growth

In Choosing to Grow: The Leader’s Blueprint, which draws on extensive research from McKinsey, we see that growth-oriented leaders react decisively to short-term disruptions and 'build organisational resilience and agility to respond to change and leverage disruption'. 

In addition we see that, ‘leaders who choose growth and outperform their peers not only think, act, and speak differently; they align around a shared mindset, strategy, and capabilities. In turn, they actively track leading and lagging growth indicators to tie their aspirations to clear and measurable key performance indicators (KPIs).’ 

How's Your Organisation Faring?

Performing in a volatile, unstable, complex and ambiguous world warrants support from a trusted partner. Purposefully Blended continues to support global Learning and Development Managers with the capabilities or additional expert resource they need to identify, build and implement effective blended learning solutions consistently and at scale. We continue to equip First-Line Managers with coaching capabilities that embed, apply and sustain the learning. When these two roles work in harmony, they have a dramatic, transformative impact on outcomes.

Interested in getting our help to drive performance in your organisation?