It’s been a while. Long enough that some of you won’t remember signing up for this, which is fair enough.
Short version of where I went. I had a baby on my own. I built a company, then another one. Mostly I was surviving, and The Performance Club ticked over in the background on whatever work came to me rather than work I went looking for.
Anyway. I’m properly back in it, there are two new sites to look at, and this is the first issue of The Standard.
What you get, weekly: something about work that people deal with and don’t tend to discuss. I work from the biopsychosocial model, so that’s the physical, the psychological and the social together rather than one of the three on its own. There’ll be research where there is research, and something practical to try. No resilience tips. And if a week turns up nothing worth saying, I won’t send one.
So, this week.
For years I was brought in on the assumption that the perfectionist is the problem. I don’t think that any more. Some of the people I’m asked to support aren’t setting the bar impossibly high. They can’t tell where the bar is, so they do everything twice and stay late. That’s not a character defect. It’s a reasonable response to a moving target.
Your people aren’t more ambitious. They’re more frightened of being judged.
Curran, Hill and Pose have just pooled 307 samples and 82,939 students across Britain, America and Canada, covering 1989 to 2024. Here’s the bit worth your attention. Self-oriented perfectionism, the sort that comes from inside a person, rose gently and in a straight line. Socially prescribed perfectionism, the belief that other people demand flawlessness of you, bent upwards from the early 2000s and hasn’t stopped. Concerns over mistakes and doubts about actions rose too. So the growth isn’t in ambition. It’s in the fear of somebody else’s verdict. The people joining your organisation have been trained to look for a judge before they start the work.
Source: Perfectionism is accelerating over time, Curran, Hill and Pose, Psychological Bulletin, 2026
Ambiguity does more damage than overwork, and you’ve been fixing the wrong one.
Sawhney and colleagues went through sixty years of role stressor research: 515 studies, 588 samples, 787,959 workers. They separated three things organisations routinely lump together. Role overload, too much work. Role conflict, incompatible demands. Role ambiguity, not knowing what’s expected of you. Ambiguity came out as the most damaging of the three. Not the volume of it. The vagueness of it. I mean, think about what that does to your wellbeing budget. You’ve been buying resilience sessions and time management training for a problem that’s mostly about nobody having said out loud what “good” actually looks like.
Sources: A meta-analytic review of 60 years of role stressor research, Sawhney et al., Journal of Vocational Behavior, 2026, written up in Research: work stress isn’t always about workload, Harvard Business Review, 17 September 2026
You made redundant the people whose job was to say what good looks like.
Korn Ferry surveyed over 16,000 professionals across eleven markets. Forty-two per cent of organisations cut manager roles this year. Around half the managers left report being exhausted. And thirty-nine per cent of employees say the shortage of managers has left them feeling directionless. Meanwhile sixty-two per cent are carrying heavier workloads than two years ago and sixty-one per cent are doing the work of more than one role. Delayering gets sold as efficiency, and on a spreadsheet it is. But the middle manager wasn’t only a cost. She was the person who told you your draft was fine and you could stop now. Take her out and everyone sets their own bar, in the dark, on the high side.
Source: Half of employees too busy to deliver meaningful work, survey finds, on Korn Ferry’s Workforce 2026 Global Insights Report, People Management, 11 September 2026
People who can’t see how they’re measured will over-produce for safety.
Gallup asked 22,573 workers in May whether they trust their leaders to use employee data responsibly. Twenty per cent said a great deal. Thirty-seven per cent said not much, or not at all. The one worth sitting with is the not-knowing: fifteen per cent have no idea whether their activity is tracked, and twenty-one per cent have no idea whether their emails and meetings are being read. A fifth of your people are working with no sense of who’s watching or what they’re looking for. Nobody in that position does less. They do more, they do it defensively, and everyone calls it being thorough.
Source: Employee data use: one in five trust leaders a great deal, Gallup, 24 September 2026
You can’t appraise people against a job you are currently rewriting.
McKinsey Global Institute reckons 11 million American workers, about 7 per cent of the labour force, may have to change occupation over the next decade: around 770,000 a year against a long-run average of 215,000. Roughly 70 per cent will see their role reshaped in some way, at three to four times the historical pace. Put that next to the perfectionism data. The job’s being rewritten underneath people whilst they’re still being measured against the old version of it. And then we act surprised when they check everything four times and won’t send the work.
Source: AI may cause 11 million Americans to change occupations, on McKinsey Global Institute’s Workforce in motion, Axios, 29 September 2026
One thing to do with this
Pick one thing your team produces every week. Write down in plain language what “finished” looks like, what “good enough to send” looks like, and who decides. Two sentences each, no more. Then read it out in your next team meeting and watch how many people have been quietly guessing. That number’s your baseline. Do that before you book another resilience session.