If you are a human you are not far from making an excuse at this very moment, as you read this line. We are always thinking of excuses and give excuses at a frequency which varies from individual to individual. Don’t be surprised, you are not a human if the computer situated inside your brain is not working overtime to find excuses for you to give.
Let’s see what an excuse is Definition of excuse - Merriam-Webster Online Dictionary
Now that we know the real meaning of excuse, let’s explore how the quality of our excuses depicts our character especially our mental alertness or shall we say mental laziness. But before coming to that we need to know why we are giving so many excuses in the first place.
Excuses are normally given to momentarily get over an unpleasant situation. It is done to avoid the immediate embarrassment in our own eyes if the excuse is not given. Just imagine that you receive a call from an insurance agent trying to sell his product. You feel embarrassed to tell him or her that you either do not have the money to pay the premium or you are not blessed with intellect to fathom the virtues of any product so you take the easy way out and say “ I am in a meeting , could you please call after two hours”. The call ends and the caller if not the persevering kind will drop you from the list. By giving the excuse you have avoided feeling small in your not so bright eyes.
Excuses are also given as a defense against our inability to complete a given task or in order to postpone a possible embarrassing situation for the future. But this article is not about why excuses are given, we all know by now that every one does that. This article is about how excuses can be interpreted to know more about an individual.
More often than not we give excuses assuming that the person who is receiving the excuse is so gullible as to accept any of our excuses. Here we are clearly undermining the mental intellect of the target person. If the excuse is identical to what you had given earlier to the same person it clearly shows how horrible a memory you have.
Six months back I had called an ex colleague on his cell to enquire his well being. Let’s call him Tag. After talking for sometime he promised to call me in a week’s time when he was visiting Mumbai. He didn’t call and I waited for two weeks before I called him again. He took my call and said “Its good you called I had lost my cell and didn’t have your number and now that I have your number I’ll call in exactly two minutes and we can talk”. Those two minutes never came. That was six months back. A fortnight back I was in Delhi and thought of meeting him in person. I informed him that I was in Delhi till Friday and will be mostly free so he can call anytime and we could meet. He didn’t call and just to check what happened I called him last Wednesday. He took my call and said
“Its good you called I had lost my cell and didn’t have your number and now that I have your number I’ll call in exactly two minutes and we can talk”. Tag has a habit of even recycling excuses. What do you call this guy – “a milquetoast”. That’s a very simplistic way of analyzing a human behavior. Tag is in the same organisation for more than twenty years. He is politically correct most of the time and is generally known as a helpful guy. This article is about excuses, so let’s stick to that. For a person who loves to study human beings and analyze human behavior let us base our conclusions only on the excuses. My analysis is as follows:
a) Tag is a mentally lazy person
b) Tag has a bad memory. Giving same excuse to the same person under same/similar circumstances.
c) Tag doesn’t value his word.
A HR expert concludes that this person should never be promoted as long as he continues to exhibit traits shown above.
More and more HR experts are now analyzing individuals by sitting in normal departmental meetings as observers and dissecting various excuses given by individuals. The feedback given by HR team is then reviewed by the top management before deciding the promotions.
There is a hierarchy of excuses which people use at different times. Innocent excuse like “I forgot” is extremely common in schools and colleges which lower rung employees continue using blissfully forgetting that they have graduated out of the college. This excuse is least tolerated in any efficient corporate.
Many employees take the lead from their bosses when it comes to spinning a tail of excuses. In many a big corporate houses an outsider can easily find who belongs to which division by merely listening to the excuses. Lessons learnt from bosses are rarely forgotten.
While intelligent, cogent and plausible excuses do display that an individual is using the mental faculty he or she has, but too frequent a use of this capability does also reflect that the individual is spending / wasting too much time on finding excuses rather than doing what he is supposed to do in the first place. A discerning human behavior analyst doesn’t miss even this trait of yours.
Excuses will exist as long as human beings will. A good and successful company will have lesser frequency of excuses than a less successful organization. So it boils down to having bright, intelligent and passionate employees in any organization to make it successful.
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