Weekly Subscriber benefit: Make a Really Good Apology

Future Here Now

We talked in the last FHN about how interpersonal skills have become so crucial to our businesses and organizations — and how little our Industrial era legacy has prepared us for that.

Making a good, effective, resolution - creating apology is one of those things that we often think we learned in kindergarden, but it turns out that we didn’t learn how to do that well enough. And when something goes wrong, especially when it’s Really Wrong and Really Public, that lack of learning shows. A lot. Go back through three days in your news feed and I’m sure you’ll find a story about some leader or public official who gave a really bad apology — and note the anger and misunderstanding and mess that comes up after that.

I’ve written about apologies in the past, and I condensed that advice into this handy checklist. Stick this somewhere you can see it, and hopefully the next time you have to apologize — whether it’s to the press or your spouse — you’ll cover everything you need to enable a reconciliation to start.

Let me know if you have any recommendations. This is a first draft!