Hi! Welcome. You being here means more than you know. Knowing it resonates with you keeps me going. I'm Lavena Xu-Johnson. I write about psychology for founders. Why? Because scaling a business means knowing ourselves first.
Happy Tuesday, founders,
Recently, I had a pretty difficult conversation.
After months of implementing behavioural management tools, an ex-team member is still making similar mistakes that could have been avoided. With many deflecting unrelated explanations from the ex-team member, I became fixated on this communicative behaviour.
Although we ended on a relatively good note and the outcome of ending the relationship is for the better, there was more I could have done better in the heat of the conflict resolution.
Next thing I knew, I was deep in the research-paper rabbit hole of excuse-making, and after three article drafts in totally different directions, I decided to start with the basics that I believe most of us miss when we’re lost in a difficult conversation:
An excuse is a defence mechanism.
To open up the possibility for change and achieve an effective outcome, we have to hold back the urge to force the other person to see our own perspective, and start manoeuvring the conversation with care and true listening, so that they drop their defence mechanisms, bit by bit.
To do that, we must first understand what defence mechanisms are from the very person who theorised the structure: Anna Freud, Sigmund Freud’s daughter.
Let’s jump into part 1 of excuse-making communication: defence mechanisms.
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Excuse? Or defence mechanisms?
Here’s a scenario you might have encountered:
Team member A missed a deadline for client B; instead of being accountable for what had happened, person A deflected and blamed the issue on the client’s change of scope, a teammate’s slow response, or an unclear brief.
To respond effectively to a habitually defensive team member, we must understand the psychological mechanism behind their defensiveness.
The ego and the mechanisms of defence
Sigmund Freud had observed many patterns across decades of clinical work on the mind when the sense of self is threatened. But it was his daughter, Anna Freud, who systematised the patterns, categorising ego strategies to protect itself against anxiety, shame and guilt.
In 1936, Anna Freud published The Ego and the Mechanisms of Defence, which would define the field of psychology, particularly in defence mechanisms.
The central argument was that defence mechanisms are not conscious decisions, but automatic psychological strategies to cope with a threat that, in the moment, could cause great anxiety, and that is too large to absorb directly. A mechanism that reduces the distance between the event and the person’s sense of competence and identity. A defence mechanism is an entirely habitual, unconscious, and sometimes pathological process employed to resolve conflicts among instinctual needs, internalised prohibitions, and external reality (Freud, 1937).
To understand the defence mechanisms, we must first revise how our minds are in a state of constant negotiation between our ego, id, and superego:
id: instinctual impulses, they are our drives, urges and wants, they seek expression in the consciousness
Ego: Mediating between the Id and the Ego, manages the demands of both
Superego: internalised moral authority, prohibits certain impulses and punishes the ego with guilt when it comes to consciousness
“To put it in another way, when he sets about the work of enlightenment, he takes his stand at a point equidistant from the id, the ego, and the superego.”
Defence mechanisms are unconscious strategies used by the ego to protect itself from anxiety by changing the narrative of reality. This anxiety arises when the ego feels overwhelmed by the id's pleasure-seeking desires and the superego's moralistic demands.
As a result, 11 defence mechanisms arise:
The three subtle defences we see most at work
Rationalisation: the construction of a logical-sounding explanation that protects the ego from the real reason. The person who missed a deadline because they procrastinated or misjudged their capacity offers a vendor delay instead. The explanation sounds reasonable. It may even contain true elements. What makes it a defence mechanism rather than a straightforward account is that its primary function is self-protection, rather than accuracy.
Projection: Instead of recognizing their own role in a failure, the person locates the problem in someone else: the co-founder didn't communicate clearly, the client kept changing their mind, the team wasn't supportive enough. Anna Freud's insight was that the projected element is usually the quality the person finds most threatening to see in themselves. The team member who accuses others of poor communication may be, at an unconscious level, managing their own anxiety about their poor communication.
Displacement: redirects the response. A founder gives critical feedback about a missed deliverable. The team member doesn't push back on the founder, but later that day, they're unusually sharp with a junior colleague, or they send a frustrated message to the vendor, or they criticize a process that had nothing to do with the original issue. The emotional charge from the accountability conversation has been moved to a place where it can be expressed without risk.
What defence mechanisms do you see most at work
What this means for founders
These three mechanisms, rationalisation, projection, and displacement, account for most of what we interpret as making excuses in a team setting. And recognising them as defence mechanisms, rather than as deliberate choices, changes what a useful response looks like.
When we treat an excuse as a conscious decision to avoid responsibility, our instinct is to confront it: push harder, ask sharper questions, demand ownership. When we recognise it as an automatic self-protective response: an involuntary attempt to save their ego, we realise confrontation would not be an effective tool. The defence mechanism was built to absorb exactly that kind of pressure. Pushing against it tends to activate it further, making it entirely counterproductive to our goal of dissolving it.
This doesn't mean we accept the excuse. It means we understand what produced it, so we can respond to the mechanism rather than the content. An excuse is only a symptom, the root cause is the person's identity. Addressing the cause requires a skilled way of communicating: one that reduces the perceived threat enough for the person to lower their defences on their own.
Part 2 covers what the research says about responding when the excuse is made during the conversation. Stay tuned.
How's the depth of today's edition?
As always, hit reply if something in here hits home.
Until next week,
Lavena
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