A friend of mine and I have been talking lately about this topic of making excuses, which I referred to in my post talking about my latest newsletter.

On one level, most of us hate thinking that we make excuses for things that, truthfully, are in our hands to change. On another level, most of us feel pretty good when we earn rewards for things we've completed, because it often means we've done something well.

I've always believed that most management and employee relations are set up so that employees are stuck with only the ability to give excuses. Think about it; as a manager, you're always in the mode of evaluation or critiquing the performance of others, and when they're not up to par and you have to call them on it, most of the time employees will come up with reasons why they couldn't do what you needed them to do, as opposed to just accepting what you said and moving on.

So, the challenge to managers or leaders in business is to find ways to have more reward moments for employees instead of excuse moments. How does one do that? With incentives for hitting targets, both for the individual employee and for the group at large.

When I was a director over lots of employees, I used to have quarterly awards, and I would buy a plaque and put it up as a testament to their performance during the previous quarter. After having the same person win twice in a row, I then changed the rules so that no one could win more than once in a row, so that everyone would have a chance to get one. That worked well.

At another place, we set up food goals and would have special event days to honor them. For instance, we had sub day, pizza day, barbecue day, desserts day, etc. That worked wonders for us because everyone got a piece of it, and many times I paid for most of it myself, sometimes all of it. Once we even had a reward, which was agreed upon by administration, where everyone earned a half day off because we exceeded our monthly goal by almost 25%.

This doesn't mean that, when it's needed, you don't counsel employees when performance isn't up to standard. It does mean, however, that the focus changes to a more positive environment. And positivity always trumps negativity.