There is a finding in my MSc research that I did not expect, and which I have found more useful in practice than any of the results I actually went looking for.

Some background. When researchers measure perfectionism properly, they do not treat it as one thing. Hewitt and Flett, back in 1991, split it into three dimensions, and that split has held up ever since. I used their scale, all forty-five items of it, on a sample of working professionals.

The three dimensions are these.

Self-oriented perfectionism is the demand for perfection in yourself. Striving for perfectionistic standards, and then rigorously evaluating and censoring your own behaviour against them.

Socially prescribed perfectionism is the perceived need to obtain and sustain standards which you believe are expected of you by other people and by your environment. Not standards you have chosen. Standards you believe are being applied to you.

Other-oriented perfectionism is your expectation of everybody else. Setting unrealistic standards for other people, believing they ought to be striving for perfection too, and evaluating their performance stringently when they fall short.

Now. If you had asked me beforehand which of those three would be most associated with psychological distress, I think I would have said something diplomatic about all three. What the data said was much less diplomatic.

The ones who suffer

Self-oriented and socially prescribed perfectionism were both strongly related to psychological distress, and both predicted the two mechanisms underneath it, intolerance of uncertainty and fear of negative evaluation.

So: the person demanding perfection of themselves, and the person who believes the world is demanding perfection of them. Those two are the ones lying awake.

Other-oriented perfectionism showed no significant relationship.

I want to be careful here, because this is one study, on a modest sample, and I am not going to pretend a single MSc thesis has closed the question. But the finding is consistent with what other people have found, and more to the point it is consistent with absolutely everything I have seen in a room.

The colleague you are thinking of

You already know this person. Everybody who has worked anywhere knows this person.

They have impossibly high standards for the team. Nothing is ever quite right when somebody else has done it. They redo other people's work. They have opinions about how you formatted the deck. They are exhausting to work for and they generate a quite remarkable amount of turnover.

And they sleep beautifully.

That is the uncomfortable bit, and I think it is worth saying plainly, because a lot of workplace wellbeing conversation is built on a quiet assumption that the difficult person must be suffering underneath. Sometimes they are. Frequently they are not. Some people simply externalise. The standard goes outward, the disappointment goes outward, and the distress goes outward with it, into everybody else's Tuesday.

The person carrying the distress is usually the quiet one two desks down who has never missed a deadline in nine years and has just written the phrase "sorry, just checking" for the third time this morning.

Why this matters more than it sounds

It matters because of who gets help.

The demanding one is visible. They cause noticeable problems, so they get noticed. They get the coaching, the difficult conversation, the leadership development programme, occasionally the exit. Organisations are quite good at spotting the person who is making everybody else miserable.

The self-oriented one is invisible, by design. They are, on paper, your best employee. They deliver early. They do not complain. They pick up the work nobody else wants. They are the safest pair of hands you have and everybody says so at the end of the year.

They are also, statistically, the one most likely to be in real distress, and they will not tell you, because telling you would constitute a failure to meet the standard, and the standard is the thing keeping them safe.

I said in the opening of my thesis that to identify employees at high risk, you first have to understand how perfectionism contributes to distress. This is why. If you go looking for distressed employees by looking for people who are difficult, or underperforming, or visibly struggling, you will find some. You will systematically miss the ones this research suggests are at highest risk, because they present as the opposite of a problem.

And if you have recognised yourself

Which, statistically, some of you will have.

The thing I would say is that the invisibility is not accidental and it is not modesty. It is part of the pattern. Socially prescribed perfectionism in particular is a belief about what other people require of you, and that belief is very rarely tested, because testing it would mean saying out loud that you are struggling and then finding out what happens.

Most of the time, what happens is considerably less catastrophic than the version in your head. But I am aware that is easy for me to type and quite hard to do on a Tuesday morning.

Anyways. Two things I took from that finding and have never let go of.

The first is that being difficult and being distressed are not the same thing, and we should stop treating them as though one implies the other.

The second is that if you are wondering who in your team is struggling, the honest answer is that you probably cannot tell by looking, and the person you would least expect is a reasonable place to start.

So. Who in your team have you never worried about, not once, not ever? And when did you last actually ask them?

Until next time, Stacy