Shaping Club Culture

4. The Lame Excuse Club

Created in the mid- to late-90s, the website WebPagesThatSuck.com has had a simple tagline: "Learn good web design by looking at bad web design." If you survived the Geocities and MySpace eras, you know of many head-desk inducing techniques cataloged there. In a similar vein, it's time to look at some lame excuses so you can identify and correct bad attitudes. To do that, here's the story of the worst VPM ever (we'll call him Bob) and his president, Jackie.

For background, Jackie has asked for the following from the Membership team:

Create new guest folders to hand out to potential members who come to the club for the first time
Manage the ex-members and guest lists on the club's marketing site
Mail out meeting reminders to ex-members and guests
Contact members who have not shown up to three consecutive meetings without notifying the club
Hold committee meetings once a month

Jackie has a one-on-one meeting with Bob to discuss progress with these to dos. Because she wants to share her screen, she mails Bob a how-to on using Google Hangouts, tells him to send a test message and let her know if he has any questions, and calls Bob.

"Hi Bob, it's time for our one-on-one. I'm ready to start the Google Hangout. Are you set?"

"Oh Jackie, I don't know how to do those things. They're just too hard. I'm bad at computers."

Already Bob is trying to snow Jackie under with excuses. The trick here is to balance empathy with accountability, or this attitude is going to continue.

"Bob, I know new things can be hard sometimes, which is why I sent you a how-to document, and asked you a week ago if you had any questions. When did you plan to find out what you needed to do to be prepared for this?"

Bob mumbles some more lame excuses, but Jackie cuts him off. "Please open the how-to I sent you and get connected. It's important that I be able to show some figures to you."

Once he's connected, they begin to go over the tasks Jackie has assigned his team with, starting with the new guest packets.

"Bob, as you know, our club gives new guest packets to first time guests. However, we're running very low. Stan has been making a few to keep us going, but this is a task your team needs to take on, and it's well overdue. What do we need to do to get this done?"

Bob begins complaining that the packet has too many things to print, too much work, and that no budget has been given to him for this, though Jackie knows otherwise. She needs to get Bob to engage with his work or she's going to have to take over his tasks - a swift route to burnout.

"Bob, you have a team that should have the resources to print the materials, and the club can have some time after a meeting to help put the packets together. These packets really help turn new guests into new members. I've included the attachments that we want in them. Have you met with your team about this?"

Bob starts up with another litany of excuses. At this point, Jackie should see a pattern and attack it at the root.

"Bob, we're just into one item into the agenda here and I feel like you're very defensive. When we started the year I was excited to have you on my team because I knew you had a lot of Toastmasters experience, but now I'm not sure anything has been done. I need to know if you're committed to building and maintaining our membership. If there's something I'm not seeing or don't know about, I'd like to know."

Bob & Jackie's conversation can continue from there, but let's go over some of the common excuses and how to counter them:

"I don't know how" - The context here is that a task was given and when you check in to see what progress has been made, they claim they don't know how to do it. Ask "what have you done to get an answer?" If the person says "I don't know how yet" and proceeds to explain a limiting factor, then this might be okay. If there's a constant pattern of "I don't know how" followed by inaction, make it clear that the expectation is to ask sooner rather than later, not to sit on their hands.
"I don't know where X is" - Make accessing your team's resources as painless as possible. Make it clear however, that they should know where their tools are (and how to use them).
"I don't see why that's important" - A slightly more tactful version of "I don't care". If you've explained why the task matters already, this is a diversion. Otherwise, make sure you include reasons for tasks.
"I'm busy" - A universal and very lame excuse that translates to "I don't care enough about it". Renegotiate the time frame the task needs to be done in, or see what help others can give.
"It's too hard" - Runs in a similar vein to "I don't know how". See if the task can be simplified, or broken into component steps.