Know Your Company builds software that helps CEO’s gather real feedback from their employees. Last week, they found a glitch in their software. For the past six months, new employees were able to see responses that only the CEO was supposed to have access to. That’s a pretty major slip-up. But rather than hope nobody noticed, they emailed every CEO who was their customer and admitted that they’d screwed up. Every response they received back was positive. You can read about it here.
The easy lesson to pull from this for companies and for people is to apologize when you make a mistake. But there are other components in this instance that are important not to miss.
1. They’d already built up credibility.
I don’t use the product, but I’ve read a lot about Know Your Company. The product seems to get rave reviews. They treat their customers well (every potential customer gets a personal tour of the product from Know Your Company’s CEO). They try to run a good business. Imagine how the customers would have reacted if the product regularly had problems or if they didn’t treat people well. The admission and the apology went over well because Know Your Company had done the hard part of building up credibility before their mistake.
2. They admitted their mistake before they had to.
Know Your Company didn’t discover this mistake—a customer pointed it out to them. But instead of dealing with that one instance, fixing the problem, and hoping nobody noticed, Know Your Company sent personal emails to every CEO on their customer roster. They didn’t wait until a company actually suffered damage or the press got a hold of the story. They admitted their mistake before they had to.
There are two kinds of apologies. The first is the one that comes when you’re caught. You knew you were doing something wrong, you did it anyway, and now the jig is up. Apologizing actually serves you as much or more than it does the people you hurt. You’re really just asking for leniency.
And then there’s the apology that comes after an honest mistake, something you never wanted to happen, when you never intended to cause harm, or when you just plain didn’t know you were doing anything wrong.
Know Your Company’s apology went over well because it fell into the second category. As you’ll see in the story, many of the CEO’s who responded to the admission pointed out that mistakes happen. They do. But people are more likely to forgive when your intention was good, but the outcome was bad.