Don’t tolerate those sorry attempts at justifying failure – no excuses

Leaders must manage excuses from their employees as well as themselves.

“But” is among the most disheartening words for a leader or an employee to hear, as it almost always signals an excuse is coming. It is shocking how easy it is for someone to give an excuse to justify their performance, or shall we say lack of performance, behaviour, and about anything else they want to explain away.

Not long ago, I heard a leader blame everyone else for the way he was acting: “My behaviour is justified because they don’t know how to work here.” This was a Arab expat who spent 25 years of his career working in Europe before returning to the region for his retirement job.

Can you imagine the guile of a leader to blame his behaviour on how someone else acts? He bluntly said: “I am rude because they don’t work like they do in Europe. If they [referring to employees in the region] were not so emotional, then they would not think I am rude.”

I sat there listening to this poor justification for unacceptable behaviour thinking to myself: “The excuses that people come up with never cease to amaze me.” While this was an extreme, it paints the picture of reality – how to manage others’ defensive stories is an everyday part of the leader’s job. Although it’s far more alarming when excuses come to roost in the executive suite, which they had in this case. Actually, most excuses I hear come from senior leaders. So let’s not try to fool ourselves into thinking we don’t make them. We do.

So to begin, let’s commit together to stop making excuses.

There is a fine line between explaining the reason for something and using the reason as an excuse. A “reason” is about understanding something – why it happened, why it didn’t. It is about applying logic, making sense of and verifying the facts. Reasons are statements of fact that explain why something is the way it is, why someone does, thinks or says something, or even behaves in a certain way.

Whereas an “excuse” is assigning blame for what didn’t happen. It explains away a fault or an offence in the hope of being forgiven or understood. Ironically, many leaders use reasons as an excuse to say they are not making an excuse.

A common business excuse is “the targets were too stretching” or “we didn’t have enough time to deliver”. When a leader engages in one of these, he is shifting the locus of blame away from himself and on to another. This is an excuse, not a reason, as it is not based upon fact – it is rather an opinion. To shift this from being an excuse to a reason, you would need to support it with fact.

For example, replying with the following is a reason: It takes me one hour to create X, and you asked for 10 Xs to be created in eight hours. We will need 10 hours to achieve this target. Or we can achieve it in eight hours if you have ideas on how to improve our work. This example uses specific data to explain the performance quagmire.

The effect of the excuse reminds me of the children’s book The Little Engine That Could, which incidentally was used as a textbook for my doctoral seminars on leadership. In this story we find a train that could not get across the daunting mountain ahead but must as it had all of the toys that the kids wanted and food they needed. As the train asked for help, three able engines made excuses why they could not help. Really they were saying why they would not help, because they were able to if they rid themselves of their excuses.

Then the train asked one small unproven engine for help. Even with his self-doubt he overcame his excuse and successfully pulled the train cars across the mountain. He did it.

That is your job as a leader to get rid of excuses and help others get rid of theirs. Make it a priority to create an excuse-free environment in which it is easier to find reasons to achieve than excuses for not.

Tommy Weir is a leadership adviser, author of 10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East and other leadership writings, and the founder of the Emerging Markets Leadership Center