Last fall, I taught my first collegiate sustainability course for the University of Iowa’s Evening MBA Program. If you’re like me — a recovering perfectionist — you can relate to this story. When environmental issues you care about can often (literally) seem like life or death… the end of the world, etc… then every decision feels like it carries a lot of weight.

The responsibilities and expectations placed on supervisors are enormous at times—production, workforce management, quality control, budgets, and of course safety. These “deliverables” communicated to them by management require the supervisor to work within the employers system to effectively perform their duties.