I’m banishing excuse (the noun, not the verb) from my vocabulary. It serves no useful purpose. I made the decision after I realized that the only difference between an excuse and an explanation is which side of the conversation you’re on: It’s an excuse when it’s an explanation you give me that I don’t think is good enough.
Certainly, some explanations are better than others. “I didn’t get it done because my daughter’s appendix ruptured and we had to take her to the hospital for emergency surgery,” is a better explanation for failing to meet a deadline than “I couldn’t find a banana to put into my breakfast smoothie, so I decided to go back to bed for the rest of the day.”
Unless, that is, an employee presents the latter as a symptom of some psychological pathology, at which point we’re in ADA (Americans with Disabilities Act) territory and the explanation might prove to be both legally and clinically valid after all.
When discussing failed assignments and missed deadlines with employees, there are three variables to consider: Timeliness, reasonability, and emphasis. The sins of what we commonly call excuses are that they are too late, not reasonable, emphasize a problem instead of a solution, or some combination of the three.
When your daughter tells her Literature teacher “My dog ate my homework,” her explanation is a problem even if Spot really is digesting her book report.
If Spot hasn’t masticated your daughter’s essay, and is therefore blameless, we’ve left the realm of excuses and entered that of outright falsehood — an entirely different domain. You should not tolerate dishonesty, because it makes you work much harder than necessary to get accurate information.
This is the real problem with dishonesty. It’s worse than immoral. It’s inefficient. It also isn’t the subject of this column, which is, just to remind you, about the explanations employees give to explain why they fail to deliver assignments on time and in satisfactory form.
When employees give you an explanation for failing to deliver on an assignment, here are the key issues:
- They are giving you a problem instead of a solution. Even when an employee blows a deadline completely, he or she is still responsible for providing a plan for recovering from the problem. This is always the case.
- They are giving you an explanation after the deadline instead of a warning before it. Unless the explanation is an unforeseeable, last-minute event, basic professionalism requires employees to let you know of problems before they happen, not after.
- The explanation they provide might, in your eyes, be something you expect them to be able to handle. This is where managers and employees most frequently find themselves at odds.
If an employee fails to make a date or to meet your needs, there’s always a reason. The reason might be insufficient competence, procrastination, conflicting priorities, an unrealistic deadline, motivation, unclear expectations, changed circumstances, new information, unexpected circumstances, or insufficient communication, to name just the most common.
Not one of these deserves to be waved off as just an excuse. If the employee wasn’t competent to perform the assignment, the fault is yours for delegating to the wrong person. If it’s procrastination, you should ask yourself whether more frequent follow-up meetings might have kept progress on track. Conflicting priorities? At a minimum, help employees understand how to deal with them (and yes, “work more hours” is a reasonable expectation for salaried employees, so long as you ask it as an exception, not a way of life). And so on.
Too often, when managers complain that employees are making excuses, they’re really using it as an excuse for their own poor delegation technique. Always, when an employee fails on an assignment the manager’s second question should be, “What might I have done differently?” (The first question: What really happened?)
When you delegate, handle the assignments the way good project managers handle projects — schedule regular follow-up meetings with the employee to review progress, recognize risks and issues, and in general keep things on track. If you do, you’ll help employees acquire the right work habits while you prevent both unpleasant surprises and the need for employees to give you an explanation for why they missed a deadline.
So I’m retiring excuse from my vocabulary. It’s useful only for starting arguments, encouraging defensiveness, assigning blame, and damaging relationships. These are all enjoyable pastimes, no doubt about it.
But in the end, because the word does so much more harm than good, there’s just no good excuse for using it.