Perfectionism is a word I have learned to hate.
In the past, I would have proudly labeled myself a perfectionist. It felt synonymous with being capable, dedicated, and trustworthy. This mindset seemed to fit right into veterinary culture and I felt like I had FINALLY FOUND MY PEOPLE!
Fifteen years later, that same label feels far less flattering. Perfectionism no longer looks like excellence to me; it looks like fear. Fear of making a mistake. Fear of someone else’s reaction. Fear that one misstep will erase all the good work that came before it.
Perfectionism and the Absence of Safety
In recent years the vet field has gained ground in skillset utilization, fair pay, and mental health awareness. But it has failed to address a critical issue: How perfectionism erodes workplace psychological safety.
In many practices, the unspoken expectation is flawlessness. When mistakes happen–and they will—trust feels conditional. Team members describe feeling micromanaged, publicly corrected, or lectured over everything from a simple clerical error to a true medical mistake. Over time, this creates an environment where no amount of excellent work ever feels like enough.
Perfectionism thrives in these conditions. When the cost of being human feels too high, people stop asking questions, stop speaking up, and stop taking healthy risks. The goal shifts from learning and growth to self-protection.
What Psychological Safety Really Means
If psychological safety is an unfamiliar term to you, don’t worry, you aren’t alone. It’s not a commonly understood concept for most professions, and vet med is no exception.
Psychological safety was coined by Amy Edmondson, a Harvard Business School professor, defining it as a shared belief that a team is safe for interpersonal risk-taking. In her book The Fearless Organization, she paints the picture for psychological safety’s importance in learning, innovation, and high performance in complex environments. In psychologically safe teams, people can ask questions, admit mistakes, raise concerns, and share ideas without fear of punishment or humiliation.
In her book The Fearless Organization, Edmondson emphasizes that psychological safety is not about lowering standards or avoiding accountability. It is about creating the conditions necessary for learning, innovation, and high performance, especially in complex, high-stakes environments like medicine.
How Mistakes Become the Breaking Point
Many veterinary workplaces have strong cultures on the surface: teamwork, shared values, and genuine care for patients. Yet they often falter when mistakes occur.
Mistakes are not the sole determinant of psychological safety, but how they are handled is one of the most powerful signals a team receives. When responses are driven by blame, emotional reactions, or public call-outs, safety is quickly destroyed. Team members become afraid to approach doctors with questions, hesitant to admit uncertainty, and resigned to the idea that they should just be “mentally tougher.”
This is where perfectionism and psychological safety collide. A culture that reacts harshly to error teaches people that perfection is the only acceptable option and that anything less is unsafe.
The Unique Weight of Medical Errors
Medical mistakes carry a different emotional weight than errors in many other fields. Our work directly affects living beings, and the consequences can be serious or even fatal. A heightened sense of responsibility is both natural and appropriate.
But at their core, mistakes in medicine are still human mistakes. They are not moral failures. They are not character flaws. They are often the fastest and most effective teachers we have.
Making a mistake does not define who you are, and it does not diminish your value as a professional or as a person. What does do lasting damage is being met with shame instead of support.
This is where perfectionism quietly does the most damage. When mistakes are treated as personal failures, clinicians internalize them, replay them endlessly, and raise the bar for themselves even higher next time. Not because it improves care but because it feels safer than being wrong again.
Replacing Perfectionism With Process
Last year, I attended the American College of Veterinary Internal Medicine forum and was struck by a three-part lecture on psychological safety in the face of mistakes. Doctors presented the cases that still kept them up at night, not just because of the medical outcome, but because of the lasting impact on their confidence, decision-making, relationships with coworkers, and even their lives at home.
These stories highlighted something we rarely say out loud: perfectionism doesn’t protect us from mistakes, it amplifies their damage.
I was especially interested in the TeamStepps Debrief Checklist, which takes you out of emotional reaction and into objective assessment of a situation. While this tool is an effective way for teams to check in with each other at any point during the day, it can be especially useful to turn down the emotion of making a mistake. This exercise can shift focus from who messed up to what happened in the system, and help individuals and teams move forward without blame or shame.
This checklist turns mistakes into data instead of verdicts.
- Was communication clear?
- Were roles and responsibility understood?
- Was situation awareness maintained? (Did you know the plan)
- Was workload distribution equitable?
- Was task assistance requested or offered?
- Were errors made or avoided?
- Were resources available?
- What went well?
- What one thing should improve?
- What is one thing that could be done differently next time?
Download the free app for Android or Apple for the full TeamStepps resource guide.
Compassion as a Clinical Skill
When a mistake causes harm to a patient, the person involved often carries deep guilt, grief, and trauma. This is precisely why our response matters so much.
Addressing errors with compassion, professionalism, and objectivity does not minimize their seriousness, it honors it. Constructive conversations, system-based problem solving, and emotional support help individuals heal while also making the practice safer for everyone moving forward.
If the veterinary field truly wants better mental health outcomes, we cannot ignore the role perfectionism plays in destroying psychological safety. Shifting away from fear-based responses to mistakes is one of the most powerful changes we can make for our teams, our patients, and ourselves.