Apology Leadership in Public and Private

Love, perhaps, means never having to say you're sorry.  Not so in business. 

Leaders are defined not by avoiding mistakes, missteps, and misstatements.  The mark of a leader is how he or she responds to mistakes, missteps, and misstatements. 

Apology doesn’t come easily to most professionals. Business schools don’t cover apology, and if they do, they agree with lawyers who say, an apology is just like admitting fault, so don’t do it. 

For business people, apology is complicated.  Executives must be clear on whose behalf they are apologizing: for their own misbehavior or on behalf of the organization they lead.  The frameworks for making apology decisions under these two scenarios differ and successful leaders understand the differences.

Apology is a key survival skill for business leaders. As long as businesses have to recruit from the human race, organizations will slip up, go astray, make errors, misjudge risks, and otherwise screw up.  At complex, organizations with tens of thousands of employees working all over the world, mistakes—large and small, public and private—are all but inevitable.  Executives who are in the pubic eye must anticipate the probability of making mistakes.