How to screw up an offer of apology
July 23, 2008 ·
Imagine getting a phone call from the gardener at your out-of-state family home. Now imagine your gardener telling you that your house and your belongings are nowhere to be seen.
That’s the call a Dallas woman received recently about her family home in Jackson, Mississippi.
It turns out that a Jackson State University contractor demolished the wrong house after a “prankster” (way too mild a word) made it look like the woman’s house was the one designated to be razed, instead of a university-owned house. Said a University official, “I’m sad that we made the mistake, and I wish that we hadn’t. It was nothing intentional.”
The apology started out so promising…and ended up so utterly ruined. It’s the implied “but” just before the last sentence that ruined it.
And the homeowner agrees, commenting to the Chronicle of Higher Education, “Nobody ever apologized. They just said, you know, ‘It was a mistake,’ if you call that an apology.”
Like the now-famous, “Mistakes were made,” apologies like Jackson State’s come across as disingenuous. They’re better understood as inadequate attempts to sanitize bad impact by claiming benign intentions, or attempts to shift responsibility. They feel like pretend apologies and can do more to escalate bad feelings than ease them.
Benign intentions don’t erase bad impact, anymore than bad impact automatically implies bad intentions. In conflict situations, the two can become tangled and we need to untangle them before more damage is done.
What would a stronger, more effective apology have sounded like in this situation? An effective apology would have admitted the blunder, acknowledged the impact, and been very human. Using the University’s own first sentence, it might have sounded something like this:
I’m sad that we made the mistake. Sad for a valued alum like Ms. Wilson, whose family home has been almost like a part of this campus for many years. Ms. Wilson, we know you must feel a loss, and hope you’ll accept our offer to fly you here so we can sit down personally with you. We want to apologize in person and figure out together what can be done.
For more on making effective apologies, try these two prior posts:
I suspect but do not know and cannot prove that most apologies like this are concocted in committee and are vetted by legal minds all of whom are keen to tamp down the potential effects. Odd that this may just have the opposite effect.
Dean, it’s true that attempts to craft apology statements that are safe can certainly result in too much vanilla!
It’s amazing how sometimes an attempted apology can be so pitiful. A true apology could make all the difference sometimes. Yours was much better than the University’s!
Thanks for the kind comment, Laurie. Your words reminded me that intention is what makes the difference. If the intention is to self-protect or protect institutional image, the danger is that’s what will shine through. If the intention is to genuinely acknowledge the catastrophic impact, the words will reflect that so much more clearly.
Just stopping by from Liz Strauss’s Blog Show.
Experience has taught me to not follow up the words, “I love you” or “I’m sorry” with the word “but.” No buts about it, “but” negates the previous words completely.
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Lori, yes indeed — it’s that “but” that’s such a killer in the middle of something else that might have been lovely.
Thanks for stopping in for a visit…glad to have found your blog!
It sure seems like a legal, “canned” apology to me.
Hey there, Karen, how are you? Seeing your note made me think back to the river cruise in Chicago and the spectacular skyline and company.
It does feel a bit canned, doesn’t it? Or vanilla-ed.
Hi Tammy, I’m doing well! I think back to that Chicago cruise too. Looking forward to seeing you at the next one!
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Tammy
Re “Screw Up…”: What a great example and practical advice.
You make it personal without being punitive - a rare skill to be teaching…. and what a lovely design to your site, I must add.
I wrote a book a couple of years ago call Resolving Conflict Sooner and am delighted to see the non-preachy warmth in your underlying tone of “conversation” here.
Not always easy when speaking or writing about this topic, eh?
Kare
Tammy,
I was so touched by the evident humanity and practicality in your posts that I recommended you yesterday here
http://sayitbetter.typepad.com/say_it_better/2008/08/handling-critic.html
kare, it’s lovely to connect with you here. I particularly appreciate your comments about the non-preachy tone in the post, as I work really hard to share ideas and information without preaching…and as you noted, it’s darn hard to get it right sometimes! I’m thrilled you noticed.
I’m also happy to learn about your book, because from visiting your site and seeing some of the excerpts, I think I’m going to enjoy it…and would love to be able to recommend it to readers, too.
Thanks for stopping in and taking the time to comment, kare.
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