Beloved, Not Perfect

Ask people to describe the best boss they ever had, and you will notice what they almost never do. They do not describe a flawless person.

We read through 971 of those descriptions. What struck us was not just how often people praised their best boss. It was how rarely they mentioned any shortcoming at all. Fewer than three percent did. And when someone did name a flaw, it almost never arrived alone. One person remembered a supervisor as "a good guy once you see past the seemingly-grumpy facade," the kind who had their backs when things went wrong.

The grumpiness was still there. It just was not the headline.

Most of us have this backward. We assume our shortcomings are the thing standing between us and being the boss someone remembers. So, we work on hiding them, or we wait to lead well until we have fixed them. But the leaders people revere are not the ones with the fewest flaws. They are the ones whose care was obvious enough that the flaws got covered.

Think of it as a grace economy. People extend grace to a leader who has earned it, and it gets earned in only one way: by caring, consistently, in ways people can actually feel. Do that long enough and your impatience becomes something your team works around rather than something they hold against you. The flaw does not disappear. It stops being disqualifying.

Two conditions make this work, and both matter.

First, grace is earned, not owed. Grace is not a discount you claim by announcing that nobody is perfect. It is credit built slowly, and people decide when you have it.

Second, you have to own the flaw out loud. Hidden weaknesses do not go unnoticed; your people see them clearly and read the concealment as something worse than the weakness itself. Named ones get absorbed. There is a strange relief in working for someone who says plainly, “This is the thing I get wrong, and I am working on it.” It gives everyone else permission to be human too.

One honest limit. This is not a license for purposely poor acting. There is a real difference between ordinary human foibles, the impatience or bluntness or disorganization most of us carry, and a flaw so damaging that it becomes the daily experience of working for you. Grace covers the first. It does not cover the second, and no amount of care will buy it.

So, stop auditing yourself for flawlessness as a leader. You will not get there, and it was never the assignment. The real question is whether the people you lead have enough evidence of your care for them to look past what you get wrong.

Beloved was never a synonym for perfect, but it was for care.

Diane Scott, PCC & Aaron Bujnowski, DSc, are co-authors of The Best Boss Effect: Becoming the Positive Leader People Never Forget, which will be released in late 2026.