“But” is among the most disheartening words for a leader or an employee to hear, as it almost always signals an excuse is coming. It is shocking how easy it is for someone to give an excuse to justify their performance, or shall we say lack of performance, behaviour, and about anything else they want to explain away.
Not long ago, I heard a leader blame everyone else for the way he was acting: “My behaviour is justified because they don’t know how to work here.” This was a Arab expat who spent 25 years of his career working in Europe before returning to the region for his retirement job.
Can you imagine the guile of a leader to blame his behaviour on how someone else acts? He bluntly said: “I am rude because they don’t work like they do in Europe. If they [referring to employees in the region] were not so emotional, then they would not think I am rude.”
I sat there listening to this poor justification for unacceptable behaviour thinking to myself: “The excuses that people come up with never cease to amaze me.” While this was an extreme, it paints the picture of reality – how to manage others’ defensive stories is an everyday part of the leader’s job. Although it’s far more alarming when excuses come to roost in the executive suite, which they had in this case. Actually, most excuses I hear come from senior leaders. So let’s not try to fool ourselves into thinking we don’t make them. We do.
So to begin, let’s commit together to stop making excuses.
There is a fine line between explaining the reason for something and using the reason as an excuse. A “reason” is about understanding something – why it happened, why it didn’t. It is about applying logic, making sense of and verifying the facts. Reasons are statements of fact that explain why something is the way it is, why someone does, thinks or says something, or even behaves in a certain way.
Whereas an “excuse” is assigning blame for what didn’t happen. It explains away a fault or an offence in the hope of being forgiven or understood. Ironically, many leaders use reasons as an excuse to say they are not making an excuse.
A common business excuse is “the targets were too stretching” or “we didn’t have enough time to deliver”. When a leader engages in one of these, he is shifting the locus of blame away from himself and on to another. This is an excuse, not a reason, as it is not based upon fact – it is rather an opinion. To shift this from being an excuse to a reason, you would need to support it with fact.
For example, replying with the following is a reason: It takes me one hour to create X, and you asked for 10 Xs to be created in eight hours. We will need 10 hours to achieve this target. Or we can achieve it in eight hours if you have ideas on how to improve our work. This example uses specific data to explain the performance quagmire.
The effect of the excuse reminds me of the children’s book The Little Engine That Could, which incidentally was used as a textbook for my doctoral seminars on leadership. In this story we find a train that could not get across the daunting mountain ahead but must as it had all of the toys that the kids wanted and food they needed. As the train asked for help, three able engines made excuses why they could not help. Really they were saying why they would not help, because they were able to if they rid themselves of their excuses.
Then the train asked one small unproven engine for help. Even with his self-doubt he overcame his excuse and successfully pulled the train cars across the mountain. He did it.
That is your job as a leader to get rid of excuses and help others get rid of theirs. Make it a priority to create an excuse-free environment in which it is easier to find reasons to achieve than excuses for not.
Tommy Weir is a leadership adviser, author of 10 Tips for Leading in the Middle East and other leadership writings, and the founder of the Emerging Markets Leadership Center
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Mercer, the investment consulting arm of US services company Marsh & McLennan, expects its wealth division to at least double its assets under management (AUM) in the Middle East as wealth in the region continues to grow despite economic headwinds, a company official said.
Mercer Wealth, which globally has $160 billion in AUM, plans to boost its AUM in the region to $2-$3bn in the next 2-3 years from the present $1bn, said Yasir AbuShaban, a Dubai-based principal with Mercer Wealth.
“Within the next two to three years, we are looking at reaching $2 to $3 billion as a conservative estimate and we do see an opportunity to do so,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Mercer does not directly make investments, but allocates clients’ money they have discretion to, to professional asset managers. They also provide advice to clients.
“We have buying power. We can negotiate on their (client’s) behalf with asset managers to provide them lower fees than they otherwise would have to get on their own,” he added.
Mercer Wealth’s clients include sovereign wealth funds, family offices, and insurance companies among others.
From its office in Dubai, Mercer also looks after Africa, India and Turkey, where they also see opportunity for growth.
Wealth creation in Middle East and Africa (MEA) grew 8.5 per cent to $8.1 trillion last year from $7.5tn in 2015, higher than last year’s global average of 6 per cent and the second-highest growth in a region after Asia-Pacific which grew 9.9 per cent, according to consultancy Boston Consulting Group (BCG). In the region, where wealth grew just 1.9 per cent in 2015 compared with 2014, a pickup in oil prices has helped in wealth generation.
BCG is forecasting MEA wealth will rise to $12tn by 2021, growing at an annual average of 8 per cent.
Drivers of wealth generation in the region will be split evenly between new wealth creation and growth of performance of existing assets, according to BCG.
Another general trend in the region is clients’ looking for a comprehensive approach to investing, according to Mr AbuShaban.
“Institutional investors or some of the families are seeing a slowdown in the available capital they have to invest and in that sense they are looking at optimizing the way they manage their portfolios and making sure they are not investing haphazardly and different parts of their investment are working together,” said Mr AbuShaban.
Some clients also have a higher appetite for risk, given the low interest-rate environment that does not provide enough yield for some institutional investors. These clients are keen to invest in illiquid assets, such as private equity and infrastructure.
“What we have seen is a desire for higher returns in what has been a low-return environment specifically in various fixed income or bonds,” he said.
“In this environment, we have seen a de facto increase in the risk that clients are taking in things like illiquid investments, private equity investments, infrastructure and private debt, those kind of investments were higher illiquidity results in incrementally higher returns.”
The Abu Dhabi Investment Authority, one of the largest sovereign wealth funds, said in its 2016 report that has gradually increased its exposure in direct private equity and private credit transactions, mainly in Asian markets and especially in China and India. The authority’s private equity department focused on structured equities owing to “their defensive characteristics.”
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