How to Spot a Perfectionist at Work
One of the oldest, and still successful, ploys job applicants use to gain favor with coveted employers involves a classic question:
“What’s your biggest weakness?” Answer: “I work too hard” or, even better, “I care so much about producing high-quality work that I sometimes lose myself in the process.”
If a follow-up question entails any inquiry into what the applicant does to solve this problem, the response is generally vague, such as “I focus on self-care” or, with unintentional irony, “I find running marathons helps.”
Over the last three decades, the definition of a bad worker has changed drastically, especially for knowledge or service workers.
No longer is someone labeled as “lazy” or “lacking in ambition” (although plenty of managers still think in those terms about their employees). Rather, in the ambiguous parlance of performance reviews, employees are rated on their initiative, self-direction, or, possibly, creativity (also called “problem-solving ability”).
One of the harshest twists in the employee evaluation process began during the 2008 Great Recession. Job insecurity and fear of layoffs drove workers to boost their productivity, according to a seminal 2016 paper, “Making Do With Less: Working Harder During Recessions,” from the Stanford Journal of Labor Economics.
The study details how productivity as the defining measure of job performance became standard in the late 2000s. It points to what the authors defined as “technology-based service” jobs. Insurance claims processors, technical call center operators, in-house IT specialists, and airline gate agents, for example, faced speed tests tracked by computers to measure the daily productivity of employees.
As noted by Stanford analysts, that’s the primary reason employee ID numbers exist: not for attendance, but for productivity tracking.
One dramatic example of a job tracked—that many car drivers may not fully appreciate—involves the auto windshield replacement company Safelite. Despite the cheery sunshine and smiles that are present in the company’s TV ads, its repair workers were (and still are) judged on only one thing: the number of windshields replaced every workday.
Value in the workplace changed again in the 2010s, with the always-on culture of smartphones and email.
Office workers once made a point of leaving their suit jackets conspicuously slung over their chairs—or at least left their lights on—when they snuck out early from work.
Email, smartphones, and 24-hour access by the boss destroyed any illusion of leaving work behind, which then tended to encourage or normalize overwork. The necessity of being ever-responsive, at any time of day, was accelerated by the pandemic and remote work, all of which played into the unfortunate proliferation of perfectionism.
Gordon Flett, a Canadian psychology professor, and Paul Hewitt, a clinical psychologist, have studied and written about perfectionism for over 40 years. In an extensive New Yorker article in August 2025, they spoke about those “not driven by aspiration but by fear.”
One thing that distinguishes true perfectionists from those who merely strive for excellence is the sad fact that when the perfectionist actually reaches her goals, it never helps. The perfectionist lives in an endless state of striving, and “success does not deliver the expected dividends of happiness and self-worth.”
What Hewitt continually found in his years of providing therapy for depressed or suicidal perfectionists was their inability to accept mistakes as an avenue for personal growth.
He once asked a patient, near the end of their four-year relationship, what had been most helpful for her. “The thing that was most helpful was when you made a mistake you recognized it, and we got through it,” she said. He was floored that it was his mistakes, rather than his insight and compassion, that were most useful to her.
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In the workplace, perfectionism shows up in well-documented and predictable ways: procrastination, decision paralysis, overinvestment in low-stakes tasks (re-reading an email four times before sending), inability to delegate, and difficulty finishing work.
The inability to close projects leads to missed deadlines and a backlog that often falls on colleagues to fix. The interpersonal costs of “other-oriented” perfectionism—what Hewitt and Flett call “railing against the imperfection of others”—likewise harms workplace culture because lower-level colleagues who are never trusted to work autonomously eventually disengage or leave.
No matter how it’s defined, we know that perfectionism leads to burnout and turnover. Helping perfectionists heal can do the opposite, including, to the amazement of many, leading to increased productivity—and employee retention.
