7 Steps for Apologizing at Work and When NOT to Use Them
Want instant insight into the level of trust you experience in your workplace culture?
Just screw something up! Your reaction to your own mistake, how comfortable you are fessing up to whom, will illuminate where trust and safety exist for you, and where they do not.
In an ideal culture, in an ideal relationship with your boss and colleagues, we should be able to say, “I made a mistake with that …” deliverable, snide comment, missed deadline, coding, incorrect assumption.
A sincere apology, promptly delivered, can increase trust and connection. If I’m apologizing, I’m being honest and human. I’m owning what I did, in an attempt to move on in a productive way.
But lots of workplace cultures, or individual powerful people, are more about compliance and control than support and flexibility. When you work in an environment like that, apologizing isn’t smart. In a place where people are punished for mistakes or lose status by not being perfect all the time, you are wise to hesitate and even hide mistakes.
Here’s advice on apologizing at work in both high-trust and low-trust scenarios.
Scenario 1: Apologizing in a trustworthy and safe culture
You have sufficient trust in those people in power, or you have enough power to model a good apology and stay safe from hits to your reputation and relational power.
Speak up promptly. Tell whoever is impacted by the mistake as quickly as you can, to limit any damage done. Speaking up quickly to claim your mistake also gets the unpleasantness over with, so you can move on yourself.
State your specific mistaken action and the impact. Say what you did that was a mistake, and the impact of the mistake. “I missed the deadline by three days, which meant that everyone else is now behind schedule on this big deliverable.” OR, “I should not have said what I said. People got defensive, the meeting went off the rails, and our whole team looked bad in front of the boss.” (If you know the Situation-Behavior-Impact framework for feedback, this is using that feedback format on yourself.)
Avoid implicating other people. Do NOT say “If you had done x, I wouldn’t have made the mistake.”
Say what you are doing, or what needs to be done, to fix things. Let people know you are on top of things, by fixing things. State the extra work you have done to fix the mistake. You may also need to request that someone else do something to address the impacts of the mistake.
Address any relational impacts you want to minimize. Mistakes can undermine people’s trust in us. If losing trust and opportunities is on your mind, you can address this directly, like “I understand you may have concerns about my work based on this. I hope to be considered for high-priority work in the future.”
Say what you will do in the future to prevent this type of mistake again. If the mistake is something that could happen again in future days and weeks and projects and teams, say something like “I am changing the way I manage my deadlines to avoid this happening again.” Preventing future problems is important work, and can help you be seen as a leading thinker (who made a mistake this time).
Keep your head up and move on. Finally, keep it stepping. You don’t owe it to anyone to continue to feel bad and grovel, once you have done everything you can to own the mistake, fix whatever needs fixing because of it, and consider preventing the same mistake happening again. Mistakes are normal. Apologizing repeatedly for one thing makes other people responsible for reassuring the mistake-maker that everything is okay, and keeps reminding everybody that you messed up.
Scenario 2: Apologizing in a low-trust culture where you have to watch your back
In the team or organization where there is a low level of trust, where people have to watch their backs and be careful not to make themselves vulnerable to power plays and gossip, apologizing carries risk. Even though it’s still the right thing to do.
As much as the power dynamic allows, you want to follow the same seven steps you would use in a trusting relationship or trusting culture. While minimizing risk to your own reputation and interpersonal effectiveness. A few variables to consider:
The right people: Who can you trust to help you fix the mistake, maybe in a quiet way?
The right time: Now is always the best times to admit a mistake and fix it, but when you can’t trust a boss or the team culture, it make be best to fix the mistake and learn its impacts before you admit the mistake: “See? Everything is fine. And I made a mistake over here, and I fixed it.”
The right message: Describe the mistake in more detail than would be necessary in a trusting relationship or trusting culture overall, so your mistake makes sense. “I thought x, so I did y” can help you save face without blaming somebody else or making lots of excuses. Excuses do not inspire confidence in a future free of the same mistake.
A nudge in the right direction: If you have influence and the timing seems right, you could wrap your mistake up with an endorsement of a better team culture, one that allows mistakes and minimizes fear and covering up things that need to be fixed. One idea: “I’m glad I told you my mistake. I want us to be able to admit mistakes so we can react quickly as a team when needed.”