K7 Insights
Personal Accountability: The Excuses We Tell Ourselves
Part of San Diego Business Coaching
Key takeaways
- Most owners credit wins to themselves and losses to the market. Psychologists call it self-serving bias, and it blocks the fix.
- The tell is simple: an excuse points at something you can't control, and it never survives one follow-up question.
- You don't need a better market. You need an honest list of what's actually inside your control this week.
“This year has been rough. The market down here is killing us.”
I’ve heard some version of that more than a hundred times in the last year, from good owners running real businesses. So I ask the obvious follow-up. Are prospects taking the meeting and then turning down the proposal?
“Oh, we haven’t had time to go find new customers.”
There it is. Two sentences apart, and the second one dismantles the first. That gap is where most San Diego businesses are actually stuck, and it has almost nothing to do with the economy.
What is personal accountability for a business owner?
Personal accountability is explaining your own results by what you did, and saying what you’ll do next, before anyone has to ask. Everyone else in your company has a boss who’ll eventually ask. The owner is the one person nobody asks, so the only accountability you get is the kind you supply yourself.
My shorthand for it: be accountable so you don’t have to be held accountable. Nobody in the building is in a position to hold you to it, so the first half of that sentence is the whole job.
The excuse in that conversation up top is the opposite move. It credits the result to something nobody in the building controls. Here’s why that move is so comfortable.
Why do we blame the thing we can’t control?
Because it’s the only version of the story that lets you keep your self-image intact. There’s a name for it: self-serving bias, the habit of crediting wins to your own effort and skill while assigning losses to conditions outside you (Verywell Mind).
Notice how clean the accounting is. The banner quarter two years ago? That was your strategy. The flat one you just finished? Interest rates, the cost of living down here, clients tightening up. Same company, same owner, two completely different explanations, and you never noticed you were using both.
It works. That’s the problem. It protects your ego well enough that you feel fine, and feeling fine is exactly what stops you from opening up the part of the business that’s actually broken.
What does an excuse cost you that a real constraint doesn’t?
A real constraint gives you something to work with. An excuse closes the file.
When you decide the market is the reason, every question downstream of that becomes pointless. Why chase the pipeline if nobody’s buying? Why fix the follow-up process if the phones are dead everywhere? You’ve built a story where effort has no payoff, and then you behave accordingly, and then the results confirm the story. It’s a closed loop and it feels like realism from the inside.
Psychologists have a term for the version where you help it along: self-handicapping. You set the conditions for the failure in advance so the failure doesn’t say anything about you. Nobody does this on purpose. It’s a comfort zone wearing a defense’s uniform.
The owner in that conversation up top wasn’t lazy and wasn’t lying. He’d built a story where the outcome was already decided, so the work that would have changed it looked pointless. Once the follow-up question landed, he heard it himself. I didn’t have to say anything else. That’s usually how it goes, which is why the question matters more than the lecture.
What’s the one question that cuts through it?
“What do I control?” That’s it. Ask it about the specific thing you just blamed on the market, and answer it in writing.
Watch what happens to the excuse when you do. “The market is soft” doesn’t survive contact with a written list, because the list fills up with things nobody else is stopping you from doing. Who hasn’t heard from you in ninety days. Which proposal has been sitting out there without a follow-up call. Which of your prices hasn’t moved since 2023. How many hours last week you spent inside work someone else should own.
None of those require the economy’s permission. All of them are Monday-morning available.
Here’s the discipline underneath the question. In my experience the owners who grow fastest explain their own outcomes internally, and it looks like a personality trait from the outside. I think it’s a habit. You install it by asking the same question every time something disappoints you, until asking it stops being a decision you have to make.
Common ways this shows up
Four disguises worth knowing, because the excuse rarely announces itself:
- The industry-wide fact. “Everybody’s slow right now.” Might be true. Doesn’t tell you a single thing about what you should do Monday.
- The comparison that flatters you. You benchmark against the friend who’s down 20% instead of the competitor who grew. Both are real companies. You picked one on purpose.
- The data that agrees with you. Numbers feel objective, so an excuse dressed in a spreadsheet gets through the door unchallenged. The report didn’t lie to you. You just went looking for it already knowing what you wanted it to say. Check which came first, the number or the conclusion.
- The excuse with a deadline. “Once Q4 settles down, we’ll get after it.” The deadline moves. It has moved before.
Not sure which excuse is yours? The leadership maturity assessment has a way of pointing at it.
What to do before Monday
An excuse is any explanation that leaves you with nothing to do on Monday. If the story you’re telling about your business ends without an action item, it isn’t an analysis, it’s an exit.
So take ten minutes today and write two columns for the thing you’re most frustrated about right now. What I control. What I don’t. Be honest about how short the second column really is when you’re specific about it. Then work the first column for thirty days before you say another word about the market. If you get down that list and want somebody who won’t let you quietly re-add things to the second column, that’s the work I do with San Diego owners.
- Isn't the economy a real constraint, though?
- Sometimes it absolutely is, and pretending otherwise is its own kind of dishonest. The real question is whether you've done the work inside your control before you hand the outcome to something outside it. Real pressure or not, that's the test.
- How do I get my leadership team to stop making excuses?
- Stop making them first, out loud, about yourself. A team takes its cue on accountability from what the owner does when something goes wrong, and no amount of asking will beat what they watched you do last quarter.
- What if I look at the list and most of it really is outside my control?
- Then your list is too short. Go back and get specific about the week in front of you instead of the year. There is always something in a seven-day window you own completely, and starting there is how the bigger items eventually come into range.
- What is an example of personal accountability at work?
- An owner misses the quarter's revenue number and tells the leadership team, before anyone asks: "My follow-up slipped in March. I'm calling every open proposal myself by Friday, and you'll see it in the pipeline by the end of the month." Owning the miss is half of it. The other half is the next action, with a date your team can check.
- How do you take accountability when something goes wrong?
- Say what happened and which part of it was yours, and leave the market out of the first sentence. Then name the next action, who owns it and when you'll look at the result. If you can't name an action yet, you're still explaining, and explaining is where excuses live.