"I'm sorry. I was wrong."
"Thank you for your apology."
There, that wasn't so hard, was it?
Is it wrong not to apologize when being called out on
some deed or transgression? It's a question that looms large lately with news
reports of harassment, bullying, turning a blind eye, and assorted bad behavior
from well-known players in various walks of life.
Sometimes taking responsibility for a bad act may arouse
fear of losing credibility or livelihood. But sitting silent when the evidence
suggests that, at the very least, an apology is called for, often results in
chipping even more away at a reputation built.
A non-apology apology ("I'm sorry if any of my
actions caused [assorted names here] to believe I did something wrong")
often only serves to fuel the perception that the non-apologizer has behaved
badly.
In the early 1990s, when I was working as an editor at a
business magazine, we would often invite founders of startup companies to join
our editorial team for an informal lunch. While these lunches didn't always
turn into stories, they did provide opportunities for us to get to know people who
were doing interesting things in the marketplace.
At one lunch, the founder of a company that made
children's toys visited us. There was nothing remarkable about the lunch. We
asked questions about where the founder got the idea for the company, how she
planned for it to grow, and why she thought it might succeed in a market where
no one had yet tried the approach she was taking.
The founder became a runner-up in a
founder-of-the-year-type program we ran, but a couple of years later I ran into
her at an industry conference and, after greeting her, learned that she found
the lunch with us to be demoralizing because she found us to be condescending
in our questions. That wasn't our intention, but rather than explain that it
was our job to ask probing questions I simply said, "I'm sorry."
Clearly, there are times when apologizing would be wrong.
If accused of doing something of which you know you are not guilty, holding
fast is in order. When Socrates was accused of corrupting Athen's youth, he may
have defended himself, but he never apologized, if his student Plato's account
is trusted. Things didn't end well for Socrates (see hemlock/death), but he
died sticking to his story.
When a well-known newscaster took aim on Twitter at a
teenage activist last month because he shared on Twitter that he hadn't been
accepted to several colleges, the teenager successfully convinced some of the
newscaster's advertisers to pull advertisements from her show. Only after these
advertisers acted did the newscaster sort of offer an apology. If the student
wanted to go high in response, he simply could have responded,
"thanks," even if he kept up the effort to influence her advertisers.
If adults want to model good ethical behavior for
teenagers attempting to do good, the right thing is to be honest and forthright
in their apologies if they discover they erred. If we're going to own our
successes, we should also own our shortcomings.
Jeffrey L. Seglin, author of The Simple Art of Business Etiquette: How to Rise to the Top by Playing Nice, is a senior lecturer in public policy and director of the communications program at Harvard's Kennedy School. He is also the administrator of www.jeffreyseglin.com, a blog focused on ethical issues.
Do you have ethical questions that you need answered? Send them to rightthing@comcast.net.
Follow him on Twitter: @jseglin
(c) 2018 JEFFREY L. SEGLIN. DISTRIBUTED BY TRIBUNE CONTENT AGENCY, LLC.
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