Making Amends

Jan 25
10:32

2010

Jonathan Bernstein

Jonathan Bernstein

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In order to put negative publicity and reputation behind you, it is critical to both make a public apology AND make amends for your actions.

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There has been a great deal of media coverage recently about public apologies and mea culpas offered for the harm caused by organizations or individuals. There are many benefits to humbly admitting wrong and moving on.

However,Making Amends Articles an apology is only half of the formula necessary to put negative publicity and reputation damage behind you -- and it's usually the least-important half. The other critical element is making amends.










Dictionaries define "amends" as "recompense for grievance or injury (American Heritage) or "to put right (Merriam-Webster)" or -- and this is my favorite, because it is plain English and speaks to the heart of the amends concept -- "to do something good to show that you are sorry about something you have done (Cambridge Advanced Learner's Dictionary)."

Hence, if what you have done -- intentionally or inadvertently -- has caused measurable damage, amends would be to repair, or offer some means of repairing, that damage, to include emotional or psychological damage, not just material and financial.

Here's a simple example:

At many restaurants, if you are served a well-done steak when you have ordered one medium-rare, you will get an apology from the server and they'll cook you another steak. But how have you as a customer been harmed, in addition to not being able to eat yet? You may have suffered some degree of emotional stress over the delay, over not being able to eat at the same time as others at your table, and perhaps over being held up in your plans for after the meal. None of these are addressed by a typical restaurant's "I'm sorry" and simple food replacement.

At Claim Jumper, our favorite family restaurant, they consistently have a superb response to such mistakes, which inevitably happen from time to time at ANY eating establishment. Immediately, the server apologizes, and then within a few minutes the manager appears, apologizes again for the mistake and inconvenience, assures us that the food replacement will be coming very soon, and tells us that they'll remove the item from our bill, even if it's the full price of a supper. Both servers and managers crouch down to table level so that they can look you in the eye when talking -- a nice personal touch which communicates humility and sincerity. After the food arrives, the manager and/or server will wait by at the table until we're sure the replacement is satisfactory. This is doing "something good to show that you are sorry about something you have done," this is effectively making amends.

When extending that concept out to high-profile mistakes, one has to ask why more wasn't done by Martha Stewart to make amends not only to "the system" by serving time, but also to all of her local stakeholders who felt in some way betrayed or let down.

An experiential observation: individuals with high credibility need amends less in order to survive crises. It would take a great deal for any of us to trust OJ Simpson again. But Martha had a very high C-Factor going into her troubled times and, hence, seems to have come through it stronger than ever with "only" an apology and by making financial amends as required by the law.

We need only to look to wrongdoing in personal relationships to realize that the tenth "I'm sorry" from a family member or friend who has wronged us in the same way over and over just doesn't cut it. Until and unless that person is willing to make amends, we're not going to believe an apology.