How We Contribute to the Bad Behaviour of Others

A friend was telling me the other day about a conversation he had recently overheard in a company.

One of the individuals, an over-aggressive, hard-driving, take-no-prisoners type of manager, had a company-wide reputation as a bully. He was told by his V.P. after increasing feedback not only from the direct reports of this bully, but also from others with whom he had to work, that he had to go around and apologize to those whom he had offended.

He and his V.P. made a list of those to whom he needed to go and offer an apology, and, list in hand, off he went, one more task to get off his over-loaded plate.

As soon as he spotted an individual, he would go up, and say something along the lines of, “I understand that I hurt your feelings the other day. I would like to apologize and tell you that was not my intention.”

These conversations took place in offices, in hallways, in the cafeteria, (and I suspect, in the elevator and bathroom) – whenever and wherever he could locate the victims.

As apologies go, I would give it a 3 out of 10, but what was surprising was to hear the response of those being apologized to. “That’s o.k. No big deal”, or “Oh, that’s all right. I just thought you were having a bad day”, or, in one case, “You didn’t hurt my feelings”.

My friend, (whom, I’ll admit, confessed to doing some eavesdropping on the public area conversations because he was so amazed by the approach), wanted to know what I thought.

“Well, outside of the fact that a drive-by apology is generally never seen as sincere or meaningful,” I replied, what surprised me was quality of responses that he seemed to get. I’d be very surprised if your bully comes out of this exercise believing that he really did or said anything inappropriate. Give him three months or so, and you’ll find that his behavior hasn’t changed at all. As a matter of fact,” I continued, “this process was so painless that it may take even less time than that.”

“What would you have done, then, if you were the VP?” my friend asked.

“I think asking this bully to apologize for his actions was the first step in helping to correct bad behaviour. What the VP should also have done, in my opinion, was to sit down with the victims on the list, and coach them how to respond in a meaningful way to this apology. If the victims discount the impact that the bully’s behavior had on them, why would you ever think that the bully would understand the impact that his actions had? ”