My grandmother had a nickname.
They called her the white glove lady.
She would walk through our funeral home and find every speck of dust, every light bulb that was slightly out, every piece of furniture that was just a hair off-center. And growing up watching her, watching my mother, watching the way our family cared for every single detail of every family we served, I absorbed it all. Deeply.
We served families in their most devastating moments. You cannot redo a funeral. You cannot go back. So the standard had to be perfection, didn’t it?
I carried that into my leadership. I stayed late typing death certificates because they had to be exact. I wrote obituaries by hand, polished and repolished every word. I stayed up fixing, tweaking, adjusting. And when my staff made mistakes, something in me would tighten.
I thought I was holding the standard. I thought I was protecting our families.
What I didn’t realize was this: I was also holding my people hostage to an impossible standard. And in doing so, I was slowly losing them.
Here is the wake-up call I didn’t see coming.
I made myself vulnerable. I asked my team members directly: What can I do to be a better employer? A better supporter? What can we do here at this company to become better leaders?
And they told me. Consistently, honestly, the answer came back: Lisa was a perfectionist. And sometimes, you just need to let that go.
We did an anonymous 360-degree evaluation on the entire leadership team. When I received my report, I cried. I was heartbroken to learn that I had let my people down. Not because I didn’t care. But because in trying to be gritty and tough and prove that I could lead, I had forgotten to show them my human side. My Lisa side. My heart.
I was so busy showing them I wouldn’t fail that I forgot to show them I was also someone who was learning, just like them.
There is a difference between excellence and perfectionism.
Excellence asks: Did we serve this family with all the care they deserved?
Perfectionism asks: Was every-single thing flawless, and if not, whose fault is it?
Excellence lifts your team. Perfectionism quietly erodes them.
As a leader in this profession, your standards are not the problem. Your compassion for the families you serve is not the problem. The problem comes when those standards shift from being a form of love and care into a source of fear and control. For yourself, and for the people around you.
A mistake is not a catastrophe. It is a teaching moment. And when you use it that way, you build something far more powerful than a perfect funeral: you build a team that trusts you. That grows with you. That stays with you.
When I finally learned to let go, when I started trusting my people, when I began to show them my whole self and not just my armor, our culture shifted. Our retention grew to over 98 percent in my last decade as owner. Perfection attracts. Realness keeps.
What is one area where your own perfectionism might be dimming someone else’s light? Sit with that question today.
