Tiffaney McClendon
I need you to sit down to read this. I’m not going to hold your hand as I say it. It’s a hard truth that many leaders—new and seasoned—need to read, understand, accept, and adjust to. You aren’t perfect, and you never will be.
Many leaders hold the misconception that their job is perfection. They believe that they are supposed to be perfect. That they should create perfect circumstances and that if they do their job right, everything will become and remain perfect because of how good they are at being a leader.
This is fallacy. It’s falsehood, hogwash, untruth, and delusion.
The truth is that perfection does not exist! No person is perfect, including you. No circumstance is perfect, ever. No workplace condition will ever be perfect, because it will always be filled with imperfect people in imperfect systems. Because of this, your job as a leader is not to be perfect or to create perfection for yourself, your team, or your organization.
As a leader, your job is to make things as good as they can be and to ensure that your team has what they need to get the work completed despite all the imperfections. You are not a producer of perfection. You are a conductor of chaos. That is your job.
I hope you’re still sitting, because I’m about to throw another hard truth your way. No matter how good you are as a leader, leadership will always be hard. It will never stop being arduous. Even as you build your skills, even as you gain the experience and expertise and knowledge that come with time and development, there will continue to be difficulties in navigating leadership. They will be different over time. As you change and your roles change, the challenges you face will change as well. But you will never, ever be without any challenges. Because that’s not how leadership works.
So if you are struggling with your leadership journey because you keep striving to be perfect and waiting for perfection to show up around you, I have good news for you. You can put down that burden. It’s not real. It never was. Perfection isn’t coming. So you can let that go and get to work on being the best leader you can within the imperfect circumstances that exist right now.
I hope these truth bombs have been enlightening and freeing. I hope you stop pursuing perfection and begin being amazing right where you are. Because that is just one of the things that makes good leaders great.