Leaders everywhere are striving for perfection, but this pursuit is in vain. No one is perfect, and no one needs to be. What’s most important is that you and your team are doing their best, always striving to be better, and consistently meeting goals. Perfection is only a story for suffering because it will consume your thoughts without ever being attainable. Here are some great ways to see past perfection and gain something more valuable: productivity.

Make Processes & Expectations Clear

Failure is inevitable if you don’t take the time to discuss processes and expectations with your team. New team members especially might not understand the most efficient way for accomplishing tasks, and that will certainly create issues when it comes to productivity. Make sure you, as the leader, are being clear with your team members about how things should be getting done. Go over the processes step by step by step.

Furthermore, the level at which these tasks should be accomplished is also important information to impart. (If you don’t share expectations with good examples of what constitutes “work well done” then you only have yourself to blame when you don’t see it.) Only after these two things are made perfectly clear will you be able to help your team achieve perfection.

Set Up Stage Gates

These are important in each and every business and will help leaders achieve a higher level of understanding and a higher level of achievement in their work. Set up specific milestones with your team so they know exactly at which point during a project they should check in with you. Nothing is more frustrating for both team members and organization leaders than getting a project completed in time for deadline only to find that it doesn’t meet the expectations.

Setting appropriate stage gates gives leaders the opportunity to find problems before it is too late and guide their team members along the path to success.

Make Feedback A Priority

Sometimes, team members may expect too much of themselves, and without regular constructive feedback, they can easily get in their own way. Feedback is the key to lowering anxiety and keeping personal expectations at a realistic level.

Make sure that you are checking in with your team members pretty frequently so they understand what you expect of them as well as so they can hear how you feel about their work. Feedback isn’t just about the team members that you manage, however. It’s about you too. Feedback from your superiors as well as from your employees will help you become the best leader you can possibly be.

Always Do Your Best

It’s important to remember that your best is good enough; if it wasn’t, you wouldn’t have the position you hold today. Again, no one is perfect, that’s just a fact. It’s the act of striving for perfection that makes us perfect. By continuing to work hard on each and every task that comes our way, leaders can achieve their own personal perfection and make their organization one of the best.