Obsessing about performance can hinder your success

Among the many variables that determine your career success, the ability to perform well in front of others, particularly critical stakeholders (bosses, clients, potential employers, or teachers) interested in evaluating your potential, cannot be underestimated. So much so, that much of the difference between average and high achievers is due, not so much to competence or actual talent but to the ability to perform well when it matters. Those key instances when you are in the spotlight, when you’re auditioning to get ahead in life, with a chance to positively influence others.

Research shows, unsurprisingly, that people who can handle performance anxiety, enjoy performing under pressure, and are aware of others’ expectations have an edge during consequential interactions. That’s whether it’s a job interview, a yearly performance evaluation, a sales pitch with clients, or a significant networking opportunity. 

And yet, obsessing over performance can hinder your career success, largely by limiting your growth potential and long-term development. Research shows that an unhealthy obsession with performance brings crucial risks.

Risks perfectionism

Chasing perfection has been shown to increase procrastination, and status-anxiety, and to harm performance. For every extraordinary achiever who is a self-proclaimed perfectionist, many more perfectionists fail to deliver results, complete work on time, or be satisfied with their work.  

Promotes sandbagging

The tactic of deliberately understating goals or targets to ensure you never come up short is a bad version of the “under-promise and overdeliver” mantra. We call this sandbagging or playing not to lose by setting lower targets than possible rather than playing to win.

Worse, when this tactic includes subsequent bragging or showing off after delivering results like “we over-delivered by 25%” or “exceeded our targets/expectations,” it can lock you into an approach that threatens actual progress.

Encourages playing it safe

It favors engaging in risk-averse “tried and true” initiatives, reducing opportunities for productive experimentation and smart failure. If you know it’s going to work in advance, it’s not innovation. And without innovation, the risk of stagnation—for both individuals and companies— intensifies. 

Emphasizes style over substance

When you focus too much on making a good impression, you fall into the habit of attending more to others’ perceptions of you than to the actual task. When you focus on how your actions look, rather than on solving problems and making progress, don’t be surprised that when you don’t learn. As one of our colleagues joked during the early phase of the pandemic, when offices closed and people were sent to work from home: “but without the office, how will I pretend to work?”

Reduces honesty

The dark side of reputation management is a mild form of deception, which can be exacerbated if your colleagues are Machiavellian or you operate in an environment in which bragging, engineering credit and blame, and engaging in manipulation tactics are the norm rather than the exception.

Likewise, when you’re worried about seeming strong and smart to others, you become afraid to display the natural vulnerabilities that come with admitting what you don’t know, nurturing your curiosity and desire to learn and improve, and allowing others to trust you more. 

Additional threats

Adding to these risk factors for individual careers, organizations dominated by performance-obsessed people build cultures that thwart collaboration and can even become toxic. When a culture rewards short-term personal wins over long-term collective impact, it’s only a matter of time before you’re on a sinking ship. 

In performance-obsessed environments, psychological safety suffers. People are less likely to speak up with uncertain ideas, concerns and failures, and less likely to report on antisocial or bad behaviors (e.g., bullying, harassment, corruption, etc.).  They internalize the motivation to care more about their own agenda than about the well-being of others. 

In an uncertain business environment, it’s essential to balance a performance orientation with a focus on learning and experimenting; this blend is what makes optimal organizational outcomes possible.

To support this orientation, we need effective and ethical leadership to establish the processes, incentives, and culture that foster learning as a strategy for performing and mitigating the unintended negative consequences of a performance-obsessed world. 

In particular, we recommend an approach that builds longer-term success through learning.

Five leadership actions to take

Emphasize the reality of human error. Make this clear and discussable in your organization. Mistakes will happen. To err is human. The quicker they are caught and corrected the better off is the company.

Put blamefree reporting structures and systems in place. Blamefree reporting does not mean blamefree actions: When people behave badly, engage in bullying or unethical conduct, it’s crucial for the future of the company that they face consequences. It’s instead about resolving never to shoot the messenger and making sure that people understand that it’s safe to report mistakes, problems, and failures honestly and quickly. No company can convert failures and problems into learnings and solutions when you don’t know about them.  

Clarify the formula for smart risks. This makes it easy for you and your company have plenty of intelligent failures from which to learn. This means identifying opportunities in new territory that are conducive to informed small experiments. This is as valuable in your own career as it is in any company that hopes to thrive over the long term. 

After any failure, always ask “what happened” (not “Who did it?” or even “what caused it?”). This question opens more possibilities, fosters brainstorming with an open mind, and allows you to construct the story of events as they unfolded. This approach leads to insights about causes that might otherwise have been missed.

Make failure analysis a team sport. Different perspectives on the events and factors leading up to a failure enrich our understanding of its multifaceted nature and enable more robust and useful lessons.

Performance is about achieving goals, and performance clearly matters for career success. But success over the long term means willingly taking on challenges where failure is a distinct possibility. An unhealthy obsession with performance brings the dysfunctions of perfectionism, limits growth and adventure, and ultimately blocks career success.

Choosing learning over performance paradoxically ensures organizational performance—as well as career success.