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My old boss told me to never apologize in a press release, and 3 months later we were on the front page of the Tulsa World for all the wrong reasons
Back when I did comms for a small HVAC chain in Tulsa, my boss Dale had one rule he loved to repeat: never say sorry in writing, because it makes you look guilty. So when a customer's furnace leaked carbon monoxide and she ended up in the hospital, I wrote a statement that said we were "reviewing the situation" and "committed to quality." 48 hours later a reporter from the Tulsa World called, and the story ran with the headline "Company Won't Apologize After Family Hospitalized." The comment section was brutal, people were posting our address and calling for a boycott, and we lost two commercial contracts worth about $40k over it. Dale finally let me put out a real apology, plain words, no lawyer speak, and the heat died down within a week. The thing is, the apology cost us nothing, but waiting cost us money and trust we never fully got back. Now I'm wondering, how do you all handle it when leadership won't say sorry, do you push back or just draft around them?
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nora_park724d ago
I worked at a staffing company in Norman where our VP pulled the same thing, no apology, just "we take this seriously," after we mispaid about 60 nurses over a holiday weekend. It blew up on Facebook and we lost three hospital clients before he finally caved and wrote a real sorry note. The apology took me 20 minutes to draft and the whole thing went away, so yeah, push back early because the silence always ends up costing way more than the words ever would.
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