Questions to Pose in an Apology

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0:55Shalene Gupta:If you're making an apology, there are three questions that you want to be able to answer. The first is, do we tell the truth? People want the company to tell the truth for two reasons. One is it gives them confidence that they know what went wrong. And so that means that they will presumably know what to fix. The other is that they want the company to be a truth-telling company so it can uncover the truth. The second is on whose behalf are we acting? Is it clear that people understand that we understand that? And the third is how do our actions benefit those people who trust us? So what is it that we're going to do in the future that's actually going to make people believe that we're going to fix the problem we created?

1:37Shalene Gupta:And this is where all those facts matter because if you've laid that out pretty clearly then there is in fact a path to describe what it is that you're going to do. And so that action planning part is part of the apology too because that gives you confidence that the company actually knows how to get from the current state to the future state where this kind of thing is not going to happen. What is the idea of trust?

2:01Sandra J. Sucher:We definitely have this idea that trust is a binary where you either trust or you don't and once it's broken that's permanent, there's no coming back. But that's such a myth because in actuality, in this model that Sandra and I have unveiled and analyzed through our research, trust is based on multiple dimensions. And because of that, trust is much less fragile than we think. So you break it on one dimension, but you still have it on others, and you can rebuild it in the dimension because trust is a relationship. It's not just this feeling that goes away because something went wrong. And we can see that with corporate scandals.

2:38Sandra J. Sucher:There are lots of big companies where they've had to go out, something bad happened, it was their fault. They apologized, and yet, you know, years later, they're still here. The public still trusts them. There's a way in which they regained that trust. It's entirely possible.