The Difference Between Blame and Excuses and Why It’s Important for Leaders “Blame, excuses, they’re both just lack of accountability.” We’ve all heard someone say it. But actually, blame and excuses are two of the four completely different stages (denial, blame, excuses and anxiety) that people go through on their way to reaching accountability. And because the way to deal with blame is quite different than how to deal with excuses, you want to know how to assess where employees are at so you can help them reach accountability that much faster. The difference between blame and excuse can be found in the kind of noun that follows the phrase: “I couldn’t get it done because_____.” If you hear: “I couldn’t get it done because of Keith or Jane or Paul,” or some other proper noun, that’s blame. It’s one of the easiest stages to identify because you just have to listen for the proper noun and you know it’s blame. However, if you hear: “I couldn’t get it done because the server crashed,” that’s an excuse. Unlike blame, where you hear the fault go to “someone”, the fault in excuses gets assigned to “something”. This is where people say, “I get that there’s an issue, and I’ll even accept that it was my issue. But I’m not totally responsible. I couldn’t get that report done because the server went down… I couldn’t do it because the dog ate my homework… Listen, there were mitigating circumstances. Yeah, I guess it’s my responsibility; I’m not assigning it to somebody else… I guess it falls on me, but there were all these other factors that came into play here.” Conversations to help employees or business partners move past blame and excuses When you hear blame you want to have the Ownership Conversation. And this is as simple as saying, “Listen. I don’t want to talk about Bob in accounting. I don’t want to talk about Jill in marketing. All I want to talk about right now is what we can control, right here, right now, you and me right this moment. I don’t want to talk about anybody else. I don’t want to talk about anything outside of our control. I just want to talk about what you and I have control over right here, right now.” The Ownership Conversation reorients the conversation back to the real problem by clearly expressing the message, “I don’t want to talk about these other people, I only want to talk about what you and I have control over.” And that often drives the folks who are in this stage of blame closer to ownership and to accountability. And when you hear excuses, you want to have the No-Excuses Conversation. The thing to understand about excuses is that people make excuses because they feel like they’re being blamed. This is the real linkage between blame and excuses. People make excuses because they feel – whether it’s implicit or explicit – that they’re being blamed for something. You wouldn’t make an excuse if you made a huge mistake. No matter how dumb the mistake is, if you didn’t feel like you would be blamed for it, you wouldn’t offer an excuse. You would say “I made that mistake and you need to move on.” It’s only because we feel like everybody else is going to look at us and say “What a dope” that we have to make the excuse. So, “I didn’t see it…” or “I didn’t get the memo…” Whatever the excuse is, you’re simply going to say “Listen. I’m not blaming you. I’m not blaming anybody. Let’s just focus on the task at hand. Let’s focus on this problem we need to fix, this thing we need to solve right here, right now.” The No-Excuses Conversation explicitly eliminates the idea that there’s any blame and gets people redirected and refocused on solving whatever it is that requires solving. So the next time you hear someone lacking accountability, remember that accountability is not a black or white, either/or kind of phenomenon. It’s an evolutionary process, but you can help people arrive at the final destination of accountability faster. It just requires listening for the clues (is there a personal pronoun?) and then directing the conversation accordingly.
Posted on: Wed, 06 Nov 2013 21:19:55 +0000
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