“Breaking through Excuses” — worth pondering.
Cleaning out some files, I just came across a photocopy from a couple of years back — a May 2005 article by Jeffrey Pfeffer in Business 2.0:
Having espoused my views on the importance of human capital in this column for the past two years, I’ve grown accustomed to reader responses that go something like this: “Hey, Jeff. Loved what you wrote about treating employees better to capture their discretionary effort. Promoting learning by building a culture that tolerates mistakes? Great idea! Trouble is, we can’t do it. Too much day-to-day stuff that takes precedence. Wish we had the time, money, and other resources to change the way we do things, but you know how it goes.”
It’s as though a requirement for entering the ranks of corporate management today is the ability to generate excuses for why it’s impossible to do things everyone agrees are important.
The whole column is worth reading — especially if you find that you have to deal with lots of excuses from day to day.
In my own life, I hear plenty of excuses, for three reasons:
1. My other “job” is as a Ph.D. student at my revered alma mater. As part of this work, I grade papers and tests for professors in my department, and I’m the initial point of contact for undergraduates who want to complain about the grades I’ve given them. No horror stories to report — e.g. no student has yet put a parent on the phone to berate me — but you won’t be surprised to hear that 19-year-olds have lots and lots of reasons (though few of them good) for failing to study.
2. Even though Hoover’s is a fine company with great people and a long record of success, it’s still a group of human beings we’re talking about. It’s inevitable that sometimes we end up making excuses to each other about what went wrong, what didn’t get done, or the like. This workplace operates better than any other I’ve ever been in, but we have our foibles like anybody.
3. I myself seem particularly foible-prone, and I often bite off more than I can chew. So I make excuses to myself.
The hard part about coming to grips with excuses in any workplace is this: we need explanations for our failures if we’re going to have any hope of avoiding similar failures in the future. But because we’re human and it hurts to admit when we’ve done a poor job (or made unwise decisions etc.), we tend to morph those explanations into excuses that forgive us for our failures.
The grown-up thing to do, of course, is to admit the failure, embrace its lessons, and then trust that you and your colleagues are mature enough to award forgiveness to people who’ve earned it for trying hard, not to people who have managed to dodge responsibility for their own actions or inactions.
Dodging responsibility — and other forms of childlike behavior — more or less dictates that you’ll have to face the same problems over and over again, because all the excuse-making ensures that issues don’t get fixed the first time. Which leads Pfeffer to this conclusion:
As the saying goes, the definition of insanity is doing the same thing over and over again and expecting the outcome to change. Excuses, therefore, drag organizations toward an insane, unprofitable end. As a leader, it’s your job to counteract them. Or don’t, and you and your team can trade excuses all day about why you’re unemployed.
Like I said: worth pondering.
UPDATE, 19 April 2008: Here are a couple of other links about excuse-making from Rajesh Setty’s “Life Beyond Code” blog:
- Ways to distinguish yourself #176 - Stop believing in your own (weak) excuses - “Excuses are OK but the real problem is when you actually believe in those excuses. The fact remains that the best excuse is still an excuse. By fully believing in that excuse, you have reducing your level of responsibility and accountability to your own promise. When you do that, nobody else but YOU will get hurt.”
- Do you have results or explanations for no results?
~
Category: The working life
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[...] questions about what their real work is and what they need to do to accomplish it. They need to examine — and then discard — their excuses. They need to really think about what value they [...]