Apologies work, Peter Bregman reminds us:
A friend of mine, Paul Rosenfield, was skiing with his six-year-old son Yonah when Yonah fell. It was not a terrible fall, but the binding didn’t release and Yonah broke his leg. After an emotionally wrenching day spent in the emergency room tending to his child, Paul went to the shop to return the skis and speak with the owner.The owner of the shop immediately became defensive. He claimed the bindings were set within the normal acceptable range for Yonah’s 40-pound weight (in fact one reading showed the binding set above 60 pounds). He claimed he used a special machine to calibrate the setting, a machine that had been used in several court cases. And he initially resisted Paul’s request to see the printout from the machine’s test.
Paul went into the shop to have a conversation and he left angry enough to sue.
I asked him what the shop owner could have said that would have given him a different feeling.
“If he had been more concerned with the injury than protecting himself, if he had apologized, if he hadn’t tried to cover over the fact that the bindings were too tight, if he hadn’t given me a hard time about asking for a copy of the measurement printout, if he hadn’t mentioned how many times his machine was used in lawsuits, then I would have left feeling less angry.”
We try so hard to protect ourselves from lawsuits that we bring on lawsuits. We forget that we are human beings dealing with other human beings. And what human beings want more than anything is empathy — to be cared for and treated with respect.
By avoiding responsibility, empathy, and apology, the shop owner became a target for all of Paul’s anger about the accident.
In a study of medical malpractice lawsuits, the top five reasons people gave for initiating the lawsuit were:
- So that it would not happen to anyone else
- I wanted an explanation
- I wanted the doctors to realize what they had done
- To get an admission of negligence
- So that the doctor would know how I felt
And the number one thing the doctor or hospital could have done to prevent the lawsuit? An explanation and apology.
When the University of Michigan Health System experimented with full disclosure, existing claims and lawsuits dropped from 262 in 2001 to 83 in 2007.
Apologies work. Real, heartfelt empathy between one person and another diffuses anger and builds relationships. Defensiveness and resistance to admit mistakes creates anger.