I generally believe taking pride in your work is a hugely important characteristic commonly found in high-performing professionals. When you take pride in your work, you care. You are more likely to go above and beyond. You are likely to re-read before hitting send. Taking pride in what you do also correlates positively with effort; you’re going to put more in because it matters to you.

For these reasons, I like hiring people and working with people who take pride in their work. There are two watch-outs, though. First, when someone takes immense pride in their work, it can occasionally lead them to strive for perfection. Perfection is impossible to achieve. There’s a gap between excellence and perfection, and in almost all scenarios ‘excellent’ is a sufficient bar to strive for. Usually, I start to wonder if someone is falling into the perfection trap if they always deliver extremely high-quality work but consistently struggle to keep up with the pace of deliverables, if they deliver work after a reasonable, mutually agreed-upon deadline has passed, or if they can only hit the deadline by working an unreasonable amount. Second, is when I notice someone struggle to get started on a new project or work deliverable. The desire to deliver a work product close to perfection can lead to inaction by creating this intimidating invisible barrier to start.

Fortunately, I’d much rather work with someone who struggles with these challenges than someone who doesn’t give a shit. With coaching, it’s possible to educate someone on the declining marginal benefit of taking something close to ‘perfection’, and make them feel really, really good about delivering something that’s (just) excellent. There’s still a lot of pride to be had and finding that sweet spot between quality and effort is an important learned skill.

Part of building good professional judgement over time is knowing which projects and work products require more or less time and effort and whether the investment is likely to impact the outcome. For far too long, my desire to take pride in my work resulted in me investing too much effort into deliverables where the quality didn’t necessarily impact the outcome much. Spending an hour honing the perfect email proposal to an executive at a client, who you can reasonably predict might skim the email and say “let’s hop on the phone” may not be the best investment. I try to remind myself of the intended outcome of what I’m working on to help calibrate what level of effort should go into it, despite a general desire to produce something I can be proud of.