The Devil Made Me Do It

October 30, 2023?

Dear Leaders,?

With the specter of ghosts and goblins, demons and devils that we so love at Halloween, we remember that which is scarier:? the inner demons and the perception that the source of a mistake is based thereon, spawning the infamous excuse:? the devil made me do it.?

Blaming the devil is the oldest recorded excuse in history, for it was Adam and Eve, having disobeyed God’s order to not eat of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge, who passed the buck, with Adam blaming his wife (never a good idea), and she claiming she was tricked into it by the demon serpent.? As we know well, none of them got a pass on their misdeeds, and we’re still paying the price to this day.? ???

Let’s face it, everyone makes mistakes, some miniscule, some massive, and embarrassment ranges from no one saw it so no harm, no foul, to having it play on the world stage as the lead story on the evening news.? It is how you handle those missteps, both large and small, that makes the difference in leadership.?

When something goes wrong, the first thing to do is blame someone or something else.? Absurd as it sounds, it is the default position of many a person anonymous and famous alike.? Deflecting responsibility, denying blame, and hopefully dispensing with the issue quickly makes everything better and we can simply get back to business like nothing happened.? A slight problem with this approach is that it seldom works, for the greater the deflection or denial, the brighter the spotlight shines back on the person doing it.? As we previously noted, Adam and Eve remain as the poster children for it more than 6,000 years later.??

Making excuses to try and justify errors in judgment and action is never better.? One of the first lessons a new soldier learns, and with robust reinforcement in leadership training, is that while the maximum effective range of their rifle is 460 meters, the maximum effective range of an excuse is zero meters, for it has neither velocity nor force of impact.? The point of having this hollered at the new trainee by a drill sergeant or training officer who seemingly gets up on the wrong side of the bed every morning is to teach accepting responsibility for actions, as leaders bear that responsibility, regardless of control.??

Accepting responsibility is one thing, owning it is another still, for it is here we see the artful dodgers in action using parsed words that the best legal minds can create, starting with the infamous “Mistakes were made.”? If that makes you cringe, it should, and if I were sitting in the audience, I would immediately shout “Who made them?”? The more you dance around the issue of responsibility, the more it falls back to you.? ???

In conducting compliance inspections, we listed findings and recommendations, and I learned that recommendations with no responsible party attached went unresolved, for everyone thinks it’s someone’s responsibility, consequently, no one fixes the problem.? I started affixing specific position responsibility to each of my recommendations (read:? Do it this way!) and followed up with them to ensure that they understood and executed.? They in turn, learned that life was easier without incurring my displeasure, and learned to do it the right way before I came to inspect.?

As for the devil, he still makes people do things they normally wouldn’t do, and you will still hear admissions thereof, even when not mentioned by name, or when referred to in demonizing some other factor. ?“Whiskey gets blamed for lots of things it didn’t do,” and so too is that demon real or imagined, for its presence is not an excuse for an errant word, action, or omission thereof, and trying to blame it or something else without ownership and humility with the point of fixing whatever went wrong is the antithesis of leadership rather than the act thereof.? Don’t let your inner voices or your staff dictate to you the wrong things to say or do; fear them not and lead with reassurance in times good and bad, and no one will ever fear you.??

Happy Halloween, and if you eat too much candy, herein lies the exception, for it’s OK to say the devil made you do it.? ???

Sincerely,

Tim

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