My Cat Ate My Homework

Written by Thomas Ajspur | Nov 2, 2017 2:52:23 PM

Do you remember in school all the crazy excuses we could come up with for not completing our homework?

There are only a few things that can raise my blood pressure (besides my weight😊), one of them is excuses of why people do not deliver or why they are late.

A few months ago, I had the pleasure of meeting Mike Richardson in one of my CEO meetings at Vistage. Besides his interesting talk about cracking the agility code, I also read about his declaring war on excuses.

One of the most frustrating things is to sit and wait because someone is late. Even more frustrating is when the person then shows up, and we have to hear their excuses of why they were late, and how, most often, they are the victim instead of just admitting they are not organized. At Enavate, we have a number of boundaries, and one of them is:

We will not be late for meetings; we will end meetings 5 minutes ahead of schedule. We will show respect for people’s time

So when we start a meeting, we tell the audience that at Enavate we end 5 minutes before the scheduled time so that we all can be on time for the next meeting and have time for grabbing coffee or taking a bio break.

Now back to Mike’s declaring war on excuses. He has published a list on how to declare war on excuses, and they are worthwhile reviewing and using for yourself and your team.

Racket Conspiring with a default future	Alternative Opening a door to a new future
I didn’t have time	I didn’t make wise choices with my time I didn’t triage my time well enough
I don’t have the resources	I am not using my resources optimally I am not triaging my resources well enough
There’s no way/It can’t be done/It’s impossible	I haven’t come up with a creative solution to the problem
Sorry I am late… … the traffic was bad … my previous meeting ran over … I had to take a phone call	I didn’t leave enough contingency time to reliably be here on time I don’t place enough value on being here on time
I am over-whelmed … Spread too thin, buried, swamped etc.	I am under-organized
I don’t know how	I didn’t figure out how
I am confused/not sure what I was supposed to be doing/how I was supposed to do it/who I was supposed to be doing it with	I am not taking responsibility to get unconfused. If there is a void of leadership I will fill it. Move to a steer
My computer crashed and I lost all my work	The dog ate my homework! … Or, if it really did crash… … I wasn’t smart enough to be saving/backing up my work … I left it so late/last-minute that I didn’t have time to redo it
Dis-Ownership	Ownership

Yes, I am guilty in some of the areas as well. And then there is the gray zone area, when you really are stuck in an airport like when Eyjafjallajokull (say that fast three times😊) erupted in 2010, then an “I was late” excuse could be accepted. Just remember to tell the people that you will be late or re-schedule as soon as you know. I was actually on a flight waiting for take-off, looking at the news and decided to ask to leave the airplane since I didn’t want to risk not being able to get home. A wise choice since all airports closed down in the northern part of Europe. And I was on the first flight out from Sweden a week or so later, managed to see the volcano from the air.

Here is one of the things I have learned over the years. When you are being asked when you can deliver, always give yourself a few extra days/weeks. For two reasons:

You have more time (and we usually think we can do more than we can)
The person, customer, etc... are expecting you to deliver to that date and now you actually have a chance to deliver before, and you will be a hero

So please help me declaring war on the excuses.

Thanks to Mike for the inspiration!

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