When doing interviews, one personally trait that is important to asses is perfectionism.

It is easy to be fooled by someone admitting to be a perfectionist because, somehow, we often view this as a quality. We probably believe that a perfectionist will be someone striving for accomplishments, who will be motivated to persevere in the face of discouragement and obstacles. It is important to pay attention to the level of perfectionism in an individual to make sure it will stay at a healthy level of motivation and energy.

Unhealthy perfectionists will exhibit some of these personality traits: emotional guardedness, need for control, fear of failure, need to be above criticism, tendency to be stubborn or confrontational. Negative perfectionism can result in low productivity as individuals lose time and energy on small irrelevant details of larger projects. In the context of a startup, negative perfectionism can have serious consequences on the enterprise, yourself and your team.

One of the important concepts of an agile development environment is to “release early and release often” which condemns you to making lots of compromises. To release early and release often means that you have to be able to accept the fact that the product will not be at the quality or completion level where (you think) you want to bring it in time. To achieve this, scopes must be kept small and progress most be done in iterations. This means that you must be ready to make compromises on some aspects of the project and stay focused of the really important stuff. In other words, you must be ready to accept to do less and probably below your “quality” level and then iterate toward improvement.

When choosing a colleague in an agile startup, make sure you choose someone who will be able to cope with the compromises required for such an environment.