Perfectionism is the most expensive habit in this industry. (I should know—I’ve been a recovering perfectionist for my whole career.) If you hand a staff member a project and they do it 80 percent right, do you quietly fix it when they’re not looking? It may feel as if it is easier, but it comes across as micromanagement, and even worse, that their judgment doesn’t count.

Some design firm founders resist delegation and justify control because the work carries their name. Unfortunately, you can’t scale yourself. Here’s the math I share with founders when they tell me it’s faster to do it themselves.

WHAT TAKING IT BACK COSTS
There are three costs to the “fix the last 20 percent” approach, and one of them dramatically affects your P&L.

The first is your hourly value. If your time is worth $300 an hour in the seats only you can fill—say, pitching a $400,000 project, negotiating better trade discounts, upleveling your marketing to attract a better client—then every hour spent redesigning a space your junior designer created costs the firm $300. Six hours a week of redoing someone else’s work is $93,600 a year on tasks you already pay someone else to do.

The second cost is capacity. When you redo the work, you’ve consumed an hour of your time as well as the staffer’s hours that could have gone elsewhere. In short, your firm paid twice for one deliverable.

The third cost is higher than the other two. Fix someone’s work without telling them what you changed, and they learn to bring you the 80 percent version and wait for you to finish it. You lose that person’s judgment and trust even as you continue to pay for it. I’ve watched excellent designers leave firms that were run this way. The founder mistakenly reads the silence as proof they were right to keep doing the work—until they lose their best employees.

MAKE YOUR STANDARDS VISIBLE AND TRAIN YOUR TEAM
This is where perfectionists get delegation wrong. We hand over the steps and keep the judgment, then treat the inevitable errors as evidence the person can’t do the job.

But nobody can meet a standard that lives only in your head.

Document your “company way.” For each function, write a one-page summary of what “done” looks like; two to three criteria that would cause you to reject (read: redo) the work; and the decisions the team member can make on their own, including details like how much company money they can commit without your approval. If you’ve been redoing the same type of work for years, you haven’t clarified what done looks like, and you haven’t empowered your team with the authority to act without your go-ahead.

Here’s the test: If you can’t describe what constitutes “excellent” work without doing it yourself, you don’t have a delegation problem—you have an undocumented standard.

WHO WILL DO WHAT BY WHEN
Every accountability failure I see in a design firm traces to a missing owner, a missing deliverable, a missing date or an unstated standard.

“Sarah’s handling the Weber install” is not an assignment. “Sarah owns the Weber punch list, delivered to the client by October 12 with photos aligned to our firm-wide communication and deliverable SOPs” is an assignment. When the expectations are clearly stated, it’s easy to determine if the task has been done on time and according to your firm’s standards. No hovering is required.

When something slips, the conversation is about a commitment that was dropped, which is a far easier talk than one about how you feel about someone’s work ethic or skills.

LET THE NUMBERS TELL THE STORY
The firms that position their founder in a leader role versus a manager role use key performance indicators and a scorecard to track them. For example, if the requirement is for a team member to bill 32 hours a week, and the KPI scorecard is updated weekly and visible to everyone on the team, it’s clear whether he or she is meeting expectations.

Here are other examples by role: The project manager owns on-time install percentages. The designer owns hours compared to budget. The sales seat owns pipeline against monthly overhead. When those numbers are on track, no conversation is required. When one metric is off for two weeks running, it’s time to talk about what’s happening and come up with a strategy to get it back on track.

If this idea makes you tense up, picturing a stressed-out team racing to hit their numbers, give the system a whirl before writing it off. My experience? Perfectionists’ first tendency is to resist metrics, but once they manage the team with metrics, they can’t live without them. Metrics inspect the work so you don’t have to. Oversight moves from micromanagement on a day-to-day basis, where objectives are a moving target, to weekly check-ins about consistent and predictable work dimensions—and the team stops experiencing the process as surveillance.

SEPARATE YOUR PERFECTIONISM FROM THEIR PERFORMANCE
Metrics won’t work if you don’t trust the team member.

Two things can be true at once: You’re a perfectionist who needs to let go of some control, and someone on your team is still underperforming. Before you have the difficult conversation, assess whether you’re holding that person to your standard (which may be too high), or whether you’re holding them to an objective metric. Explain the standard, the assignment and the metric; then review everything again in 90 days. If the number moves, the problem was your perception. If it doesn’t move, but the person can explain why they didn’t reach the goal, coach them. If you’ve coached them (and sometimes it takes seven repetitions), and prompted them to do the exercise of “How would you explain this to someone else?” and they continue to miss the mark, then it might be time to release that person to find a job that fits them better.

The firms that scale past their founder are run by people who understand how they are measured against clearly articulated and documented standards. Remember that your team wants to do a great job and please you. Help them succeed by setting clear expectations, training them, and being clear and kind if it isn’t working.

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Gail Doby is co-founder of Pearl Collective (formerly Gail Doby Coaching & Consulting), an interior design business consultancy that helps designers, architects and other creatives increase their profitability. Doby ran her own design firm in Denver for nearly 20 years and has a degree in finance and banking. Since 2008, she has been helping designers scale their businesses profitably and reach financial freedom. As a coach, mentor and business transformation specialist, she shares innovative ways to overcome the roadblocks, challenges and detours creative entrepreneurs face. She is also the bestselling author of Business Breakthrough: Your Creative Value Blueprint to Get Paid What You’re Worth. Her goal is to empower design industry clients to differentiate themselves, drive measurable results, achieve business projections, and create personal satisfaction through game-changing strategies and business practices.