In the NY Times Shortcuts column on Saturday, Alina Tugend wrote an excellent article: An Attempt to Revive the Lost art of the Apology.
According to the piece, there are four important components to an apology:
These include an acknowledgment of the fault or offense, regret for it
and responsibility for it — and, if possible, a way to fix the problem,
said Holly Weeks, a communications consultant and author of “Failure to
Communicate: How Conversations Go Wrong and What You Can Do to Right
Them” (Harvard Business Press, 2008).
The article includes examples of inadequate apologies (classics include “I want to apologize” or “I am sorry that I have offended you”). On Curb Your Enthusiasm, Larry David was famous for his poor apologies (one of my favorites was when he was taken to task for apologizing via telephone while loudly chewing pistachio nuts. The other characters argued with him about whether his apology was valid).
It seems so simple, yet why do so many people stumble when it comes to apologizing (especially when it involves a public figure and some kind of crisis)? We are all familiar with the carefully parsed apology that sounds like it was written by a lawyer and does not adhere to the above apology “specs.” In fact, fear of legal liability – and the involvement of lawyers – is a major cause of ill-conceived apologies.
Here, I disagree with the article, or at least one of sources quoted. Holly Weeks is quoted in the article as saying: “So many apologies are constructed by legal or P.R. people” as a defensive mechanism, not as a sincere expression of remorse.
This implies that legal and PR are generally agree, and of course that is not always the case. The last thing we (PR people) want our clients to do is sabotage apologies by making them legalistic and incomplete.
Another interesting thing I learned from the article is that a number of states have enacted “apology laws” that protect people from penalties they would otherwise be subject to simply because they apologized.
