In this episode, we explore why accountability breaks down—and how great leaders rebuild it with empathy and precision.

Blame. Denial. Excuse. These aren’t just bad habits—they’re survival tactics rooted in fear. Junior and Tim unpack the three psychological fears behind patterns of deflection and show you how to coach through them to create high-performing, accountable teams.

This one’s for leaders who want to stop the spin and start the truth.

00;00;00;08 Junior: In 1979, a sightseeing plane crashed into the side of a mountain in Antarctica, killing everyone on board. At first, the airline blamed the pilots. But the truth a last minute change to the flight plan. One no one told the crew about sent them straight into danger. The organization denied it. They covered it up. They made excuses. It's a haunting example of what happens when leaders dodge accountability and deflection becomes the norm.

00;00;32;15 Junior: So that's the anecdote in my notes today to kick off the episode. I looked I looked into this particular story in a little bit more detail. And what I saw was it was pretty gnarly.

00;00;45;03 Tim: Yeah.

00;00;45;23 Junior: Yeah, it was sad.

00;00;47;21 Tim: They blamed, the people that had died.

00;00;51;02 Junior: Yeah. Because they couldn't speak for themselves. No. And so that was an easy way to do it.

00;00;56;04 Tim: That's an easy way to kind of close the case. Case closed. Right. Let's move on. Yeah.

00;01;01;14 Junior: And sadly, this isn't the first time we've seen this behavior. It's a pattern. Someone drops the ball, but instead of owning it, they deflect responsibility. And that's the topic for today's episode is the three patterns of Deflection. This is an episode that I'm really excited to dig into. I learned a lot in preparation for this episode. I asked and answered.

00;01;29;02 Junior: I asked a lot of questions. I answered maybe a few of them. And so I think that there's some insight in this episode that will be useful, especially to leaders.

00;01;38;14 Tim: Who.

00;01;39;27 Junior: Are helping teams become high performing teams. They're going after meaningful goals, but you're often met with patterns of deflection that we'll dig into today and give you hopefully, some practical tools, to overcome. So what's on your mind, Tim, as we approach today's.

00;01;58;11 Tim: Topic, I have two thoughts. One is as I reflect on this, and this has given me another opportunity to reflect on accountability. Overall, we don't teach accountability as strongly, as consistently as we need to and be. We don't teach people how to take it in the moment when they need to, when they've made a mistake, when something's not gone right.

00;02;32;22 Tim: I think, for example, junior, a leader factor, we've tried to nurture an environment where, hey, we make mistakes, but we've tried to nurture a culture where when someone does make a mistake, they just raise their hand. They just raise their hand and say, my mistake. And then we can move forward immediately. We're not stuck. We're not wasting time.

00;02;55;04 Tim: We're not looking for a shortcut. We're not we're not doing any of that. We just raise our hand and then we keep going. And I love that. And I've seen that again and again with our colleagues. And and I try to do that. That's my mistake. Right. Because that's what that's the reality. Yeah. But in organizations, we, as you like to say, spin up a new reality.

00;03;20;08 Tim: And then we spend so much time, we're wasting time. And it's it's a sentence to mediocrity if you don't take accountability. Welcome to mediocrity or failure, perhaps, but that's that's what you're choosing. So I, I love the pattern that I see on the team. It's so refreshing. It keeps us going. It keeps the momentum going, and it accelerates the development of the people.

00;03;50;26 Tim: I it's so it's I love it.

00;03;53;20 Junior: One of the things that I've been thinking about in preparation for this episode is the difference between truth and fiction, and accountability has a lot to do with the difference between those two things. Patterns of deflection help spin up an unreality. It supports something that's fictitious, something that's not the truth. And so that's part of our invitation, I would say, on the front end of getting into this episode is to be introspective about the way that you engage in these three patterns of deflection, blame, denial, and excuse.

00;04;30;12 Junior: Because each of us, we all do it, and we probably have a favorite one that we lean on more than others. And there are probably things that we can look back on and say, I used that one that time and it didn't go so well, or perhaps no one ever found out about it. But I've lost sleep over it for 20 years.

00;04;49;14 Tim: And I don't know.

00;04;50;24 Junior: So what is accountability? Accountability is being answerable for something. And accountability and management, I think, often gets a bad rap because people immediately jump to micromanagement and they think, well, yeah, if you're going to hold your people accountable, you're just going to bare over them and you're going to, you know, crack a whip and that's what accountability means.

00;05;13;19 Junior: It means driving your people harder.

00;05;15;26 Tim: It's yeah. And I think what I would put the emphasis on junior and make it put a little sharper point on in this relates back to what I just said, is that, hey, if you are really taking accountability, that means you're playing offense rather than defense. That means that you will. You will identify the error or the mistake preemptively yourself, and you'll act on that.

00;05;47;29 Tim: So you're going to call it out. You're going to communicate it, you're going to publish it as necessary, and you're going to act on it instead of waiting. See, it's you can say, you know, if someone calls it out for you, you can say, oh, yeah, I'm sorry. My mistake. And that's great. But the next level of accountability is that you're you're self diagnosing and you're self-correcting and you're proactively calling out mistakes and errors before others do.

00;06;20;16 Tim: That's next level. Yeah.

00;06;23;06 Junior: That is next level. And it should be the aspiration of all of us. It accountability speaks to the relationship you have with reality with the truth.

00;06;31;08 Tim: Yeah.

00;06;31;16 Junior: So if it's fair to say that achieving anything meaningful as an individual or a team requires accountable, you have to be accountable to something. You're accountable to yourself for certain things, accountable to a team, a manager, an organization. We all have different strings of accountability attached to, to different things. If accountability is so necessary, then why is good accountability so rare?

00;07;02;01 Junior: This is a question that we've been wrestling with trying to figure out.

00;07;05;24 Tim: I'd love to hear the answer.

00;07;07;26 Junior: Well, the answer, I think is non-obvious. Yeah, I really do. Yeah. I don't think that you would just end up here after thinking about it for five seconds. We've thought about it for more than five seconds, which is why we've come up with what I believe to be a non-obvious answer. And the answer is fear.

00;07;25;18 Junior: If an organization shows signs of poor accountability, there's fear lurking somewhere. And not fear in the sense that if you don't do this, then I'm going to do this, and you should be scared of that. That's not the fear I'm talking about. It's fear at the level of the individual, at every level in the organization of the person being managed, of the person managing, of the person.

00;07;50;11 Junior: Leading any lapse in accountability, I think, is traceable to fear. If you look at the root causes of poor accountability, any lapse in accountability is rooted in fear. And there are three fears that we've been able to distill out that we think inform the three patterns of deflection. And that's where we're going to start at the root cause if we go all the way back and try and figure out why are we seeing this symptom?

00;08;22;28 Junior: And poor accountability is a symptom. It's not a cause. True. It's in a long causal chain. And there are things that follow it. But if you trace it all the way to origin, this is where we think it goes. The first is fear of judgment. If I admit fault, I'll lose credibility or be punished. What do you think about fear of judgment?

00;08;46;23 Tim: Well, I think it's it's the cancer sequences that come with judgment, right? Isn't that what you're saying? JR? It's. Oh, okay. So if I'm, if, if, if I've found guilty, if I've made a mistake, if I've committed an error, then there are consequences. And so the judgment comes with consequences. So we fear.

00;09;10;27 Junior: That. And why would we fear the consequences.

00;09;13;08 Tim: They're adverse.

00;09;14;07 Junior: Yeah they're adverse and we're social animals. That's right. Right.

And that plays into this too. It's something that we have to acknowledge right up front, is that we want belonging and approval from those around us.

00;09;28;12 Tim: And so that's threatened right immediately. Yeah.

00;09;31;18 Junior: So if I admit fault and I feel like I'm going to lose credibility, then what do I do? The way we cover up fear of judgment is with one of the patterns of deflection, which is blame, which we'll get into. The second fear is the fear of reality. This is my favorite. And I have not been able to stop thinking about this as I've thought about today's recording.

00;09;56;03 Junior: If I acknowledge the problem, I might have to change or confront something painful and change probably. Is that something painful?

00;10;05;15 Tim: Yeah.

00;10;06;10 Junior: So something painful will follow my acknowledgment of reality. So what do we do? We spin up our reality in which the problem is no longer the problem. And if that's true, then we don't have to confront the change or the thing that's painful. So this pattern, this fear we cover up for with denial, which is the second pattern of deflection that we'll get into,

00;10;31;15 Tim: I've thought about this junior as we've been putting this episode together, and I think it's. Yes, we do fear confronting something painful, but but also we fear confronting the requirement of effort.

00;10;52;16 Junior: That's painful.

00;10;53;08 Tim: Which is painful. I'm gonna give you a very simple example that I that

I've kept thinking about when I was in manufacturing. Safety was important. We preach safety every day, and what workers would often do is take little shortcuts with safety rules, just little things like they wouldn't put their hard hat on, they wouldn't put their safety goggles on if they were going from maybe this pulpit on a production line to this pulpit on a production line.

00;11;29;14 Tim: Little, little things. Why? Because they are mental and physical misers. They want to economize. And so it goes down all the way down to very simple things. And then when you confront them, hey, where are your safety goggles? Oh, hey, it's it's not a problem. Like then we go into the patterns of deflection. So I can't tell you how many times I was in conversations with people deflecting on these little things.

00;12;06;00 Tim: Little, little, little things. So the fear of the pain of the effort or the exertion could be very small. And they were still doing it. Yeah. Isn't that interesting?

00;12;20;21 Junior: Well, one of the things you said stands out to me, which is that they and we and we.

00;12;27;02 Tim: Yeah.

00;12;27;08 Junior: Our mental and physical misers. Yeah. What does that mean? It means that we are looking for the shortest path from A to B, and we will come up with a reality that supports a short path.

00;12;39;16 Tim: Yeah.

00;12;40;09 Junior: And any path that's long and winding may not be the reality that we want to engage with.

00;12;46;24 Tim: So JR, I got to give you an example because I'm going to raise my hand and plead guilty. So you know I had to I had to step outside of myself and engage in some metacognition to think about this. Because the other day I had a little handsaw and I was going in at the end of the day, I had done a couple of projects, and I had used this little handsaw and it goes in a different place, right?

00;13;19;04 Tim: But I put it on the shelf right before in the garage, right before I walked into the house. And that's not where it goes. But I didn't want to go back to where it goes and put it in its right place. Isn't that interesting? Yeah, well, I didn't want to pay that huge price.

00;13;37;05 Junior: That massive price.

00;13;38;14 Tim: Yeah.

00;13;38;29 Junior: And there are some downsides. Some small, some big that can come after that.

00;13;45;11 Tim: So I was looking for an efficiency.

00;13;46;29 Junior: Yeah. Well if you go to look for it in the future or someone gets their hands on it, they shouldn't have it.

00;13;50;28 Tim: Exactly. Right. Exactly.

00;13;52;20 Junior: So the the point that I want to make here is that that's not a natural. That's perfectly natural. That is what biology has spun up for you. So these fears that we have, it's these defense mechanisms we use to cover those fears are not just simply excuses. It's not just simply denial. It's not just simply blame. It's a biological defense mechanism.

00;14;22;16 Junior: Our brain tries to find a way to offload the responsibility that we don't want to reduce cognitive dissonance.

00;14;31;09 Tim: Right.

00;14;32;00 Junior: And this is a point that you made the other day as we were discussing these ideas, is that cognitive dissonance plays a massive role in the explanation of these defense mechanisms. So maybe you could help us understand at a basic level what cognitive dissonance is and how it relates to these defense mechanisms. Sure. Call them.

00;14;52;11 Tim: Sure. This is in all of social science. This has got to be one of my top three most favorite and most useful in my opinion, useful theories presented to the world in 1957 by the Stanford psychologist. Oh, hang on a second. I forgot his name. Leon Festing or. Okay, let me let me redo that. So the theory of cognitive dissonance was unveiled to the world in 1957 by the Stanford psychologist Leon First dinger.

00;15;29;20 Tim: The the kernel of the concept junior is exceedingly simple. What it says is that humans in their natural state, they want harmony. They want consistency. They want what he calls consonance between their behavior and their beliefs. And and if there is consonance, if there is consistency, if there is harmony, they feel peace. They feel, an inner peace and harmony within themselves.

00;16;06;02 Tim: If if there's a dissonance, if there's a disharmony between the two.

So for example, if you start behaving in a way that is not consistent with your beliefs, that's going to create discord and dissonance within you, and that brings emotion or pain. And so your instinct as a human being is to move immediately to reduce that dissonance. And that's what we call dissonance reduction.

00;16;36;24 Tim: There's only two ways you can do that. You can change your behavior so that it comes back in alignment with your beliefs. Or you can change your beliefs in a way that can accommodate your behavior. Which one's easier to change your beliefs. And so that really plays a huge role here. And I think the other thing that we can also bring in, we've been talking about it is that humans tend to follow the law of least effort.

00;17;12;07 Tim: And so if we can give ourselves a soothing story that justifies the lower effort that we took, then we often we're going to reach for that right? So that we can restore the the consonance, the harmony, and feel good about ourselves. This is going on all the time with all of us as human beings.

00;17;35;14 Junior: I want to get into the third, the third fear, the fear of inadequacy.

If I can't succeed, I may have to acknowledge that I'm not good enough. We don't want to acknowledge that possibility.

00;17;49;15 Tim: That's pain, that reality.

00;17;51;15 Junior: If it's true. And so what do we do to offload the response ability and the pain? For all of these things, we use the three patterns of deflection for fear of judgment. We use blame for fear of reality. We use denial for fear of inadequacy. We use excuse. So all three patterns are adaptive responses to psychological vulnerabilities. That's encouraging actually, because if we can trace all of these symptoms back to root cause, we can do something about it.

00;18;27;07 Junior: We can do something about it. As a person who engages in these patterns of deflection and as the person who leads others who engage in these behaviors. And that's where we're going to end up today is how do we deal with these, how do we unpack them and what this also means is that as a leader, as a parent, as a friend, instead of asking, goodness, why won't this person just stop engaging in the blame and the denial and the excuse?

00;19;00;08 Junior: You frame the situation differently and you ask a different question.

And that question is, what is this person afraid of? Yeah, that's an empath curious question that speaks to root cause in a way that just treating the symptom doesn't. And you can think about that literally in a medical sense. Are we going to treat symptom or are we going to look for a root cause when we just going to prescribe something based on some symptom?

00;19;30;24 Junior: We saw which managerial it could be a slap on the wrist and stop blaming other people? Or do we ask that question and start to explore what is this person afraid of? What is feeling threatening to them right now? What are they protecting? That was kind of, a light bulb for me in helping me unpack what might be going on with somebody.

00;19;59;11 Tim: There's a point in time when, if you make a mistake of any kind and you haven't yet chosen your response pattern, you haven't yet chosen your pattern of deflection, whether it's shame or denial or excuse, there's a moment there where you're incredibly vulnerable and you haven't yet chosen what you're going to do. If you're going to go into a pattern of deflection or not.

00;20;32;11 Tim: And so if you're interacting with other people. If they can begin with to approach you with empathy before the accountability, they may help you if they reward your vulnerability at that critical point before you've gone into deflection, they may be able to help you not go into a pattern of deflection because they're rewarding your vulnerability. They're not punishing you.

00;21;04;15 Tim: Does that make sense? Yeah. They're not punishing you and you haven't yet, moved into a response pattern. And so if they are empathetic and they're willing to explore with you and, share with you and, do some, some joint exploration with you, then you are much more apt to be open to that, in your mind and in your heart and and maybe not go into a pattern of deflection.

00;21;42;07 Tim: I've been thinking a lot, a lot about that because I've. I've thought about when, when have I gone into deflection and what when did I double down on that and when did I, get very stubborn, put up the defenses, get very territorial, take things personally. Wow. So I've done that. Yeah.

00;22;07;13 Junior: Well, and as the person on the other side, you have to look at the the person across from you and say to yourself, this is perfectly natural.

Of course this person's doing this. They're scared of one of these three things. It's judgment, reality or inadequacy. And are those things worthy of being scared?

00;22;28;19 Tim: Yes. That's an interesting yeah, that's an interesting question, right. Yeah.

00;22;33;24 Junior: Certainly. Trying to answer that question would trigger a more empathic response than just asking, how do I solve blame denial and excuse. Right. Because the solution to that problem seems like a hammer. Whereas if you explore through inquiry, I think you'll probably find yourself in a position, more understanding of the person on the other side. And once you do that now you can start to work toward a solution.

00;23;03;00 Junior: But that's where you have to start empathy first, then accountability.

00;23;06;04 Tim: Yeah.

00;23;06;22 Junior: And that sequence is ultimately important. And so that would be one of my first invitations to the audience is when you find yourself in a managerial position like that, someone's exhibiting one of these behaviors, one of these patterns of deflection. And start with empathy before you move into accountability. And it's not that we're getting rid of accountability. It's not empathy instead of accountability.

00;23;29;23 Tim: It's I think you're accentuating it. Yeah okay. But junior, what if a manager or a leader comes to you and says, well, hang on a second.

We're all adults here and we have an organization to run. I don't have time for empathy first before accountability. Yeah, that's that's really soft.

00;23;48;01 Junior: Depends on what would you.

00;23;49;07 Tim: Say to that?

00;23;49;28 Junior: I would say, how long do you want to run this organization. How long do you want this team to be a thing. Because timeline matters. If you extend that timeline out then everything breaks. If you persist right. And also, how will you measure your leadership.

00;24;13;26 Tim: Your impact.

00;24;15;29 Junior: So you have the personal development response on the one where you're helping develop the other person. That's antithetical to that type of behavior. And then you have the long term corporate interest, which is also in favor of the empathic response. This is something that I've been playing around with recently. Is this idea that the human response is almost always in the best interest of the organization, just over a long timeline.

00;24;43;28 Junior: So if you're optimizing for the quarter, then what's in the best interest of the business may not necessarily be what's in the best interest of the person. But I think if you said, okay, I have I'm responsible to grow this organization for 100 years.

00;24;58;21 Tim: Right?

00;24;59;24 Junior: The human response, the empathic response is almost always going to be the right one, because that's what's going to unlock the commitment. The discretionary effort and the long term loyalty.

00;25;10;28 Tim: So maybe that's even a shorter term argument as well, junior. Because if EMP what I'm hearing you say is that empathy first actually accelerates accountability. It doesn't decelerate it.

00;25;24;02 Junior: Yeah, I think that that's often true. And it may seem counterintuitive, but I've often the discretionary effort that you unlock, even in the short term, is enough to turn the tables. If you think that you need to rush for some outcome to make some goal. So I, I don't know if people also see that as ironic, but I certainly do, because that's the way that we justify poor behavior to other people is short term results.

00;25;51;03 Junior: But the short term results that we get are often worse if we take that path. So.

00;25;56;01 Tim: I don't know, maybe we need to think longer about the unintended consequences of not taking an empathy first approach. Yeah. If we jump into accountability and it's it's, It's it's it's pretty hard.

00;26;15;19 Junior: And maybe the reason that it's seems ironic to me is because my tendency is to live in the other camp. My tendency is to like, say what you said. We have a business to run. There are things to do. I don't have time for this, right? I don't have the emotional energy. I

want to spend it elsewhere like.

00;26;33;23 Tim: You just do your job.

00;26;35;04 Junior: Together. You'll get it done, right? Yeah. And so maybe there's a portion of our listenership they can identify with that. But and so the I mean, I guess it's just insight into my own maturation as a leader is coming to terms with some of these realities where I'm thinking I'm saving time. I'm not where I'm thinking I'm getting ahead.

00;27;00;03 Junior: I'm not. And what really would be in the best interest of the person and the company would be to to take this approach. So, so I.

00;27;10;08 Tim: Love the.

00;27;11;00 Junior: Let's let's dig into each of these patterns individually and unpack them. There are some practical things that we can do to overcome each one. And there are some commonalities. At the very end, we're going to give some behavioral tips to you as a coach, like literal language that you can use in incorporate to help people work through these things.

00;27;32;04 Junior: So blame pattern one. What is it shifting responsibility to others?

What does it sound like? Well, if they had done their job, I would have done mine.

00;27;42;03 Tim: Right? Yeah.

00;27;43;07 Junior: It's marketing's fault. It's sales fault. Xyzzy. Why it happens. We want to protect ego and our image in the face of failure or frustration. How does it hurt? It erodes trust. It kills learning and it stalls progress. What is the antidote? Personal ownership. And the coaching question is what part do you own? So have you ever been in a situation where someone's blamed something?

00;28;11;04 Tim: Yeah. Like yesterday. Yeah, yeah. Shifting the blame, the responsibility, trying to transfer it. It's very common.

00;28;23;03 Junior: It's very common. It wasn't me. It wasn't my fault. That's so-and-so's responsibility. And it's it's obviously easier for me cognitively when we go back to dissonance if I'm not the problem. Obviously. Yeah. So it makes it way easier if you're the problem. So if that's the shortest path.

00;28;51;19 Tim: Yeah. Let's then.

00;28;52;15 Junior: Let's just make it your.

00;28;53;12 Tim: Problem. I love the coaching question on this one JR what part do you own? I think it's vital to have the person verbalize and vocalize this. Yeah. So that that forces them to go through the logic and to synthesize the data, come to a conclusion and then say what it is. Yeah. So what do you think? What part of this do you own.

00;29;24;21 Tim: Yeah.

00;29;25;09 Junior: And what's your world over. What do you have. Stewardship. Right. What were you responsible for.

00;29;30;24 Tim: And when they answer that coaching question, you know exactly where they stand in terms of moving into a pattern of deflection or not. Yeah. Yeah. They're going to tell you right where right where they are.

00;29;43;24 Junior: Yeah. You're trying to get them to understand it's not about whose fault it is. It's about what you own and what you did about them.

00;29;50;18 Junior: That's where we're trying to get them.

00;29;52;17 Tim: Yeah.

00;29;53;10 Junior: Let's go into type two. Denial. What is it. Refusing to acknowledge the truth. What does it sound like. There's no problem. There's no issue. Why it happens. We're trying to avoid discomfort feedback or change. How does it hurt us. It delays corrective action. It invalidates its concerns, and it perpetuates dysfunction. The antidote to denial is honest awareness. And I want you to talk about awareness because you've been thinking about that word.

00;30;23;28 Junior: And then the coaching question, what might be true about the situation that might require us to change or spend energy? So what do you think about this one?

00;30;34;14 Tim: Well, again, let's go back to this coaching question. What might be true about this situation that might require us to change or spend energy? I love the way this is phrased. Might it's an invitation to engage with me in joint discovery. I'm not indicting you. I'm not accusing you. I'm inviting you to think through this with me. I love that approach.

00;31;06;05 Tim: Right. So you draw them in to inquiry, and it's an invitation. It's it's, it's a safe. It's a much safer invitation. And so then let's explore this together. Right. And again, what happens is if they feel that they're vulnerable is not being punished, but rather it's been being rewarded as we engage in joint discovery, then they are much more likely to not put up the defenses and to explore honestly.

00;31;40;14 Tim: And that's what you're trying to do. You're trying to prevent the the defenses from going up, because then we can get something done. And I love I love how it hurts and what the stakes are here. Right. So if, if, if we continue with denial, we delay corrective action, we invalidate concerns, we perpetuate the dysfunction. But if you if you hit someone hard with what they potentially are doing and what the consequences are, they're going to react and recoil.

00;32;20;18 Tim: And you may get to impasse and loggerheads very quickly. And then we're not going anywhere. We have no traction in this discussion. Yeah.

00;32;31;06 Junior: Well, that's why the head on collision is something we want to avoid, which is why we have to phrase the question this way. You're inviting their input and perspective in a way that's non-confrontational. You're asking the question if this were a problem what would it look like. Right. Well then they'd have to answer something like that.

00;32;56;08 Tim: Yeah.

00;32;57;00 Junior: Instead it's hard to.

00;32;58;03 Tim: Get mad at that.

00;32;59;02 Junior: Exactly. And if you go right at it then you just have two realities that are probably mutually exclusive. Like it can't be a problem and not B, and if we just bear down on the perspectives that we each own, that it is or isn't, it's unlikely that we're going to get anywhere. And so you have to be super tuned into that as a coach.

00;33;25;06 Junior: And once again, what are they trying to cover the fear of reality.

00;33;29;29 Tim: Right.

00;33;31;11 Junior: And you are trying.

00;33;33;00 Tim: To help them willingly uncover that. Right.

00;33;37;27 Junior: You also have to be open to the possibility that the reality you see is actually not the right one. And each of us needs to acknowledge our own ignorance and the fact that we are not the arbiter of reality.

There will be some things that we have clear perspective on and can be pretty confident about, but there are other things that you have to approach with the healthy dose of, skepticism so that you don't find yourself on the wrong side of what actually was reality.

00;34;06;24 Tim: Very true.

00;34;07;27 Junior: And then the question about, or the, the last piece, spend energy.

That's an interesting one, because as you said, we want to be efficient creatures. And it could just be that it may not be very sinister. It could be that our reason for denial is we just want to save some energy.

00;34;27;19 Tim: Maybe we're just lazy.

00;34;28;28 Junior: Yeah, it could be exactly that. Let's get into the third one, which is excuse. This is the most common and the most socially acceptable. What is it? It's explaining away poor results with external justifications. It sounds like it couldn't be helped or there wasn't enough time. The client changed the scope. It was out of my hands. There was traffic.

00;34;53;06 Junior: Why does it happen? We think that excuses protect us from shame or inadequacy because again, we're trying to solve for that fear. If we fear inadequacy, we're going to use excuse. How does it hurt us? It reinforces powerlessness and it blocks growth. It's excuse might be the most socially acceptable and also the most sinister. I don't know if I want to come all the way out and say that it is, but it might be because you are reducing deliberately.

00;35;26;01 Junior: I mean, it may be a little bit unwitting to you, but you are reducing your agency in a given situation. You're throwing your hands up.

00;35;34;24 Tim: Yeah.

00;35;35;08 Junior: You're saying I had no control. And that's a sad, sad story. So the antidote to this I've called future agency, which is your ability to influence in the future. In the coaching question follows, what would you try differently next time that would give you greater influence over the situation? So let's take an example. There was traffic, right?

00;36;01;20 Junior: I'm late. I hate this so bad. It's okay to be late for because of traffic once, right?

00;36;14;22 Tim: Well, that's a that's a tough standard. Tenure?

00;36;17;01 Junior: No. Like once because then you learn like, oh, there might be traffic.

00;36;22;14 Tim: Yeah.

00;36;23;07 Junior: And this is hyperbole, right? I'm joking. There are times where you can't control. Right. But what might you try differently next time? Person who would say it's true.

00;36;34;14 Tim: It's true, it's true.

00;36;35;24 Junior: That would give you greater influence over the situation. Yeah.

00;36;38;13 Tim: Yeah. Right.

00;36;39;01 Junior: Yeah. They give you're predictably late. You can predictably leave earlier. Right. And so that's a light example. But let's say that you do the, the moral equivalent of saying that there was traffic. That's a dangerous path. And pretty soon you learn the helplessness. You become completely powerless. You see yourself as object not agent. And then life is lived in front of you, and you.

00;37;11;14 Junior: It's not a participatory experience, it's just happening to you. And that's that's.

00;37;19;17 Tim: Sad. Well, I love the way I love the way that that you said here JR that. Excuses externalize the locus of control. So I'm going to take that locus of control which is here. And I'm going to move it out here. So now it's out here. And the thing about excuses is that they are, socially acceptable. Right?

00;37;48;04 Tim: We normalize excuse making.

00;37;51;03 Junior: That's why it's so we to.

00;37;52;16 Tim: Take it to an art form. It's so bad. Really good at it.

00;37;56;11 Junior: It's so bad because if you say, oh, yeah, you know, I'm so sorry. Like, the traffic is just so bad.

00;38;03;20 Tim: You know, it's just so bad. It's like, what? Instead of I left too late. Yeah. And, and and you know, I have to raise my hand because I've done that.

00;38;13;22 Junior: But on the other side and this is my point. Like, how apt are we to just take the excuse.

00;38;22;00 Tim: Yeah.

00;38;23;21 Junior: And we'll talk about how to do this.

00;38;26;08 Tim: Right. It's normalized.

00;38;27;22 Junior: But if we normalize that. Yeah. What are you normalizing. And I think that that's a it's a deeper question because if you just take people's excuses and you normalize that, what are you doing? You're saying I'm okay, that you're externalizing your locus of control? I'm okay with the idea of you giving away your agency, and I'm okay with you just being a participant instead of an agent.

00;38;50;11 Tim: 00;38;51;09 Junior: Why would we do that? That's not in the best interests of the person in front of us. But that's our inclination, right? And it makes sense. It's a natural thing to do. We don't want the dissonance. We're social creatures. We want people to like us. Oh, yeah. No. No problem, no problem. It's okay. Right. And we allow for that.

00;39;09;29 Junior: But it's a dangerous thing. And maybe that speaks to why I think it's such a sinister pattern.

00;39;16;12 Tim: I think yeah, I think with some of these very common excuses. JR yeah.

You could maybe make the, the, the argument that it's pretty benign, but I think there's a slippery slope. For example, if you have an employee that's struggling with performance, that is when you really need to coach through inquiry and then you need to listen, to their response patterns.

00;39;46;18 Tim: So are they going to blame? Are they going into denial? Are they going into excuse. What's their thought patterns. What have they. Right. Their patterns for justification or rationalization. And how are the how are they accounting for that. Yeah that's critical. And then as a coach that you've got to see those patterns.

00;40;14;21 Junior: First.

00;40;15;14 Tim: So that you can then coach in response in an effective way.

00;40;20;20 Junior: Well you said that they might appear benign, but I think a lot of what is most sinister lurks behind what first appears to be benign. Yeah. You have to be very careful, super, super careful. And as a leader, if you really are taking charge of your people and their development and you feel responsibility toward that, then this isn't, you know, just another light conversation. 00;40;45;08 Junior: It's something that you really have to consider. Yeah, you really have to chew on it. So let's talk about that. As a coach, how do you deal with this. So we've put together this table the three patterns of deflection pattern avoidance reinforcement the coaching move and the antidote. And this is a nice tidy way to go through all three.

00;41;03;26 Junior: So for blame I won't go through all of them. But for blame they're avoiding fault. You want to reinforce ownership. The coaching move is to redirect attention to them to self.

00;41;13;21 Tim: Yes.

00;41;14;03 Junior: And the antidote is personal ownership. Let's come down to here. These are the steps that we need to go through as coaches. First is recognize you as a coach. Need to develop a finely tuned deflection detector.

00;41;32;08 Tim: It needs to sell those.

00;41;33;09 Junior: On I wish they did. I would buy one. No, I would buy several dozen and

I would hand them out. But at the time you hear some of the language that we talked about, the what it sounds like language, the alarm bells should start going off and you should be able to tell immediately, oop, there's a pattern of deflection that leads us to point number two, which is to name it we need to know which one it is.

00;42;06;24 Junior: And I would say that people's deflection sensitivity meter is often low. And it's super blunt. So they'll hear blame denial or excuse and they'll, they'll not even say oh that's a pattern of deflection. They'll just feel that they don't like that. Right. And that says nuanced as we get as far as that's as specific as we ever get.

00;42;28;04 Junior: And so that's step one. Oh pattern of deflection. What's happening.

The person's scared of something they're trying to cover fear of one, 2 or 3. And then based on whichever one it is, I'm going to name it. That's blame. That's denial or that's excuse.

00;42;42;28 Tim: Because as coach you need to know what it is.

00;42;45;05 Junior: So that you.

00;42;45;26 Tim: Can coach effectively. You you have to understand the nature of the root cause.

00;42;49;19 Junior: Exactly. And then you redirect toward accountability. And accountability is the crux of the issue. That's where we're trying to end up trying to transfer the accountability so that the person will take ownership. So if you go back up to the table, we're trying to figure out which one of these do we want to do. Do we want to redirect attention to self?

00;43;10;15 Junior: Do we want to focus on surfacing the facts, or do we want to focus on the future? Yeah, right. And then the next one is to create a next step. So we'll we'll get into that. I want to spend a second on naming because it's one thing for you to understand what the person's doing, but that's not enough.

00;43;33;28 Junior: They need to understand what they're doing and getting their it's kind of dicey.

00;43;41;07 Junior: It requires some tact. It requires a lot of practice. You might fall on your face a few times, but this is where we want to give you some more prescriptive advice. Take it or leave it. These are things that we've tried that have worked. I'll tell you first some things that haven't worked. If you were to blame.

00;44;05;20 Junior: Right. What not to do, Tim, stop blaming everything on everyone.

00;44;13;11 Tim: Right. It doesn't work too well.

00;44;15;14 Junior: I mean, I've tried a lot.

00;44;17;07 Tim: And.

00;44;17;13 Junior: It doesn't. Right. And number two, let's say that you're denying something and I just say, well, that's just the way it is, that you're wrong. It's this way.

00;44;28;06 Tim: Yeah, right. It is what it is.

00;44;31;12 Junior: Yeah. I don't know what else to tell that one. Yeah. You know.

00;44;33;29 Tim: Hey, things happen for a reason. That's my favorite.

00;44;36;13 Junior: That's gross.

00;44;37;10 Tim: I see. Yeah that's horrible.

00;44;39;18 Junior: But the if you do that, you're going to find yourself in a place that's just not useful. Right. And I'll tell you what, I have tried those I really have. And I wish they worked and wish I like.

00;44;53;23 Tim: Do like that?

00;44;55;04 Junior: I wish that we could be like, no, that's just not no, not how it goes. Not it.

00;45;00;15 Tim: Yeah.

00;45;01;18 Junior: And have the other person just say, yeah, you know, you're totally right, you know? Yeah. Thumbs up. Let's move forward. That's not how it goes. And the third one excuse if I just say stop making excuses. Right. That's all I hear out of you. I just hear excuses, right. If you use those three responses, I mean, let's say you've made it all the way there and you've correctly identified the pattern of deflection.

00;45;26;01 Junior: You just hit it on the head in an effort to name it. It's it's it doesn't work. And so you have to be more nuanced. So here are three, that I wrote down that I've used that I think might be useful to people. The first one is for denial. The story I'm telling myself is that you might be feeling pressure about whatever.

00;45;53;21 Junior: It's a deadline. The thing. And so, you might be trying to minimize how important the thing is, whatever it is we're talking about, one of the best. Starters is the story I'm telling myself. It's beautiful because you're acknowledging that it is a story. It's a narrative. You came up with it in your head, and it may or may not be right.

00;46;21;29 Tim: 00;46;22;24 Junior: And you're inviting the other person to tell you where it's not right.

00;46;26;11 Tim: Right. Yeah. Where you got the wrong story. Yeah.

00;46;28;22 Junior: Hey, the story I'm telling myself is that based on the discussion we had yesterday about the importance of this deadline that you really feel and the pressure there, that's what I'm. That's what's going on in my head. And that might be the reason that we're having this conversation. And the person can say, you know what? Yeah, you're you're right.

00;46;43;23 Junior: It is a big deadline. You know, it is a big deadline. And I want to come through, you know, I want to do well. But yeah, I'm a little bit, a little bit scared that if we get all the way there and we don't make it that, you know, and then you have that conversation, what do you think about that one?

00;47;03;21 Tim: I like it, I think overall, junior, I just keep coming back to the thought that empathy lubricates the gears.

00;47;12;22 Tim: Accountability. Regardless of which pattern of deflection you may be encountering. Yeah. And I and I come back to the to that one coaching question I love so much. Which is which part of this do you own. Yeah I think that's so powerful. Yeah. But those are a couple of things that just really stick out to me.

00;47;35;10 Junior: Yeah. Here's one that you could use for blame, in addition to the one you just said. How much of the blame should we give to marketing?

00;47;44;28 Tim: It's a good one, right? Yeah.

00;47;47;08 Junior: I love this.

00;47;48;00 Tim: One. Yeah.

00;47;49;00 Junior: Because it's a.

00;47;49;19 Tim: Sign of percentage. Yeah.

00;47;51;15 Junior: Yeah. Really? Because we're assuming that, like, someone's responsible and you're telling me in the blame game that whatever thing is responsible and not you. So let me invite you to assign how much.

00;48;04;21 Tim: Blame.

00;48;05;18 Junior: Is warranted. Right? Yeah. Because usually the way they've set it up is it's binary. Like it's not. That's right. Problem. That's right. It's it's a them problem. That's right. And so if you say you force their hand because they're not going to tell you it's entirely their fault, right. And that if they do like, great. Now you know what decision to make.

00;48;24;27 Junior: But if they say, well, you know, like probably most of it, right, then you follow it up with that. You say, well, even if it is most of it, let's assume that it is most of it. What part did you own?

00;48;36;09 Tim: Right.

00;48;37;13 Junior: Well, you know this 10%. Okay. Great. And how did you do with your

10%? Awesome. One of two things is true at that point. Either they did really great with their 10%, in which case we help them understand that you do what's yours and that's all you can do. Or two they did 5% of what was their 10%.

00;48;57;25 Junior: And there's room for them to improve there. So either way it redirects back to self and they're forced to acknowledge that they bear some responsibility.

00;49;10;21 Tim: The other thought that comes to my mind, junior, is that when we're trying to coach people toward accountability, we're often. The way that people talk about what they've done and their responsibility and the way that they go, they move into patterns of deflection. Often the language is very sloppy. It's reckless, it's fictitious, and, we move into the fallacy of dichotomous thinking.

00;49;43;22 Tim: No, it's their fault. And it's not my fault, right? It's just exaggerated. It's hyperbolic stuff. And so much of this is bringing them back to accuracy, precision. Like, let's really think about this, which helps us be better problem solvers. Yeah. Overall, yeah.

00;50;09;03 Junior: I couldn't agree more. Here's the third one for excuse. And this one's a little bit lighter. But if we take the traffic example and you're like, hey, you know I was lights traffic so bad and I might say, hey, you know what? If I heard someone else say that, it would sound so much like an excuse.

00;50;28;17 Tim: Yeah. Right now you're injecting humor, right?

00;50;31;26 Junior: Yeah. And I think that there there are times and.

00;50;34;09 Tim: But how could you, how could you keep a straight face if someone said, yeah.

00;50;38;13 Junior: And it's it's what you're doing with all three of these tactics is you're naming the thing right, that we're seeing, which is blame, denial and excuse. And in the last two cases, literally as we're using the words, but you're also giving space for the person to, to breathe. Yeah. To give you new information. Right, right. To recover. To recover.

00;51;05;18 Tim: Do you want to recover. Yeah. Do you want to take another shot at yeah. Do you want to clarify that. Right. Do you want to correct that. Right.

00;51;14;10 Junior: And people want that. And I think they respect that. They know what you're saying. Right. Like, we both know you were late and we both know that's a B.S. excuse.

00;51;22;16 Tim: Right. But.

00;51;24;04 Junior: You know, we can at least make a joke, right? And then hopefully next time, you know, you take the hint. Yeah. And, you know, maybe there comes a time where we have to have a more formal conversation. But the first time you treat a topic like that, maybe it is with a little bit of humor, a little bit of levity, and, you know, you don't have to take it so seriously.

00;51;41;28 Tim: So I agree.

00;51;43;08 Junior: As we, wrap up in the create a next step, one thing I was thinking about is another way to, to, engage the person is to say, hey, you know, the next time you see me using one of these patterns, I would love for you to help me on it. And call me on it, because we all engage in these things.

00;52;06;05 Junior: You know? Excuses is my favorite. Or like denials, my favorite. Again, like, you can inject humor into these and just say, hey, we're all working on them. And so I would appreciate it if you could keep an eye out for me. I'll help you if you help me. And we can overcome these together. We can do a little bit better because you're acknowledging your common humanity, your fallibility, that you both are working on it, and then it helps them, because what are you what are you actually saying?

00;52;36;07 Junior: You're saying like, hey, we both acknowledge that you're engaging in this stuff, and I'm putting myself in there with you and we're going to work on it together. And you know, that's great. Instead of, you know, being patronizing and sitting in your tower and just swinging the hammer and being mean. So. That's that's what I would say as, when you're doing the next steps, should be thoughtful about how you do that.

00;53;08;20 Tim: I would add one last point, Joe, and that is that let's also recognize that when we are working with people who are new, who are less experienced, who are learning all those things, they are probably, by definition, coming in feeling very insecure and, and yet they, they, they want to do well. And so I think we need to be sensitive to that.

00;53;37;28 Tim: So, so empathy first. Right. Then accountability. The other thing to to say is that people have different tolerances for the truth. And this is part of what we're trying to ascertain as a coach. So how much candor what's your what's your tolerance for truth right now. Can you can you take 40% right. Can you handle that? Can you absorb that?

00;54;05;03 Tim: Can you process that? So is your is your coaching. One of the things that you have to be doing is testing the person's tolerance for truth. And then based on that you will give you'll measure that. And and it's not often it's not the right thing to give them everything today. So you're going to measure that out. And we're going to try to take a step and then another step and then another step.

00;54;34;12 Tim: So I think we need to acknowledge that, as the truth tolerance increases, then the the candor increases and then it changes the nature of our interaction. I think we all struggle with that at times. Right? So I've got dissonance between behavior and beliefs. And so how much can I handle at one time. And so I think I think that's where the empathy comes in and the understanding.

00;55;03;01 Tim: Yeah.

00;55;04;00 Junior: So as we wrap up I would say that that's that's the summary. These patterns of deflection are natural. They're response patterns to some sort of vulnerability or fear that people are feeling. So take that for what it is. Understand that the person's reacting instinctively and try to unpack that to inform your approach in the way that you're going to hold them accountable.

00;55;28;05 Junior: To what degree, how fast and in what manner? And if you do that, what are you going to get? While the upside is pretty high, teams that operate with high degrees of alignment move way faster than those that don't. So there are real organizational stakes at play for the organization as a whole and for your team. And so is it worth it?

00;55;50;21 Junior: Yes, it's worth it. But it will require tremendous effort. And that's one of the things that I would probably be feeling if I were in the listener seat. Right now, though, it sounds like a lot of work. It is, it is, but it's worth it. And if you can do it well, you'll grow your people, you'll grow your team, and you'll become a better leader.

00;56;09;00 Tim: Yeah I agree. All right.

00;56;10;24 Junior: Well with that, everybody, we will say goodbye until the next episode. Take care. Leave us a review and share it with a friend.

00;56;17;15 Tim: Bye bye.

‍