After every governmental, organizational or individual scandal – or even pratfall – the advice is immediate: Apologize. A sincere apology should dampen the controversy and satisfy most well-intentioned critics.
But that may not be true. It depends on the nature of the offence and which of the two main elements of trust has been violated. Trust is largely determined by competence or integrity. If the misdeed revolves around competence, trust can be restored by an apology. If, however, integrity has been betrayed, it’s less likely.
There are, of course, other factors that can influence the situation. The apology must seem sincere and contain what are now considered standard elements: An expression of regret, conveying how sorry the individual or organization is for the offence; an explanation that provides reasons why the offence occurred; an acknowledgement of responsibility to indicate the violator understands their part in the offence; a declaration of repentance that promises not to repeat the offence; an offer of repair, that proposes how to work to regain trust; and a request for forgiveness.
But whether the violation is of competence or integrity, research is showing, can be crucial.
Peter Kim, a professor of management and organization, notes in his book How Trust Works that we tend to consider a single successful performance of competence a reliable signal of competence, figuring that those without competence could not achieve that performance level. However, we tend to discount a single poor performance as a signal of incompetence based on the belief that even the best can perform poorly in certain situations, such as when there is little motivation or opportunity to perform well.
With integrity, it’s reversed. People tend to weigh negative information on integrity much more heavily than positive information.
“This is because we intuitively believe that those with high integrity would refrain from unethical behaviour in any situation, whereas those with low integrity may behave either ethically or unethically depending on the incentives and opportunities. For this reason, we typically discount a single honest behaviour as a signal of integrity since those with high or low integrity can each behave honestly in certain situations (such as when there are benefits for behaving honestly or enough surveillance to prevent dishonest acts). However we also tend to consider a single dishonest behaviour a reliable signal of low integrity, based on the belief that only those with low integrity would act in dishonest ways,” he writes.
Putting it into colloquial terms, he says that hitting a home run can make you a home run hitter in the eyes of others, even if you strike out afterwards. But cheating on your spouse and noting in defence you didn’t cheat yesterday will not probably save the situation.
Apologies to the spouse – and in other matters where integrity has been violated – can even make things worse because they are confirmation of the offender’s guilt. Promises of repentance and redemption are dismissed, such positive expressions outweighed by the negative incident when integrity has been breached. But the promise to do better in future is viewed positively when competence is at stake because there is still a belief that the individual or organization is competent.
In one of his team’s experiments, participants watched a videotaped interview for a tax accountant job. At some point the interviewer would raise an accounting-related violation at the candidate’s previous job. In one version, the applicant was accused of filing the incorrect return because of inadequate knowledge of the relevant tax codes, a competence-based violation. In the other, the incorrect return was filed intentionally to satisfy an important client, an issue of integrity. The applicant would respond with an apology or a denial.
Everything else was kept the same in the videotaped interviews. And the results were dramatically different for the matters of competence or integrity. When the violations concerned competence, participants were more likely to trust and hire the candidate when she responded with an apology than a denial. So the apology worked. But for matters of integrity, people were more inclined to trust the candidate when she denied rather than apologized for the violation.
He stresses that trust was never repaired completely. The measure of trust measured before the allegation was raised was higher than even after the competence apology. “This shortfall is common after trust-repair attempts, and it is a testament to how difficult the challenge of trust repair can be in general,” Mr. Kim says.
In other trust studies, repentance was critical to whether the repair efforts worked. But again, repentance was easier to convey when the violation concerned competence rather than integrity.
House of Commons speaker Greg Fergus apologized several times in December for a video he made supporting a fellow Liberal, promising to work to regain trust. Whether he can recover may depend on the eye of the beholder: Whether the individual sees his failing as incompetence or lack of integrity. Similarly with Boeing’s apology after an Alaska Airline’s panels blew out mid-flight: Was it related to competence or money-saving, integrity issues? More generally, we need to be alert to the dynamic if we endanger trust with a colleague or a country.
Cannonballs
- Corporate crises and reputational recovery have changed in nature and length of time, consultant Mark Penn observes in Harvard Business Review. Crises used to involve products, services or governance and were U-shaped, with a dip and then reputation built back up over a few years. But in today’s polarized landscape, we are seeing L-shaped crises that are more severe because they are driven by politics and culture wars, with how long the tail of reputation damage remaining unknown.
- Leadership guru Ken Blanchard urges you to catch people doing something right in 2024. Praise them as soon as possible after you see praiseworthy behaviour, explaining specific terms what they did right and relating it to the bigger picture.
- OpenAI chief executive officer Sam Altman says incentives are superpowers so set them carefully.
Harvey Schachter is a Kingston-based writer specializing in management issues. He, along with Sheelagh Whittaker, former CEO of both EDS Canada and Cancom, are the authors of When Harvey Didn’t Meet Sheelagh: Emails on Leadership.
Harvey Schachter