Drop the Pink Elephant, page 4
Dale Carnegie, How to Win Friends and Influence People
Elton John was spot-on when he sang ‘Sorry Seems to be the Hardest Word’.
To be wrong hurts us deeply. It shakes our self-confidence. It makes us doubt our ability. But the truth may well be that we simply got it wrong.
Is it possible to go through your whole life being right all the time? Some people would certainly give you the impression that they, or their organization, are infallible.
Most of us hate having to say ‘I’m sorry, I got it wrong’. I reckon that’s because our self-confidence is a little more fragile than we would like others to believe. But the quicker we come to realize our mistakes, and the quicker we apologize, the quicker the growing tension evaporates.
Refusal to apologize increases the tension - and increases the mistrust of the judgement of the person in the wrong. Refusal to apologize leads to wrongful imprisonment, huge compensation claims, even wars.
Caroline jokes (at least I hope she’s joking) that the first time she heard me apologize was when I got a football scoreline wrong on television. I used that anecdote when calming down a potentially explosive situation at the Women’s World Doubles Tennis Championship final in Edinburgh a few years ago, in my role as Master of Ceremonies.
From our office above the grandstand, Gavin, the tournament organizer, and I looked out in puzzlement at the quarter-full stadium as the final got underway at one o’clock on the dot. ‘I’m at a loss!’ he exclaimed. ‘Where is everybody? We’re sold out.’
Then the penny dropped. The tickets were advertising a 1.30 p.m. start, but a late decision by the BBC to televise the event meant the start time had been brought forward by half an hour.
Gavin was distraught. So, too, were the fans gathering round the stewards, who were preventing ticket holders from taking their seat because play had started. Their anger was growing at the suggestion that they should have been in their seats in time for the start of play. ‘What on earth are we going to do?’ Gavin asked, to nobody in particular.
‘Well, as Master of Ceremonies, I reckon it’s my job to go on court at the end of the first set and apologize,’ I suggested.
‘But that will make things worse,’ he replied. ‘People will demand their money back. The papers will be full of complaints.’
‘Only if we do nothing,’ I offered. ‘Trust me.’
He did and, amid rumbles of discontent, I strode out on court at the set break, with a final instruction ringing in my ears: ‘Don’t blame the BBC!’ (Pink Elephant!)
‘Trust me,’ I replied.
As the players wiped their brows and their racquets, I was the one having to face the heat.
‘Ladies and Gentlemen,’ I began. ‘We owe you an explanation and an apology. You turned up on time for a 1.30 start, but we’ve published the wrong start time. The ticket should have said 1 o’clock. Now I can only apologize for that. We’ve had a great first set of tennis and I’m looking forward to some more enthralling play, this time with everybody seated. Again, please accept our apologies - and enjoy the match.’
The end of the announcement was marked with a faint ripple of half-hearted applause. But the match stretched to three sets and the crowd loved it. The stewards reported to us that the only complaints they received came before the announcement.
‘How did you know that would work?’ Gavin asked.
‘They only wanted to know the mistake was ours and that they were right to arrive when they did,’ I replied. The apology was simply asking them to forgive our mistake, which they did. Their self-confidence was intact. Ours was dented.
Gavin was astonished. But then, he was more emotionally involved than me. I may have been the frontman, but the mistake was his. And I found it much easier to apologize for his mistake than I would have had it been mine.
Some years later, I was attempting to record a weekly football show I presented for Sky Television. A new graphics operator was struggling with ‘finger trouble’ - pressing the wrong buttons, leaving captions to appear at all the wrong times. What should have taken 45 minutes took twice as long. Every time he made another mistake, we had to return to the previous edit point and start again.
Everybody was frustrated and I was starting to lose concentration. The longer this went on, the more I began to stumble, meaning we had to go back to the last edit point, only this time because of me.
After two hours, the producer, director and I emerged from the studio frazzled. But, by now, the blame fell on the shoulders of the graphics operator AND me. After all, I had contributed to the length of the recording. There was only one thing to do. ‘I’m really sorry about the stumbles,’ I offered. ‘I started to lose concentration.’
They almost fell over themselves to let me off the hook. ‘It’s not your fault,’ the producer said. (Pink Elephant!) ‘Anybody would have lost the plot,’ added the director.
Had I chosen to blame the poor graphics man, both would have been justified in pointing out my shortcomings. I had simply empowered them to accept my apology. We all benefited from that.
The trouble is, many organizations see it differently. They believe, wrongly in my view, that to say ‘sorry’ is to admit weakness. I believe the opposite. I believe it’s a sign of strength. We all make mistakes. Why deny that? But those who claim infallibility usually fall in the estimation of people more realistic than themselves.
We’ve seen governments, churches, courts and police forces fail to apologize when they’ve clearly got it wrong.
Anyone who has followed the tragic story of four suspicious deaths at the Deepcut Army Barracks in Surrey would see why an apparent lack of sympathy creates deep-felt anger.
Four young soldiers, three men and a woman, have been found dead there with gunshot wounds in recent years. The Army says they are all suicides, even though one soldier suffered two head wounds (from above) and another soldier suffered FIVE chest wounds.
Parents of the young soldiers reported a dismissive attitude shown by the Army.
When phoning three days after his son’s death to hear how the enquiry was going, Jim Collinson reports being told ‘There was one body, one gun. Draw your own conclusions.’ That attitude has only provoked the parents into pursuing the matter as far as it takes to seek justice.
Meanwhile a Ministry of Defence (MOD) spokeswoman gave her feelings away with a string of denials:
• ‘We have nothing to cover up …’ (Pink Elephant!)
• ‘… nothing to hide …’ (Pink Elephant!)
• ‘It would be foolish to say bullying and harassment doesn’t happen.’ (Pink Elephant!)
When a Chinook helicopter crashed into the Mull of Kintyre in south-west Scotland in June 1994, killing 29 - among them many senior intelligence figures from the armed forces - the MOD put it down to ‘gross (pilot) negligence with absolutely no doubt whatsoever.’ (Pink Elephant!)
The pilots’ parents, and a growing number of people showing interest in the case, disagreed. A House of Lords committee concluded in February 2002 that technical problems related to computer software were the most likely cause of the crash. The House of Lords report exonerated the two pilots. The Ministry has yet to apologize. Indeed, a spokeswoman stated ‘We stand by the conclusions of the (MOD) enquiry and review officers.’
Recent history in Britain is peppered with people who have been wrongfully imprisoned, among them the Guildford Four (15 years in prison), the Birmingham Six (16 years in prison) and the Bridgewater Three (over 17 years in prison). Their fight for justice was fuelled by the intransigence of the authorities.
Stefan Kiszko, a man of limited intelligence, was jailed in 1976 for a child murder despite forensic tests which, had they been shared with the court at the time, would have proved him innocent. He was released 16 years later in 1992 and died within six months, without ever hearing an apology from anybody in authority.
More recently in 2002, Robert Brown - jailed for murder in 1977 when aged just 19 - was freed at the age of 45 after his murder conviction was quashed. Corruption among police officers involved in his conviction had first come to light when one of them was jailed in 1983.
People in high places who make big mistakes seldom apologize.
Shirley McKie was a Strathclyde Police detective sent to investigate a murder. She was accused of leaving her fingerprint on a doorway above the body, having been told specifically to keep out of the building. When she refused to admit in the witness box at the murder trial that the print was hers, she was charged with perjury and was herself sent for trial for lying under oath.
In a celebrated case, she became the first person in 102 years of Scottish fingerprint evidence to prove a positive fingerprint identification to be wrong. She won the court case, was commended by the judge and subsequently received an apology from the Scottish Justice Minister in Parliament. Several years later, she had still to receive an apology from any of her accusers - and so sued her former employers.
‘I would still be working for the police today if they had just said “sorry, we got it wrong”,’ Shirley told me. ‘Instead, I was dragged through court, my career is over and the taxpayer has paid out millions of pounds to fund this charade. All because of a refusal to say “sorry”.’
Many lawyers used to advise that saying ‘sorry’ would cost money. The opposite is often the case. Saying it at the earliest opportunity will often prevent legal action.
There are occasions when you can acknowledge someone’s anger and distress, even when you feel liability lies elsewhere. ‘I’m sorry you’re upset,’ is the very recognition some people seek. Even the sharpest lawyer would have to concede that liability is unaffected by that sort of apology. You could say ‘I’m sorry that the Twin Towers tragedy ever happened.’ But the responsibility for it happening lies elsewhere.
Things are changing. There is a greater recognition than there used to be when something goes wrong that putting it right starts with an apology. In the two decades I’ve been advising companies on handling the media, this is one of the most encouraging changes I’ve witnessed.
Any time the world’s biggest alcoholic drinks company, Diageo, has announced redundancies, it has apologized for having to do so. When BP at Grangemouth announced 700 job losses in November 2001, it prefaced the announcement by expressing its regrets. All my other clients take the same view.
As more and more companies realize that their reputation is linked to community relations, environmental responsibility and also share price, the growing tendency to put up a corporate hand in apology becomes increasingly accepted as the right thing to do.
My strong feeling is that any declining confidence in the police, the courts and government would be addressed by more frequent apologies when things go wrong.
Regret, Reason and Remedy
So we can accept that it’s often right to apologize. Is that enough? Certainly not! How are you going to fix what you’ve got wrong?
There is a simple formula to remember when all your emotions are telling you to run for cover and hide. It’s called Regret, Reason and Remedy - the Three Rs.
Two tragic air disasters in Britain within 18 days of each other in the late 1980s contrasted the attitudes of the airlines involved. One applied the Three Rs, the other was posted missing.
The bombing of Pan Am’s transatlantic flight, a couple of days before Christmas 1988, ripped the heart out of Lockerbie and was a shocking catastrophe that caught the world’s attention. Pan Am must have been stunned at what happened to their aircraft and that may be why they failed to appear at the crash site to tell the world how they felt about the biggest mass murder in British history.
The British Midland crash at Kegworth on the M1 motorway happened on 8 January 1989 after the engine of a Belfast-bound plane from Heathrow caught fire. The 47 deaths were a personal tragedy for all those involved, including Chairman Sir Michael Bishop, witnessing loss of life on one of his aircraft for the first time. I vividly recall him at the crash scene that night, engulfed by news cameras. He looked a distraught figure, attempting to absorb what had happened to his aircraft and his passengers. In each interview he expressed the grief he was feeling (Regret), explained that an investigation was underway to find the cause (Reason) and promised that any changes that could be made in the future would be made (Remedy).
Several years later, I met Sir Michael at a function and told him how much I had empathized with him that awful night and admired his handling of the disaster. ‘I was fortunate to be half an hour away at the time of the crash,’ he said. ‘What if the accident had happened in the South of France?’
‘I reckon you’d have been in the South of France just as soon as a plane could take you,’ I answered. ‘It was the attitude that shone through that night. Where you had happened to be at the time was irrelevant.’
Ironically, while terrorism was the cause of the Lockerbie disaster, fire and pilot error led to the Kegworth crash. Yet it was Pan Am who were noticeable by their absence, while British Midland stood up to face the music, to their great credit.
Three years after Lockerbie, Pan Am folded, bringing to an end 64 years of pioneering aviation. From operating its first flight in 1927, a single-engine aircraft route between Key West in Florida and Havana in Cuba, Pan Am had become industry leaders. But the company’s handling of the Lockerbie aftermath indicated that something was very wrong with their public face.
British Midland has gone from strength to strength, despite taking the blame over the cause of the Kegworth crash and the 47 deaths that resulted from it.
Regret, Reason and Remedy apply to any situation, business or domestic, that goes wrong.
I received a phone call from a client in the energy industry one sunny Saturday morning as I was out and about in the car. In a week when there had already been a loss of power and a small explosion at his plant, my client now had a fire to deal with. He was looking for my advice in dealing with the media. I reminded him of Regret, Reason and Remedy, which then gave him a structure to build on for his newspaper, radio and television interviews that day.
Firstly, he had to apologize to the local community for the noise and smoke pouring out of the plant (Regret). Then he had to explain what had happened to start the fire, and that it had been tackled successfully (Reason). Finally, he had to explain how long it would be until things were back to normal - and what would be done to prevent a recurrence of the problem (Remedy). He agreed that this was the way to handle it and carried out his task well throughout the day.
The Three Rs are applicable in all sorts of circumstances, if used sincerely. And of course it’s important that you really do everything in your power to prevent recurrence.
Use the Three Rs when running late for a meeting. You probably hate being late and feel you want to apologize all day for your seemingly inexcusable mistake. But that’s all baggage. So remember to get things in perspective by using the Three Rs - and to progress beyond just the apology:
• ‘I’m really sorry I’m late. (Regret)
• I misjudged the traffic this morning and got held up in a jam. (Reason)
• If you like, I’ll shorten the lunch break to ensure we finish on time.’ (Remedy)
Going back to the starting time cock-up at the tennis tournament, that was classic Three Rs:
• ‘I’m sorry we got it wrong.
• We printed the wrong start time.
• We’ll now get underway with everybody seated (and pray for a long match).’
You’ll often feel that situations are made worse by people telling you what’s wrong but omitting either to apologize or solve the problem. In other words, Reason - without the Regret and Remedy!
Recently I watched a young member of staff at a leisure club struggle through a morning in which the swimming pool had run out of towels. She met every member with the same message: ‘There are no towels!’ (Pink Elephant!) This, of course, was the problem. What was the solution? Regret and Remedy were both missing.
I wrote out the three Rs on a piece of paper and said to her to try this:
• ‘I’m sorry we’re out of towels this morning. (Regret)
• We’ve been let down by the delivery company. (Reason)
• They’ve promised to deliver fresh towels by 10 a.m., so can I ask you to use your own in the meantime?’ (Remedy)
Of course sometimes it’s impossible to predict exactly when a problem will be solved. And pointing out that it’s difficult to make a prediction is infinitely preferable to hazarding a guess that turns out to be wrong.
