The Ethics of Apologies
This article originally appeared on Businessweek.com on June 21, 2010. It was reprinted with the expressed permission of Dr. Weinstein. The Dr. Weinstein now offers this article in the greater context of our discussion about Shirley Sherrod’s wrongful termination.
These few simple rules will help you give apologies meaningfully and accept them gracefully
Every day, it seems, we learn of an apology from a prominent executive, celebrity, or political figure in response to an indiscretion of some sort. Those in the public eye have an unfortunate tendency to apologize only after they have been found with a hand in the cookie jar. When this happens, it is only natural for a skeptical (or cynical) public to wonder, “Are they apologizing for their conduct, or simply because they were caught?”
To make matters worse, the wrongdoer will often use the passive voice in his or her apology: “Mistakes were made,” rather than “I made a mistake.” It is more comfortable to use the passive voice here, but doing so relinquishes any sense of personal responsibility. It is a non-apology and is not very meaningful.
Of course, it’s not just those in the public eye who readily offer an insincere “I’m sorry.” You probably have at least one such person in your life. It may be the person working for you who spends too much time making personal phone calls or surfing the Web while at the office. Perhaps it is a friend who consistently cancels lunch dates at the last minute. Maybe you even find yourself offering apologies more than you should. Regardless of the circumstances surrounding the need for the apology, and whether you need to make one or feel you deserve one, the following questions arise:
• What makes an apology meaningful?
• Does apologizing make us look weak?
• How should you respond if you can’t avoid repeating the mistake?
• What may we rightfully expect from someone who apologizes to us?
To answer these questions, it will be helpful to keep two ethical principles in mind: “Be Fair” (what I have called Life Principle No. 4) and “Be Loving” (or Life Principle No. 5). Recall that fairness or justice requires, among other things, that the punishment should fit the crime, and some forms of wrongful conduct are so serious that a mere “I’m sorry” isn’t enough of a response. To be loving and compassionate in our professional and personal lives calls upon a different set of skills: We should do what we can to honor a person’s sincere apology, even though our anger pulls us in the opposite direction.
With these two principles in mind, I propose the following guidelines for giving and accepting apologies:
When You Owe an Apology
• Admit your mistake quickly and take personal responsibility for it. Don’t say “We made a mistake” when you mean “I made a mistake.”
• Apologize first to the person you have wronged. That is the person who matters most.
• Speak from the heart. An insincere apology is as bad as no apology at all. People can tell when you really mean it, even if you think you’re a good actor and can fool everyone.
• Realize that “sorry” is just a word. For that word to be meaningful, you must do your level best to avoid repeating the mistake. This means coming up with a strategy and sticking to it.
• Understand that a meaningful apology is a sign of integrity, not weakness. Anyone can blame others, or deny that he or she did anything wrong, or lie about what really happened. Only a strong, self-possessed person can own up to their mistakes, and only such a person commands true respect.
• Don’t be afraid to ask for help. If you can’t do something well on your own, invite others to work with you on the problem. If the problem is beyond your grasp, consider asking someone else to take it on, if it is appropriate for you to do so.
When You Are Owed an Apology
• If someone has done something wrong and apologizes to you, accept the apology graciously. However…
• You are also justified in expecting the person to avoid repeating the behavior that required an apology in the first place.
• Depending on the situation, you might need to make clear to the other person what the consequences will be if he or she makes the mistake again.
• “Three strikes and you’re out” is fine for baseball, but in other areas, it may take only one strike for someone to be justifiably banished from being a player. Some mistakes are so serious that you should not grant a second chance. For relatively minor slipups, however, or if the task at hand is unusually difficult, it might be unfair not to allow more than three opportunities to get it right.
• If the apologist continues making the same mistake over and over, you may have to say, perhaps regrettably, “I can’t in good conscience give you another opportunity to slip up,” no matter how much that person continues to apologize.
The 1970 film Love Story featured the memorable line “Love means never having to say you’re sorry.” Even if this were true, there are many other areas where we do have to say we’re sorry—and mean it. The challenge for all of us is to admit we’ve made a mistake, to do our best to ensure that we don’t do it again, and to forgive others who sincerely regret their own poor judgment. No one is perfect, but most of us do have the capacity to right our own wrongs and to accept the imperfections in others.
Bruce@TheEthicsGuy.com Bruce Weinstein, Ph.D. is the corporate consultant, author, and public speaker known as The Ethics Guy. He has appeared on numerous national television shows and is the author of several books on ethics. His “Ask the Ethics Guy!” appears every other week on businessweek.com/managing/.
The Slippery Slope of Talking About Race in America
A couple of years ago I took on an assignment to write about racial equity and social justice in the food movement I have to admit, that I didn’t know much about the United States Department of Agriculture or its history of inequity. So I started with what I knew to do… research. I typed in race and farming. It made sense to me. I needed a background, a point of reference. To my surprise there was entry after entry on discrimination against black, Native American and Hispanic farmers. The discrimination resulted in a class action suit filed by black farmers, known as the Pigford Case. I went on to interview a few black farmers to get their take on this. For more information on the Pigford Class Action Suit go to http://www.nationalaglawcenter.org/assets/crs/RS20430.pdf
Fast forward to July 21, 2010. It is the day that the first person to be fired for racist activity. Shirley Sherrod, a 25-year employee of the USDA was asked to submit her resignation because she told her truth. Back in March she made an honest and open speech in front of the NAACP about her personal journey and evolution around race.
I am sure that Ms. Sherrod never set out to be the next Rosa Parks. And I am sure that she never expected to lose her job, because she told her truth. Instead, the head of the USDA reacted to a snippet of a tape of her speech. The NAACP reacted, as well, throwing her from the bus for a speech that Ms. Sherrod made at one of their meetings months before). Working in rural Georgia, I am sure it couldn’t have been easy for her. I bet she has some stories about being called names and threatened by the white farmers she tried to help. Whatever she saw, and felt, she clearly was able to move past it. It is a lesson that we all need to hear. And we could have heard it, if the tape hadn’t been edited.
The rest of the tape addresses lots of things including Sherrod’s story of the death of her father in a racist act. She talks about having crosses burned on her family’s lawn. And she talks about her commitment to stay in the South to change things. Yet, if you read the Tea Party blogs, or watched only Fox News, you would have heard only a couple of lines of her speech, out of context.
When a spokesperson for the Tea Party admitted that it was their intention to embarrass the NAACP by editing and sending this tape out virally, they set in motion a firestorm that made a whole lot of people look bad. The house may be on fire, but remember there was somebody standing there with a gas can and a match. Will we continue to let the flame throwers set the Shirley Sherrods of the world on fire for sport?
If you think that we live in a post-racial society, now that we have the first African American president, then think again. My heart broke a little when I heard Ms. Sherrod say “I can’t believe I am out of a job.” Shirley, I can’t either. I am not surprised that extreme conservatives work tirelessly to stir up the tensions of race. But I am horrified that the NAACP and the USDA were so reactionary. Right now I am sure that Tea Party members all over the country are having a great laugh at the expense of a woman in her 60s who told a story about how she has come to view race and poverty.
As a child of the 60s, I have seen hate around race. I have seen how far we’ve come. But I see how much healing we need to do. As of this writing, Secretary of Agriculture Vilsack has apologized to Ms. Sherrod, and offered her a job. Not her job, but a job. The NAACP also apologized. But when will we stop being a PR machine, reacting to save funding, and chase a few public opinion points? I am sure that the USDA acted to curb any embarrassment to the Administration. How’d that work out USDA? Are you willing to shake the trees and go back to and chase out the hundred or so years of discrimination against black, Native American, Asian and Hispanic farmers?
I also want to thank CNN for doing real journalism. They teach us a lesson. Blogs and twitters are just sources. They are not the story. Real journalists roll up their sleeves and vet stories. They look at real tapes. They give balanced coverage. In fairness to other media outlets, it is true that there is a rush to get the story out there as quickly as you can in the 24-hour news cycle. We feed the beast as fast as we can. Some time we need to slow down and ask some questions, especially when we call for someone to get fired.
The media has a lot of work to do. And so do we, the advocates, the thinkers, the policy makers and the pundits. Race is an uncomfortable conversation. But I am now convinced that we need to have more conversations. We need to address our humanity and our diverse American culture. We need to find our own courage to be Shirley Sherrod in our own right. And then we need to heal. Today I found out how easy it is to be angry in cases like this. It is challenging to take a deep breath and move forward in truth and honesty. Thank you Shirley Sherrod for the lesson.
Four Ways to Know Whether You are Ready for Change
This post originally appeared on the Harvard Business Review blog on June 2, 2010. It has been reposted with the expressed consent of the author.
Why can some companies take advantage of any change the market brings (Apple), while others struggle with the even the smallest internal or market-necessitated modification (GM)? Chances are your company has successfully executed a planned change initiative, but been unable to take advantage of a change brought on by market demands. Or vice versa. The reasons why will differ for each organization, but the question is definitely worth asking - especially in light of the fact that the pace of change is accelerating at the fastest rate in recorded history.
In our experience, the companies most likely to be successful in making change work to their advantage are the ones that no longer view change as a discrete event to be managed, but as a constant opportunity to evolve the business. GE, Hewlett-Packard and Nissan are three companies who are starting to treat change as a constant event; not as an initiative that needs to be managed. In these organizations, change readiness is the new change management.
Change readiness is the ability to continuously initiate and respond to change in ways that create advantage, minimize risk, and sustain performance. The age-old challenge: balancing the tension between the internal and external focus required to do all three equally.
This continuous and integrated approach to change requires the coordinated participation of everyone in the company, not just a few change agents or change leaders. Jeffrey Immelt, CEO of GE, articulated this in the company’s 2007 annual report when he explained that his new senior management team training, Leadership, Innovation and Growth (LIG), was to “embed growth into the DNA of our company.”
In a Harvard Business Review article “How GE Teaches Teams to Lead Change,” Immelt explains what he meant by that statement.
“… getting the teams leading the businesses to think about organic growth day in and day out - to be constantly on the lookout for opportuities and to create inspirational strategic visions that would enlist their troops in the cause… to weave innovation and growth into every aspect of their businesses… their behavior, their roles, how they spent their time.”
The need for this organic, constant approach to change is acknowledged in a Center for Creative Leadership White Paper, Transforming your Organization in which the authors conclude that organizations “need a new kind of leadership capacity to reframe dilemmas, reinterpret options, and reform operations - and to do so continuously.”
This is pretty ground breaking considering that our understanding of organizational change has has remained fundamentally intact since the innovative work of Lewin in the 1940s. Likewise, the concept of change management as a process of reorganizing, restructuring and reengineering (PDF link), which evolved incrementally over two decades.
Leaders know these theories no longer work, and even seem crazy considering how much the marketplace and corporate environments have changed in the same time period. Product lifecycle has never been so compressed, nor the need to innovate so fierce.
Consider BP and the oil still spewing from the company’s deepwater rig in the Gulf of Mexico more than a month after the initial explosion. No 10-step change management process is going to help BP’s management. The company must simultaneously react and innovate - all while maintaining their daily business. The BP situation may be extraordinary, but it does illustrate the need for change readiness vs. change management.
The discrepancy in the accelerated rate of change and the outdated change management practices still employed today unarguably have much to do with the 70% failure rate of change initiatives - a dismal statistic validated by study after study. Failure rates this high demand a new mindset and new actions, but before you can improve your change readiness, you must first assess current change awareness, agility, reactions and mechanisms.
Change Awareness. Change Awareness is a company’s ability to redefine itself as necessary. This contextual focus is critical to innovation - the right product at the right time. Good change awareness practices include scanning the environment for opportunities, focusing on emerging trends and planning for the future. Does your company have people responsible for regularly assessing the market for new opportunities and market changes? Does your company proactively search for opportunities for brand renewal and product innovation?
Change Agility. Change agility represents your company’s ability to engage people in pending changes. This is an internal focus that is critical to the company’s ability to effectively implement identified innovations. A great idea won’t matter if you can’t muster the capacity and commitment to carry it through. An organization with good change agility has the capacity to stretch when necessary and quickly shift resources to the place they will make the most difference. Leadership should inspire confidence and trust, and consistently. How agile is your company? How effective are your managers at engaging and delivering the changes envisioned by your decision makers? How well does your company actually facilitate and execute on change when it is needed?
Change Reaction. Change reaction is the ability to appropriately analyze problems, assess risks, and manage the reactions of employees. This internal focus ensures your company can sustain the day-to-day business while reacting in a timely and appropriate manner to self-initiated and market-dictated change. How effectively do you and other leaders at your company assess risk and manage unplanned change? How well does your organization react and respond to crisis?
Change Mechanisms. Change Mechanisms should encourage clear goal alignment across functions, the ability to integrate a change into existing systems, accountability for results, and reward systems that reinforce desired change behaviors. This contextual focus is critical to the ability to implement desired change with no interruption to daily operation. Are your structures and systems flexible enough to adapt and support the implementation of change? Does your organization have the structures and systems in place to support the successful implementation of change?
We have found that managers at companies like the ones mentioned here are asking themselves questions like these in the effort to build a capacity for change readiness instead of change management.
How are you working to increase your company’s change readiness?
Chris Musselwhite is president and CEO of Discovery Learning Inc. Tammie Plouffe is the managing partner of Innovative Pathways.