The most politically sensitive conversation in performance management is the one about why an employee underperformed.

The manager suspects the employee is making excuses. The employee believes they experienced real obstacles. Both may be partly right. Getting this distinction wrong in either direction produces a bad outcome: treating a genuine blocker as an excuse destroys trust and leaves a fixable problem unfixed. Treating an excuse as a legitimate blocker enables a pattern that damages the team.

This article gives managers and HR a practical framework for distinguishing between the two, with specific questions and diagnostic tests.

The distinction that matters

A blocker is an obstacle that was outside the employee's control, that they escalated proactively, and that would have prevented any similarly capable employee in the same circumstances from meeting the target.

An excuse is an explanation for underperformance that attributes the gap to external factors the employee could have influenced, escalated, or planned around, and that is offered after the deadline rather than flagged before it.

The diagnostic questions:

• Did the employee flag the obstacle before the deadline, or after?
• Was the obstacle genuinely outside their control, or something they had the authority and capability to address?
• Would another employee in the same role and with the same resources have faced the same obstacle and also underperformed?
• Is this a one-time occurrence or a recurring pattern with different explanations each time?

Common real blockers in African organisations

These are organisational or contextual failures that genuinely impair performance and require a systemic response:

• Unclear role boundaries that cause dependencies to fail without a clear owner
• Resource constraints that were not disclosed to the employee: budget frozen mid-project, staffing reduced without informing the delivery owner
• Infrastructure unreliability: power disruptions, internet failures, or banking system outages affecting client-facing work in Lagos, Nairobi, or Accra
• Senior management decisions that changed the objective mid-cycle without updating the employee's OKRs
• Cross-team dependencies where the blocking team was managed by a senior leader the employee had no authority to escalate to

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Common performance excuses

These are attributions that deflect responsibility the employee could have taken:

• "The team didn't support me" when support was available but not actively sought
• "The process wasn't clear" when the employee had access to clarification but did not seek it
• "I was too busy" when the prioritisation was within the employee's control
• "The deadline was unrealistic" when the employee agreed to the deadline without flagging the concern at the time
• Retrospective discovery of obstacles that were known earlier but not raised

How to respond to each

For a genuine blocker: acknowledge it, document it, investigate whether the organisational condition that created the blocker needs to be fixed, and remove it from the performance assessment. "The resource constraint you faced was a management failure, not a performance failure. I am not holding you accountable for something you could not control."

For a performance excuse: be direct without being accusatory. "I hear what you have described, and I want to test it against the evidence. The obstacle you named was present from [date]. Your deadline was [date]. I can see from the check-in notes that it was raised for the first time after the deadline passed. What would you have done differently if you could go back?"

The role of documentation in separating the two

Check-in notes are the most valuable tool for distinguishing blockers from excuses. An employee who flagged an obstacle in a check-in note two weeks before the deadline and received no response from their manager has a documented blocker with a management failure attached. An employee who never mentioned the obstacle until after the deadline missed has a weaker case.

This is one of the strongest arguments for requiring managers to keep check-in notes throughout the cycle: they create the evidentiary record that makes these conversations navigable rather than political.

Quick checklist: blocker vs. excuse diagnostic

• Obstacle flagged before the deadline? (blocker indicator)
• Obstacle outside the employee's control and authority? (blocker indicator)
• Same obstacle would have prevented any comparable employee? (blocker indicator)
• First time this explanation has been offered? (single incident may still be legitimate)
• Pattern of different explanations across multiple missed targets? (excuse indicator)
• Employee had authority to escalate and chose not to? (excuse indicator)

Frequently asked questions

What if the organisation contributed to the blocker but the employee also contributed to missing the target?

Acknowledge both. "The resource constraint was real and I should have addressed it sooner. There was also a decision you made in [situation] that made the constraint worse. I want us to talk about both." Shared accountability conversations are more credible than assigning all responsibility to either party.

How do you prevent "blocker" from becoming a culture where accountability is avoided?

Make the escalation expectation explicit: employees are responsible for flagging blockers before they affect delivery, not after. Include "proactive risk flagging" as a competency in the review framework. This creates a positive accountability loop: employees who identify and escalate blockers early are demonstrating good performance, not asking for excuses.