- When a CEO or company messes up and trust is broken, the apology must be done right.
- Trust is the everyday currency of business, PwC's Wes Bricker says.
Nobody is perfect, including CEOs.
When a company or leader makes a mistake, there is more than one way to offer up a mea culpa that sounds genuine, shows ownership, and lays out a path forward.
We're all familiar with how to apologize in our personal lives, but what's the best way to apologize when you're a leader of a team or a company? It's a question addressed in boardrooms, by lawyers, by crisis-communication firms, and by PwC.
The US professional-services firm runs the Trust Leadership Institute — which aims to help C-suite and senior-level executives and directors think about the evolving and increasingly complex role that trust plays in business, including public policy, data and technology, cybersecurity, workforce management, governance, and sustainability.
The institute is part of PwC's $300 million commitment to push leaders to embed trust-based fundamentals into their day-to-day and long-term management styles and business practices.
It's hard to build trust, it's harder to maintain trust, and it's harder still to repair that trust after a betrayal, Sandra Sucher, a Harvard Business School professor and one of the session leaders at a Trust Leadership Institute gathering in December, told Insider.
"Trust isn't a luxury good," Wes Bricker, PwC's vice chair and US trust-solutions coleader, told Insider. "It's your everyday currency of business, and it's a nonnegotiable for long-term success."
The apology is one component of that currency.
In recent years, a corporation's or CEO's apology has taken on greater significance because customers and employees are often quick to demand that leaders take ownership and show transparency around their actions.
Sucher said she'd seen numerous examples of poorly worded corporate apologies. Such efforts failed because they didn't acknowledge the harm, lacked accountability, and didn't offer a way to fix the problem.
She said a recent example of an apology done well was in a memo from the payments company Stripe announcing layoffs. Sucher praised the clarity that CEO Patrick Collison showed in his message to Stripe's workers.
"He was just very straightforward," Sucher said.
It was important, Sucher said, that Collison acknowledged Stripe was too quick to hire. That level of transparency made Collison seem more credible in saying the company would be working to turn things around, Sucher said.
"If you can't describe how this happened, how will I believe you can fix the problem?" she added.
Collison's apology had authenticity and didn't sound robotic, Sucher said. Any apology must seem like a human is talking, and it can't feel too rehearsed or like the company's main concern is guarding against lawsuits, she said.
Sucher also pushes CEOs to tailor an apology message to a person — whether that's the employee or the customer — and have fellow C-suite employees role-play with them to capture the spirit of what leaders are looking for with the apology.
The corporate apology must include an "offer of repair," Sucher said. This is essentially some action to make sure the betrayal or harm won't be felt again.
Sucher said CEOs were receptive to a framework on how to apologize because "everyone messes up at times."
Because "these companies are part of our lives" and many CEOs have achieved celebrity status, Sucher said, the chief executives must be aware that the way they apologize is just as important as the words "I'm sorry."