How to Prevent a Culture of Excuses

When something goes wrong or an obstacle is encountered, do people default to making excuses or finding solutions?

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When something goes wrong or an obstacle is encountered, what's the first thing that people around you try to do? Do they accept responsibility and immediately identify and implement a solution? Or, instead, is their natural inclination to explain away what happened and, in the process, blame something or someone else? If it's typically the latter, then you unfortunately may be caught in a culture of excuses.

"Well, excu-u-use me" may have been the catchphrase of comedian and actor Steve Martin. But it would be a bad motto for your organization, team, social circle, or whatever group you belong to right now. An excuse is a way of shirking and hiding from responsibility. It also allows for shoddy and substandard work or other output. If you want to not achieve your goals, hopes, and dreams, a good way is to keep making excuses. After all, you don't hear award acceptance speeches begin with, "My life really turned for the better when I started making excuses."

Moreover, excuses can be like termites, steadily eating away at everything around you. Over time, when people feel that they can get away with making excuses, the productivity and the quality of the products and services rendered take a nosedive, making it more difficult to recruit and retain quality people. After all, those who are talented, motivated, and ambitious won't want to work in a place or situation where the primary products are excuses.

Additionally, excuse-making can be contagious. When others see someone getting away with making excuses, they may start following suit. Pretty soon excuse-making can become the norm. And voilà, that's when you have a culture of making excuses.

A culture of excuse-making can manifest not only in professional settings but personal ones as well. You may have a significant other or friend who consistently disappoints you but always seems to have an explanation for doing so. "Oh, I said this because of, you know, having too much rum fruit cake." Plenty of people will keep leaning on excuses rather than take positive steps towards changing their behavior. At some point, excuse-making goes from being an occasional thing to a character trait.

So, how do you prevent or reverse a culture of excuses? The first step is to recognize when people are defaulting to making excuses. It's OK for someone to occasionally make excuses when appropriate. For example, someone saying, "I was going to do that but my arms fell off and I had to go to the emergency room" is reasonable, assuming that it is not a regular occurrence. But when explaining away mistakes becomes routine, that person and you have a problem. As they say with doing the macarena on the dance floor, once can be an accident, twice can be a coincidence, but three times is a trend. Once a person has made excuse-making a trend, it's difficult to trust that person anymore.

Excuses are ways of hiding from responsibilities.

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Once you have identified repeated excuse-making, the second step is to call out and express zero tolerance for such behavior. Tell each excuse-maker firmly that he or she has a habit of making excuses. Every time that excuse-maker starts to do what he or she does best, that is, make an excuse, interrupt by saying something like, "Let's focus on solutions."

The third step is to establish clear consequences for excuse-making. When someone makes excuses, how will it affect that person's reputation, treatment, compensation, opportunities, or career advancement? As is the case with many habits, excuse-making will continue until a person faces some real uh-ohs for such behaviors.

Finally, enforce a culture of finding solutions to replace the culture of excuse-making. Tell everyone that you don't want to hear explanations until they have come up with a proposed solution. Ultimately, there should be no excuse for making too many excuses. Jimi Hendrix may have sung, "Excuse me, while I kiss the sky." But constant excuse-making will end up bringing everyone down.