Early in my career, when I was working on an ambulance, one of my supervisors looked at me and asked a question I’ll never forget.
“What are you, the Vice President of Excuses?”
Sure, the humorist in me appreciated the snark in his question and immediately thought how awesome that title and role would be… just making excuses and earning a great living with a cool leadership title.
But the more I thought about it, the more what he said stung.
He wasn’t questioning my work ethic or my potential. He was calling out something much more important.
I had an excuse for everything. If I exercised poor judgment, I had a reason. If I made a bad decision, there was an explanation. If I did something immature or unprofessional, there was always someone else, some circumstance, or some justification that supposedly explained why it wasn’t really my fault.
Looking back, he was absolutely right.
I wasn’t taking ownership of my decisions.
That one sentence fundamentally changed the way I think about accountability.
Today, I have very little patience for excuses — especially my own.
Mistakes happen. We all make them. Poor judgment is part of being human. But excuses prevent us from growing because they shift our focus away from the one thing we can control: ourselves.
One of the most liberating philosophies I’ve adopted is what I call radical accountability.
When something goes wrong, my first question isn’t, Who can I blame?
It’s, What could I have done differently?
Sometimes the honest answer is, “Nothing.”
More often than we’d like to admit, however, there was something.
I could have communicated more clearly, anticipated the risk, or trained someone better. I could have slowed down and thought through the decision before making it.
Owning those things isn’t weakness. It’s freedom. The moment you stop making excuses, you start making progress.
Here’s a great example from a story I’ve told numerous times before:
Years ago, my grandmother was living in an assisted living facility.
One afternoon, she was taken on an outing in the facility’s van. Her wheelchair was properly secured to the floor of the vehicle, but she was not properly secured in the wheelchair itself. When the driver accelerated to make a changing stoplight and then suddenly slammed on the brakes, she was thrown forward out of the chair and into the seats ahead of her.
Rather than immediately calling 911, the driver and an attendant placed her back into the wheelchair and completed the excursion.
When they returned to the facility, staff bandaged an obviously lacerated arm, placed her in a recliner, and called my aunt to report that my grandmother had “a little fall.”
My aunt called me and asked me to go check on her.
The moment I walked into the room, I knew this was no minor incident. My background in emergency medical services told me she had suffered significant trauma. As I assessed her, I found injuries to her head, shoulder, arm, and what was obviously a severely fractured leg.
The facility initially refused to call 911. I insisted.
At the hospital, physicians confirmed the extent of her injuries. She died a few days later.
The following morning, my family met with the facility’s executive director. I wasn’t looking for perfection, but I was looking for accountability.
Instead, I was met with explanations, defensiveness, and an attempt to lecture me about what it meant to run a healthcare facility.
Eventually, I stopped the conversation.
I explained to the director that they didn’t, in fact, run a healthcare facility, but rather a residential care facility masquerading as a healthcare facility under a Medicaid waiver. This created an instant deer-in-the-headlights look as it was clear I knew what I was talking about.
Then I explained that I had worked in healthcare for my entire career and that I was in leadership for a major healthcare provider. I continued that based on that experience and my education in business administration and healthcare management, I understood the operational and clinical responsibilities involved. More importantly, I shared the leadership lesson I learned after giving too many excuses earlier in my career.
The true test of leadership isn’t whether mistakes occur. They will always occur because we run organizations staffed by people… and people are fallible.
The true test of leadership is whether you’ve done everything reasonably possible to prevent them from happening in the first place.
Did you establish clear policies, train your staff, and create systems that reduce the likelihood of human error?
Also, have you built a culture where people err on the side of protecting the patient rather than protecting themselves?
More pointedly, when something does go wrong, do you immediately act in the best interest of the person in your care, or do you minimize the situation while hoping it somehow works itself out?
Those are leadership decisions.
In the years that followed, my family pursued civil accountability. We also worked with legislators to strengthen California law governing assisted living facilities so that other families would be less likely to experience what ours did.
I’ve often wondered how many residents suffered serious injuries that weren’t recognized because no one with emergency medical training happened to walk through the door that day.
That experience further reinforced the way I lead.
Here’s the key takeaway: At some point in your career, you may aspire to lead people. You may become a supervisor, a manager, a director, or even a CEO.
If that’s your goal, your first leadership position should never be Vice President of Excuses.
The habits you develop before you become a leader are the habits you’ll bring into leadership. If you spend your career explaining away your own mistakes, you’ll eventually spend your leadership career explaining away everyone else’s.
Leaders don’t make excuses… they build accountability.
As an executive, I understand that many of the mistakes that happen inside an organization won’t technically be my fault. I may not have made the decision. I may not have been in the room or even aware that a decision was being made.
But leadership isn’t about technical fault. Leadership is about responsibility.
My job is to ask the harder questions before something goes wrong.
- Did we hire the right people?
- Did we prepare them?
- Did we create systems that reduce predictable human error?
- Did we reinforce a culture that prioritizes the people we serve over protecting the organization?
- Did we hold people accountable before small problems became catastrophic ones?
Every leader is responsible for creating an environment where good decisions are the norm, where accountability is expected, and where people feel empowered to do the right thing when something goes wrong.
I still hear my former supervisor’s voice from time to time: “What are you, the Vice President of Excuses?”
It’s still one of the best leadership lessons I’ve ever received.
I wasn’t being taught how to avoid mistakes… I was being taught to own them.
The opposite of excuses isn’t perfection. It’s accountability. And great leaders choose accountability.
Aaron J. Byzak, MBA, is a writer, speaker, and lifelong observer and developer of people and systems. He is the Chief Executive Officer and Chief Strategist for Galvanized Strategies, a strategic public affairs and leadership consulting firm that specializes in healthcare and non-profit clients, but excels across industries. His work draws on more than 30 years of experience in healthcare, leadership, public affairs, mentoring, and coaching — shaped by personal resilience, a deep sense of purpose, and a passion for driving meaningful change.
Read more insight from Aaron by following him on LinkedIn. He can be reached at aaron@galvanizedstrategies.com or at 760.889.3609.
