There is a world of difference between making an excuse and explaining the cause of a failure.
The difference is responsibility, accountability, and ownership.
Let me give you two examples of bad ways to respond to making a mistake which resulted in a failure of some kind:
- Sue misses a deadline at work and an important client is left in the lurch. When Sue’s manager asks her why this happened, Sue says: “The system was being buggy and so it was impossible for me to complete the tasks in the time I had, so even though I worked hard, I couldn’t meet the deadline. This isn’t my fault at all and so I shouldn’t be held accountable for the client complaints.” Sue is making an excuse: she’s explaining the cause of the failure fully but taking no accountability for the result.
- Christine misses a deadline at work and an important client is left in the lurch. When Christine’s manager asks her why this happened, Christine says: “I’m sorry, I know it’s totally unacceptable. I’ll reach out to the client and smooth things over and let them know I’ll be able to have the deliverable to them by first thing tomorrow. This won’t happen again!” Christine is owning the failure and taking responsibility for both the outcome and the solution, but did you notice what she didn’t do? She didn’t explain the cause of the mistake!
If the system used to perform the work is having technical difficulties, that is valid! But often people with good work ethics are so intrinsically opposed to “making excuses” that they never even explain the circumstances because it sounds like an excuse.
As a manager, things like technical issues with my team’s main tool are of vital importance for me to know, and fixing them would genuinely go a long way towards ensuring that the original mistake doesn’t repeat. The problem with Christine wasn’t that she didn’t work hard enough, but she’s treating it like it was – and applying “work harder” as a fix. But the system is still going to be buggy, and Christine is still going to have a hard time.
The correct approach, of course, is both. You need to take accountability for the result even when there were valid obstacles, because of course part of your job is solving those kinds of problems and proactively communicating about them. But you also need to actually explain what would give you the ability to correct the mistake in the future. As long as you’re owning that future, you’re not making excuses – you’re making progress.
