In my day to day
life, I couldn't help but notice these two distinct species of manager, one
being the perfectionist and the other being a people's person, for lack of the
right word, I will refer the people's person as the leader. Let's quickly describe these two:
Perfectionist manager is somebody who has been very good at what he does(did)
and is involved in minute details of day to day work. He more than likely rose to rank based on
Peter's principle(for more information on Peter's principle, see wiki). A leader on the
other hand is loved by his people, he has acquired his team's confidence
and rose to rank based on their support and appreciation.
So what are the differences in various aspect of business
when you have one manager over the other? Let's try to answer this question by analyzing
each involved group:
Team: The team working
with the leader is motivated and happy while the one with perfectionist is
always under pressure to perform at a certain expectation. Both managers would
review their teams work at some point or
the other. The perfectionist would criticize the work and the leader would provide
feedback. The success factor really
depends on team morale and there is no doubt that the leader will always win
over perfectionist.
Customer Unit: Internal
or external customer, they are impacted by the team that will be delivering results
from both managers. The perfectionist manager try hard to get to higher quality
but his team fails to deliver it and the leader relies on the motivation and
team morale to produce high quality results. In the end, a highly motivated can
make the difference where each individual is contributing to the success while
only the perfectionist is contributing to the results on the other end.
Organization Health:
A high team morale and a motivated team is always good for an organization than
a stressed out trying to realize perfection. A motivated team usually
influences other teams within organization to produce similar kind of results.
As it appears, the leader is so far scoring better than the
perfectionist. So, is there a balance between the two, can someone be a great
leader and perfectionist at the same time. In my opinion, it is possible but
very rare. the question would be can a
perfectionist succeed without being the leader? and the answer is same, it is
possible but very rare. There are only a few Steve Jobs like profiles around
the world where you can be a perfectionist and be a very disappointing boss to
work with, and you still succeed. I think then there are other attributes of
the leader like Vision, political outreach within organization etc.. that
contribute to the success.
