Don’t Use an Apology to Distance Yourself From a Difficult Situation

Sometimes we offer a quick apology in an effort to avoid feelings of discomfort or shame. When we do that, we fail to hold ourselves accountable for our mistakes and lose an opportunity to learn and grow.

Once I gave a talk and I told an anecdote about being asked to pee in a bucket (see Just Work, chapter 3). In the talk, I named where this had happened. One of the participants raised her hand and told me that I had just erased her. I knew I’d done something wrong, but I didn’t understand what, exactly.

I felt deeply ashamed. The physical sensation of shame is the same as that of fear. I felt the same way I feel when one of my children walks too close to the edge of a cliff: my stomach drops and the back of my legs, the area behind my knees, burns and tingles. I was ashamed of two things at once. One, I had hurt someone. Two, I didn’t know why. Had I been culturally insensitive? Was I expressing religious intolerance?

Rather than seeking to understand, I simply apologized and moved on to my next question. I was reluctant to expose my own ignorance and ask why what I’d said was offensive. That was a mistake. It looked to the whole audience as though I didn’t get it and, much worse, didn’t care. And it was a missed opportunity for education. In retrospect, the right thing to have done would have been to open the room up for a conversation rather than to shut it down with a perfunctory apology. Instead of just saying, “I am sorry,” I wish I’d said, “I can tell I have said something that caused harm. Even worse, I don’t know why what I said caused harm. But I would like to know. If someone is willing to tell me now, I would be grateful. If it’s more comfortable after, that would be fine, too.”

After the talk, once I had managed to move out of shame brain, I did talk to the woman who had been brave enough to give me this feedback during the Q&A. What I’d done wrong was to say that “no women worked there.” It sounded as if I’d said that no women worked in the whole country, which was incorrect, rather than that no women worked at the company where I was having the negotiation. She was a woman, and she worked in that country!

I wish I’d given her the chance to explain more during the Q&A, giving her a chance to educate everyone in the audience. Several other participants I bumped into later asked me what the question was all about. It was a women’s conference, and the participants were predominantly white American women. Sensing my shame and empathizing, many participants were too quick to dismiss the question and “side” with me, in the tendency often called white women’s tears.

I didn’t cry, but the dynamic still played out. I wanted to be an ally, but I had alienated this woman. Many of the other white American women in the audience were likely to make the same mistake I’d made. Because I wasn’t willing to learn publicly, they didn’t learn. This was a lost opportunity for all of us.