What’s the difference between an explanation and an excuse?
I’d argue—and have—that it depends on which side of the discussion you’re on.
The publisher of the small weekly newspaper where I first was a professional editor was a Navy man. He didn’t care for excuses. For him, the correct response to a significant mistake was “it won’t happen again, sir.”
But this was something of an act. The publisher wasn’t an old salt. He’d had a nice career skippering a procurement desk in the Pentagon, and any significant problem was a failure of process. If you followed procedure and didn’t arrive at the designated result, then the steps needed to be reevaluated. He liked problems like this—he would invariably rub his hands with glee at the prospect of finding a better way to do things.
The other alternative, that you didn’t stick to the plan, did not excite or amuse him. But the reason someone not on the sales or operations side of the business, i.e., anyone from the newsroom, would go to the publisher’s office would be because they didn’t want to face the wrath of the co-owner, his wife. She managed the editorial staff—the reporters, photographers, designers, and department editors—and she ran a very taut ship.
“It won’t happen again, ma’am” wouldn’t fly with her—she demanded to know why it happened in the first place. Every detail. It was a painful exercise, even if your recounting of events was highly selective in your favor.
But the process of crafting your excuses, of deciding how to work around the most incriminating parts, was useful because you have to admit your mistakes to yourself to best cover them up.
The bottom line, of course, is that the problem has to be corrected. Human nature being what it is, one probably benefits more when someone else does the correcting. The sting makes an impression, sure, but an outside solution has the benefit of objectivity, at least. But if all of the information isn’t available, any solution is incomplete.
I say all this because I happen to be in the middle of annual reviews for my team, or to whom HR refers as “direct reports.” (Is it just me, or does a lot of what the Human Resources department says and does seem completely impersonal?)
I’m lucky in that the people I have management responsibility for are all good at their jobs and I like them. Our annual review sessions are the essence of ‘perfunctory.’ I speak with these people almost daily, and know to nip problems in the bud. And, when things are going well, I try to express my appreciation. (But, HR—fully understanding people, if not necessarily liking them—expects people to take shortcuts, so we still have a lot forms to fill out detailing what we should’ve talked about.)
And assessing performance in the magazine business is pretty basic: Did the magazine come out on time, and have you served your readers and advertisers?
While serving the audience can be a moving target, and even subjective—even though web metrics and analysis aims to turn an art into a science. Deadlines are, by definition, very clearcut and assessing them is binary: yes or no, hit or miss.
Coincidentally, even absurdly, I write this just hours after making a presentation to the company’s new class of soon-to-be B2B journalists. My topic: Deadlines and how, in this business, your problem becomes everyone’s problem. And every informative slide, collected by me months ago, was painfully on point: time management, project flows … I had it covered.
What’s so painful about that? Well, it’s tough to make such a presentation minutes after postponing the most important single piece of content I’m responsible for here at TBB: the annual Trailer Output Report. Look for it next month.
Mea culpa, dear reader. It won’t happen again.