“But there was a train delay.”
A friend of mine managing her own IT business was tired of excuses. With some variations, this phrase has been extensively used by her staff to make a whole range of excuses for not getting work done. Instead of the train it might have been “really bad weather”, “Internet down”, “cleaners destroying the papers” etc. etc. There was always something.
We all fail to get things done sometimes, but it certainly does not benefit your business if all the creative effort goes into making more or less plausible excuses.
Some years ago I met a military man who set up his interior design company after 30 years in the army. You didn’t need to be Holmes to identify where he came from. He called his sales team “my artillery” and quoted The Art of War in his business plan. The company was extremely successful and managed to swallow its main competitor in the second year.
With this in mind, you would expect his office to be nothing less than a cadet training centre. So I was quite surprised to see a bunch of happy, easy-going, bubbly people running madly around the office (but all gone by 5pm). And very, very productive – in fact, more than anyone else in the sector.
I couldn’t resist asking the Major what his management secret was. He pointed his finger towards the wall. There was a piece of paper titled Ten Phrases NOT ALLOWED in the Army Unit No 323. “That’s what my officer gave me in my first day”, he said. “Try to follow this and be work-shy at the same time”. The list is below.
1. “It’s the first time I heard this.
2. I wanted to talk to you but you weren’t around.
3. I didn’t want to bother you.
4. No one’s told me.
5. I didn’t understand.
6. I didn’t think it was important/urgent/necessary.
7. The technology wasn’t working.
8. I told them to do that but they didn’t.
9. But...
10. It’s really hard to explain”.
No matter what this looks like in your organisation, there is a way to deal Masters of Excuses, and this is through clarity. People need to be clear on what they need to do; clear on their reward if it happens and punishment if it does not. The main challenge for a manager is achieving this clarity. There is just no universal recipe: some need to be directed step by step through the process, while others take the final goal and develop their own way of getting there. It is the manager’s responsibility to find the right approach to different people. Not the team member to find the clarity in the manager’s message. And we have seen from our experience that it is something that can be learnt.