The Art and Power of the Apology
By Sarah Kellogg
Illustrations by Dan Page

“I’m sorry.”

The phrase is one of the most frequently used but least appreciated in the English language. It is both simple and complex. It rolls off the tongue as easily as it catches in the throat. It can be heartfelt and achingly dishonest. An apology can be a moment of great vulnerability for its confessor, or it can be an impenetrable shield.

It also happens to be a first-rate defense when facing a potential legal pas de deux or budget-busting lawsuit, experts say. No longer reserved for a remorseful individual, the apology is a shrewd tactic for corporate America when confronted with discontented customers, unhappy employees, or angry patients.

It’s not surprising. The United States appreciates a good public mea culpa, whether it’s from a corporate CEO or a political figure, and has created numerous venues for the remorseful to deliver their pleas for forgiveness, from the Capitol Hill press conference to Oprah Winfrey’s television studio to the frenetic Internet.

As much as the public delights in a bit of corporate or political flagellation, it has little tolerance for tragedies closer to home. A wrong committed in the workplace, in a hospital, or even in a marriage leaves the individual seeking more than a showy, meaningless apology. It demands an earnest plea for forgiveness, culminating in an emotional reckoning for both parties.

Knowing that, many in the mental health, legal, and dispute-resolving communities believe the lessons learned long ago at a parent’s knee—about the moral necessity for apologizing for one’s transgressions—could be adopted in corporate America to dramatic effect, not only in terms of public reputation but also in improving workplace relations and reducing the number and cost of lawsuits.

“[The apology] is a powerful and constructive form of conflict resolution, embedded, in modified form, in religion and the judicial system. It is a method of social hearing that has grown in importance as our way of living together on our planet undergoes radical change,” wrote Aaron Lazare, a University of Massachusetts psychiatrist, in his 2004 book, On Apology.

Apologies are no panacea, though. They can be a highly risky strategy, not only because they can be read as an admission of guilt, or a potential sign of weakness, but also because, when poorly delivered, they can make a bad situation worse. Also, apologies have become so ubiquitous that their meaning and value are easily diminished by sheer volume. Lately, it’s hard to keep track of the celebrities apologizing after drunken tirades and public officials making amends after taking illegal “gratuities” from cronies.

That’s why many attorneys aren’t sold on the apology as a strategy to ward off lawsuits and complaints. They say the evidence of success remains largely anecdotal, and there is no guarantee that a well-crafted apology can, in most cases, provide aid and comfort to wronged parties or protect deep-pocket defendants from costly lawsuits. And an apology is still viewed by many as an admission of wrongdoing that can be used in court, often to disastrous effect.

Yet even the doubters cannot ignore the fact that there is mounting evidence and research showing that a policy of candidness in actions and motives coupled with a sincere apology can prompt a dialogue and create trust, reducing the need for protracted litigation and creating a long-term prototype for resolving disputes.

By Example
Let’s face it—these times just seem to demand apologies. The number of scandals acted out on the public stage grows by the day. The nation may be more prone to scandal today than 50 years ago, some psychologists say, because there is just more trouble waiting outside the door. The world is a much more complicated place, and the opportunities for missteps are many. Moreover, the public has grown more sensitive to civic and personal failures, no doubt owing to the fact they are all documented in great detail by the 24/7 news cycle.

Public relations professionals believe that the human propensity to err probably hasn’t changed much in the last few decades, but the nation’s access to slipups has increased exponentially with changes in technology. The Internet and its children—blogs, podcasts, and videocasts—make it possible for the smallest mistake to become a worldwide event. In turn, they feed the voracious need of the masses for a front-row seat at the proverbial car crash.

“There is a baseness of the audience that seems to have an insatiable appetite for tragedies of others,” says Richard Levick, president and chief executive officer of Levick Strategic Communications, a Washington public relations firm. “NASCAR is the fastest-growing sport in America. If it weren’t for the accidents, we’d call it traffic. We don’t want to admit this, but . . . we enjoy the tragedy of others as long as it doesn’t impact us emotionally.”

It doesn’t require a trip through the history books to find scandals of note that resulted in examples of admirable or awful apologies. In fact, the first few months of 2007 were littered with noteworthy scandals that demanded feet-of-clay admissions from celebrities, public figures, and corporations.

One of the best examples of a failed apology was the free-for-all around the firing of radio shock jock Don Imus. In April the New York radio host touched off a national firestorm when he used racist language to describe the players of the Rutgers University women’s basketball team. The hail of criticism that followed prompted Imus to apologize both publicly to the nation and privately to the young women. Despite his pleas, or maybe because it took him two days to deliver a half-hearted apology, he was taken to the woodshed by his cable and radio network bosses. The punishment was relatively swift and severe—the cancellation of his show.

“His apology left a lot to be desired,” says Lazare, who wrote his own version of the Imus apology for the Washington Post in April. “My apology had the right amount of humility and a sincere admission of guilt. I don’t know if it would have saved him, but it would have gone a lot further than his did. But then, I don’t think he could have given my apology. He wasn’t humble enough, and he was too defensive.”

By contrast, an example of a successful apology came from JetBlue Airways, the discount air carrier, which left thousands of its customers stranded in airplanes (up to 11 hours) and in airports (up to two days) during and after a February snowstorm. Frustrated passengers were livid, prompting a very public apology by David Neeleman, the company’s chief executive officer. Along with his apology and a vow to avoid similar crises in the future, the airline rewrote its customer bill of rights to make amends, offering to give stranded passengers cash vouchers and free airline travel when there are unreasonable delays in the future. They made the changes retroactive for passengers caught in the February storm as well.

“The CEO of JetBlue took the redemption highway,” says Bob Witeck, the chief executive officer and cofounder of Witeck-Combs Communications, a Washington public relations firm. “He can’t make the experience go away. It might have poisoned the well forever with passengers, because it’s what people will take away from their experience. But he let passengers know that he cared that it bothered them. He apologized and was accountable, and promised to do better.”

What Makes a Good Apology?
Sociologists and psychologists say that vowing to do better, along with a certain amount of sacrifice on the part of the confessor, may be the secret to success of a great apology. It also may explain why in the midst of personal upheaval individuals may choose a meaningful apology over a cash settlement or a prison term for the offender.

“An apology, no matter how sincere or effective, does not and cannot undo what has been done,” wrote author Nicholas Tavuchis in his 1991 book, Mea Culpa: A Sociology of Apology and Reconciliation. “And yet, in a mysterious way and according to its own logic, this is precisely what it manages to do.”

Not every apology is guaranteed to elicit the desired results. An apology that seeks forgiveness without humility, remorse, and a commitment not to repeat the offense is likely to fail, psychologists say. Any dissembling or defensiveness can be the kiss of death for an apology.

So what makes a good apology? Everyone has his or her own recipe for it, but there is a bit of overlap. Psychologists agree that the apology must first acknowledge the mistake and whatever pain might have been caused. In addition, it must accept responsibility for the error, along with providing assurances that the mistake won’t be repeated. Experts say for corporations the apology should include a vow to correct systemic problems that may have led to the mishap in the first place.

When counseling clients about drafting apologies, Levick focuses on a handful of important elements: sincerity, timing, and transparency. “They need to be out there first,” says Levick. “They can’t wait for someone to push them to apologize, and they need to run to the light when the story breaks. The worst thing they can do is hide. Every story has a saint and a sinner, and they need to ask themselves what role they are going to play. If you decide to run away, you have just elected to be the sinner.”

Though reacting quickly is important, the stakes can be high and caution is warranted. Dispute resolution experts suggest that corporations, health care providers, and high-profile individuals carefully consider why they want to apologize, especially publicly, before they start down that path. Once out in public view, apologies are difficult to retrieve, tweak, or improve.

“The biggest part for me about the apology is taking responsibility for what you’ve done,” says Carole Houk, an attorney and principal of Carole Houk International, LLC, a Northern Virginia firm that specializes in designing conflict management systems for organizations. “Saying you’re sorry doesn’t mean squat unless you also say you’re going to fix it. Sometimes the fix is money. Sometimes it’s an apology. Sometimes you can’t fix it, but you can at least be honest and sympathize.”

Corporate Responsibility
Many in corporate America have mastered the public apology, knowing how valuable it is in solving a major crisis, whether it’s a chemical spill, product contamination, or airplane crash. It is also a solid preemptive strike when trying to satisfy unruly stockholders and the fickle markets.

That may account for why so many corporations have opened up crisis communications shops or have sought hired guns to handle communications when things go sour. As the saying goes, the best defense is a good offense for corporations, and many CEOs find themselves front-and-center to fend off attacks for company failures with an earnest apology, a clever compensation idea, or a blueprint for how to revamp company policies and procedures.

Take CSX, the Jacksonville, Florida–based railroad. The company experienced three derailments in the first three months of this year. Mindful that lawsuits were just around the corner, yet recognizing that the company needed to keep the trains running on time, it quickly offered to reimburse thousands of local homeowners in nearby areas for their “inconvenience.” The reimbursement? One-hundred-dollar checks. Lots of them.

The offer came just days after the derailment, and in most cases individuals weren’t required to prove they had experienced a loss as a result of a derailment. In many cases, mere proximity—a driver’s license proving county residence—was enough to walk away with a check in Kentucky in January, West Virginia in February, and New York in March. For residents with additional costs, such as lost wages or medical bills, the company asked them and local governments, which cleaned up the derailments, to submit their bills, and they were promptly paid.

“It’s important to think like a consumer,” says Witeck. “What is their reaction going to be to a situation?”

Witeck says corporations can keep ahead of public relations disasters by taking the pulse of consumers, deciding how to get their buy-in, and then targeting the appropriate response, whether with an apology or with a show of goodwill.

The 1982 Tylenol case remains the gold standard of corporate responsibility. After seven people died from ingesting Tylenol capsules that had been laced with cyanide, Johnson & Johnson quickly took responsibility for the tragedy, although a subsequent investigation revealed the company was not at fault but rather some unidentified individual, who was never caught.

Johnson & Johnson CEO James Burke apologized to customers and recalled every Tylenol product from store shelves immediately, even though capsules were the only form of pill that was implicated in the poisoning. Burke encouraged customers to return their Tylenol bottles and take a voucher rather than “risk” injury.

“The message they were sending to their customers was, you are more important than our profits,” says Levick. “That has been an extraordinary legacy that has paid off for the last two decades in goodwill and, not surprisingly, profits.”

For every case of corporate mastery of the apology, there are dozens of cases of failure. Look no further than notorious incidents like the 1989 oil spill from the Exxon Valdez in Alaska. The company remained silent for six days, letting television video of oil-drenched birds and 1,500 miles of blackened shoreline tell the story. When the company did speak, there was no effort to take responsibility for the spill and the damage it caused. Soon the image on television wasn’t just of dying birds, but also of customers cutting up their Exxon credit cards.

“Absent an apology, there can be the impression of culpability,” says Witeck. “Whether that’s true or not, that’s what people may be thinking. The apology permits them to look at you in a different way and to hear your side of the story. There’s no guarantee of escaping unblemished, but it’s better than not trying.”

The Health Care Arena
The apology has taken on a near-mythic quality in the health care arena of late, owing in no small part to a national movement to break through the secrecy shrouding hospitals after an adverse medical event occurs or a medical error comes to light. The movement focuses on combining disclosure with an apology, opening the door for better communication between doctors and their patients, and diminishing the importance of litigation in finding the truth and compensating patients who are legitimately harmed.

At the center of this movement is the Sorry Works! Coalition, a Glen Carbon, Illinois, group made up of doctors, lawyers, mediators, and government officials that advocates for full disclosure of medical errors, followed by a swift apology and early settlement negotiations. Sorry Works! officials believe that hospitals and health care providers are finally seeing patients not as enemies poised to run to court over the smallest medical infraction, but rather as partners in the health care process who need to be adequately informed to assess the quality of care, both when it’s bad and when it’s good.

“Doctors need to understand that patients and families don’t expect perfection,” says Doug Wojcieszak, a spokesperson for Sorry Works! “We have high expectations, but at the end of the day we know it’s still a human endeavor. But we do expect honesty and candor after an adverse event. We can live with a mistake, but we can’t live with a coverup.”

The first health care institution to walk this path was the Lexington Veteran Affairs Medical Center in Kentucky, which adopted its “honesty” program in 1987. As guinea pigs go, it proved to be a perfect one. Veterans were less likely to sue (federal data had borne that out), and the hospital was run by the government, so there weren’t the same insurance concerns that a nonprofit or private hospital might have. The hospital also had a chief of staff at the time who believed in the program, Steve Kraman, and sat down individually with patients after adverse events or medical errors occurred.

Thirteen years after beginning the program, the hospital had settled with 170 patients and their families, going to court only three times during that period. In 2000 the Lexington hospital’s average payout on all claims was $16,000, compared with $98,000 at other veterans hospitals.

“Lexington is a real success story,” says Wojcieszak. “Before that time, if something bad happened, doctors would break off communication with patients. Nobody talked. At Lexington they were talking to each other.”

Conflict resolution specialists say the results in Lexington proved it was possible to disclose errors to patients without opening the hospital to enormous exposure and handing the patient ammunition to use in a court case. It was an eye-opener for the rest of the nation, observers say, and it sparked an interest in using the same or similar principles in other hospital settings.

The National Naval Medical Center in Bethesda, Maryland, was the next candidate for the new disclosure–apology model. In the 1990s the Navy was looking for a way to reduce medical malpractice lawsuits. At the time Houk, who served as the Navy’s first counsel for its alternative-dispute-resolution program, noticed that mediation was proving very successful in settling medical malpractice cases. After speaking with mediators, she learned mediation had worked because patients and their families were looking for an opportunity to sit across a table from their doctor and find out what went wrong and receive an apology, if appropriate.

“We began to ask the question, what if we told the truth about what happened?” says Houk. “Plus, we realized that no one was really telling patients anything, because they were so afraid of possible litigation. Patients felt like they were in the dark, and they felt their only recourse was a lawsuit.”

What resulted from the Naval Medical Center discussions was the creation of a medical ombudsman and mediator program. The ombudsman is a neutral player who operates internally, shuttling between health care personnel and patients, and who also has access to medical records. The ombudsman is a liaison who can interpret both sides of the conversation: explaining the medical decision-making process to patients and illuminating what families and patients were feeling for medical staff.

Houk says the policy has worked well in Bethesda, helping to reduce lawsuits and reduce medical errors, which was the original goal of the disclosure–apology system. The program has spread to about 30 other hospitals nationwide along with Kaiser Permanente, the nation’s largest health maintenance organization.

“This all started because of the Institute of Medicine’s 1999 report on medical errors,” says Houk. “Health care realized until the legal system changed, [doctors, nurses, and technicians] were not going to come forward and be transparent about errors, which meant the health care system wasn’t going to be able to improve. Once it’s safe to come forward, health care workers can start talking openly about making changes. The fact the apology reduces litigation is an unexpected benefit.”

The best example of that unexpected benefit, supporters say, is the University of Michigan Health System (UMHS). Following Lexington’s lead, UMHS adopted a disclosure program, which included an emphasis on transparency with a preference for apologies and frank talk with patients and their lawyers. UMHS also uses an ombudsman mediator.

This initiative was the brainchild of Rick Boothman, an attorney and UMHS’s chief risk officer, who had defended the hospital in the past in enough medical malpractice cases to see a pattern—the hospital, doctor, and patient frequently weren’t on the same page. If they had been, the result would have been different.

“More often than not, as a trial lawyer, I would say to myself, if these people would only talk to each other, a lot of this stuff would be unnecessary,” says Boothman.

After five years Boothman feels that his instincts were right. UMHS, which is one of the few facilities that is willing to speak publicly about its claims and settlement history, has seen dramatic results. In August 2001 UMHS had 262 claims and lawsuits pending. In August 2006, after five years of steady decline, claims and lawsuits had dropped to 104.

On the balance sheet, the university system has seen similar good news. Its average legal expense per case has been cut in half, dropping from $48,000 in 1997 to $21,000 in 2003. And the length of time it takes to process a case has been halved as well, shrinking from an average of 20.7 months to 9.5 months.

“As much as the health care professionals hate the legal profession, it’s amazing to me they have not developed alternatives,” says Boothman. “Instead they do just the opposite. They rely on the legal profession and crab about it the whole time. If the legal system is such a crapshoot, why don’t you take control over these issues and do your best to resolve them?”

Doctors and hospitals say they’re looking for some signal from the government that apologies won’t be used against them in court, and states have responded. Twenty-nine states have enacted laws excluding expressions of sympathy after incidents as proof of liability. Meanwhile five states—Florida, Nevada, New Jersey, Pennsylvania, and Vermont—have adopted a mandatory notification requirement for hospitals to inform patients of adverse medical outcomes.

Congress has expressed an interest in the disclosure–apology movement as well. Last year Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and Barack Obama (D-Ill.) introduced legislation, the Medical Error Disclosure and Compensation Act, laying out a two-apology approach whereby expressions of sympathy would be delivered immediately to patients and expressions of remorse and discussions of accountability would be offered only after a full investigation. There was a hearing on the bill, but it didn’t make it out of committee.

“The people who are quietly pushing this and championing this movement of apologizing and disclosing are the ones who have to do the damage control,” says John Banja, associate professor of rehabilitation medicine and assistant director of the program in health sciences and ethics at Emory University in Atlanta. “When an error is not disclosed at all, or it’s obfuscated, they’re the ones who get caught a week later, or a month later, or a year later. They’re the ones who have to deal with the patients. They’re the ones who know how much we need this.”

Dispute Resolution in the Workplace
Savvy employers are seeing the need to incorporate the apology strategy into their relationships with workers as well. Why end up in court when most workplace spats and disputes can be handled with an apology and a forthright discussion of where company policies or managerial decisions failed? And with workplaces becoming ever more complicated environments, where social mores and attitudes evolve to reflect the ever-changing workforce, companies must devise a nimble system for efficiently, quickly, and fairly handling disagreements.

Unlike hospitals, experts say, companies looking to use apologies in personnel matters must lay the groundwork first. Employment training consultants say a policy of openness and fairness must be part of the company’s corporate culture, and it doesn’t hurt to train managers on the best tactics for dealing with good and bad employees.

Rita Risser, an attorney who founded Fair Measures, a Santa Cruz, California, company that provides legal training for managers and their staffs, counsels her clients to develop a culture of honesty within the corporation, emphasizing the importance of creating a climate where managers and workers are operating under the same philosophy and value system.

“The law sets a floor for your behavior,” says Risser, who works as a consultant for Fair Measures today. “The company policy often sets a higher standard, but people’s values generally set an even higher standard still. The nice thing about law and policy is there’s usually only one law on any particular topic. Values can be all over the map. It requires a great deal of effort to create a culture where everyone’s values are respected and considered.”

The roadblock to applying the apology strategy in the workplace, says Risser, is the legal department. She believes many companies have no problem adopting a values-based culture in their offices, where individual employees have rights and are respected. She says the problems arise when the company needs to handle disputes between managers and employees, or between individual workers, and the attorneys feel the apology trades away too much ammunition that might be used later in court.

“The problem with companies is they have legal departments,” says Risser. “Legal departments are extremely concerned about the legal impact of an apology. Generally, they want an apology that doesn’t really say anything, and that doesn’t really help a situation. What we’ve tried to do in our programs is make it a matter of individual responsibility and to encourage employees to do it on their own. What we’re trying to do is keep things out of HR and keep things out of the legal department by bringing it back to individual responsibility.”

Boston attorney and mediator David Hoffman believes that in employment termination cases an apology can be an effective means of empowering both the employer and the employee. The person who offers the employee an apology may be emboldened to take responsibility for his or her actions, seeing the apology as an act of courage. The person accepting the apology feels that dignity may be restored.

“Although apologies are not appropriate in every case, in many circumstances an apology can be useful in overcoming psychological obstacles to the settlement of disputes,” wrote Hoffman in the journal Practical Dispute Resolution in 1999. “Employment termination cases often involve intense emotion, and therefore an apology may be particularly useful in that setting. In the context of negotiating the resolution of such disputes, an apology can help overcome the lack of trust created by the termination and counteract other psychological barriers to successful negotiation.”

Employment training consultants say American companies are increasingly looking for ways to incorporate apologies into their institutional frameworks because they see their value. By making room for them in human resources settings and developing protocols for delivering apologies, there is recognition of their worth beyond their ability to stave off lawsuits. The potential is there to reduce turnover, improve the company’s overall work environment, and increase productivity.

Wariness of the Legal Community
The apology may have won adherents all over the country, but converts haven’t come as quickly from the legal community. Professional legal associations have warily watched the movement from the sidelines, tracking developments with the Sorry Works! Coalition and other efforts. They aren’t lobbying Capitol Hill or cheering in the streets for a transformation of the legal system to one that is focused on the apology as the solution to all legal difficulties, but they haven’t directly blocked the path of the movement’s supporters either.

“We are interested in alternatives to litigation,” says Susan Steinman, director of policy for the American Association of Justice. “We are interested in alternatives that provide injured patients with the information about what happened to them or their loved ones if they’ve been injured. . . . We always want to preserve the right to a jury trial, though. It’s guaranteed under the Seventh Amendment, and we don’t like anything that interferes with that.”

Steinman says that though apologies are an integral part of many cases, her organization has concerns about some disclosure–apology policies that may encourage patients to forgo legal representation and negotiate directly with hospitals. Such situations would leave patients settling complicated medical questions without the assistance of a knowledgeable attorney who may be better positioned to judge the severity of an injury and determine the appropriate level of compensation.

Additionally, there is some concern in the legal community that the negotiation process between the hospital and the patient established under some disclosure–apology programs could be used to burn up valuable time—both intentionally and unintentionally—until the statute of limitations is passed, leaving patients with little legal recourse.

And trial lawyers are wary of legislative efforts that might too broadly define the apology to include other evidence, such as medical charts or nurses’ testimony.

“The apology is protected. It can never be admissible in a court of law,” says Steinman. “That has to be narrowly crafted, because you don’t want to protect other evidence of negligence that would be otherwise admissible and discoverable.”

Another concern for defense attorneys is that a quick admission of guilt, even when expressed with genuine feeling, can often be the wrong choice for a hospital, employer, or corporation. If all the facts aren’t clear, and the information hasn’t been compiled, it’s better to be cautious.

“Here’s the caveat. When something goes wrong in health care, we don’t always know what happened at that very first meeting with the patient,” says Geraldine Amori, a senior director at the Risk Management and Patient Safety Institute and past president of the American Society for Healthcare Risk Management. “The doctor may feel horrible, but he doesn’t know everything that’s happened at that point. That’s when we need to do the research and not apologize until we know the truth. That’s what makes the apology in health care tricky.”

Some supporters of the disclosure–apology programs say that attorneys are suspicious of them because they see their cash cow breaking free of the barn and running down the lane. Attorneys make a good living out of medical malpractice in America, they contend. Attorneys aren’t interested in seeing those million-dollar payouts, or their third of them, disappear.

Banja encourages attorneys to look for middle ground. There will always be a need for lawyers to help resolve disputes, because companies will go to court when they feel they’re in the right and the plaintiff is in the wrong. But after decades of relying on the current medical malpractice system, it’s time for a change. Malpractice insurance rates remain impossibly high, and the number of cases hasn’t significantly declined, despite efforts by federal and state lawmakers to restrict lawsuits and limit the size of payouts.

“The 20th-century medical malpractice model for handling lawsuits, for handling errors, was to conceal what happened, to be evasive,” says Banja. “It was thought without any evidence that concealment would accomplish the purpose of containing the number of suits as well as the cost of litigation. But there was no actual empirical evidence to back that up. That model doesn’t work, and we should change it.”

To Err Is Human
When it comes to apologies, dispute resolution specialists say save the Hallmark sentimentality for family members and friends. If apologies in the workplace, health care arena, or the public square are going to succeed, they must be dynamic and well executed, always with an eye toward their mission, whether that is reducing litigation and medical errors, bringing peace to the office, or making amends for a public catastrophe.

Proponents of apologies continue to cast them as a refreshing alternative to litigation, one that might save money and restore dignity at the same time, but it remains to be seen whether there are enough protections built into the system to ensure that the drive for forgiveness and a more immediate solution doesn’t overrun the desire to see justice done, inside and outside the courtroom.

What is apparent about apologies, observers say, is that their public uses in the workplace and other settings should not outweigh their spiritual and emotional impact for the individual. They may be a fine instrument to reach compromise and settle disputes, but their original purpose cannot be forgotten or diminished. The power of the apology lies, in both its public and private uses.

“Apologies are some of the most profound interchanges between people because they touch us at what can be our most vulnerable moments,” says Lazare. “The party who makes the apology can be relieved of his guilt and shame in this act of sacrifice, and the person receiving the apology enjoys the restoration of their dignity and can envision the beginnings of forgiveness.”

Freelance writer Sarah Kellogg wrote about lobbying in the April issue.