Publicly Apologize, Privately Chastise
Early on in my working life I learned a valuable lesson that has stuck with me ever since: You should chastise people in private, but apologize in public.
Sadly, like all lessons of this nature, I had to learn it from first hand experience. Not just being a casual observer of it happening to somebody else, rather being the employee on the receiving end of this being done the wrong away around.
There I was, sitting at my desk, doing my job, when my manager appeared and gave me a dressing down for not completing a task they had wanted finished earlier in the day. Before I could even respond, they about turned and walked away. Leaving me to sit there, bemused and confused, while my co-workers all averted their gaze to avoid any sort of awkward conversations. A few hours later I got an email asking to go to my manager’s office. I expected more of the same, instead I received an apology for the earlier chastisement. They had forgotten that the task I had been accused of not completing was originally on my list, but then taken off and given to somebody else.
What I took away from this encounter was that it had totally been done the wrong way around. Nobody around my desk knew that the manager had said sorry for the mix up, as far as they were concerned I had screwed up and gotten told off. I said to myself if I ever became a manager I would never repeat that mistake.
You should privately chastise (or criticize) people as that is something that does not need an audience. You should publicly apologize if you made a mistake as that shows you are, after all, human.
It isn’t just for managers this lesson, oh no. This is something that everyone should practice really, regardless of their level in an organisation, in this day and age. In fact, with the entire world having gone remote, now more than ever it is important to follow this suggested approach at working with others. Nobody wants to be called out in a public Slack channel for everyone in the company to read. Sure you can delete the messages later, but the damage is done then. Everyone knows that you’ve been taken down a peg or two, regardless of whether or not it was warranted.
There are numerous benefits to this communication technique.
First and foremost if everyone is on board with it, managers and engineers alike, it helps to foster a culture of learning. People are less likely to fear making mistakes if they know they will not be publicly flogged as a result. This isn’t to say you are bringing in a Wild West culture of letting a junior engineer to a production deploy on Friday at five minutes to home time. But it does mean that they will be less fearful as more responsibility is placed on their shoulders. Make a mistake, have somebody explain what went wrong. Make the same mistake a few times, have a meeting in a room away from prying eyes and be called out for not learning correctly or asking if thing were unclear.
It is the right way to doing things, if you ask me. I’ve heard of some crazy company cultures that seem to relish the public humiliation aspect of people making mistakes. Screens that display their name for all to read until the next person screws up. A small trophy that they are made bring to each and every meeting so everyone knows they are the best and doing things wrong.
Horrible methods to try and ensure people do things correctly in a workplace. If a person is afraid to make mistakes then they are afraid to learn and step up when the occasion arises. You create a Culture of Stasis, were the few do the same tasks over and over because nobody else wants to risk it.
The private chastising also allows for the conversation to be more adult in nature. A nasty trait that some folk have is they want to be seen as the smartest person in the room. It isn’t enough to point the finger and say “Look here, they did it!” but they also want others around them to know that the correct way of doing things is what they, themselves, practice. It is pea-cocking at the end of the day.
Remove the audience, you take away the desire to show-off and leave behind just the educational part of the conversation. But also the person on the receiving end doesn’t feel the weight of a thousand eyes staring at them. It bolsters their confidence a little to engage in a proper conversation rather than just take it on the chin.
What better way to learn than one-on-one, after all.
The second part is just as important, however: Apologizing in public.
You’ve had the quiet chat, given the harsh truth, and gone back to your desks afterwards. Then you realize that you were wrong. Maybe the mistake was not as bad as you first thought. What do you do here? Do you have another private chat to say you made a mistake? I’d say no, you go the other way. You publicly announce that you made a mistake and the person you had the chat with was actually not in the wrong, maybe even completely in the right.
What’s the point of doing it this way? As a manager or senior on the team it shows everyone else that you know you are not infallible, you too can make mistakes. Leaning into the culture you’re trying to foster as mentioned above. If people see that their manager can make a mistake and admit it, then they are more likely to try things themselves and admit when it doesn’t work as planned.
It also strengthens the dynamic in a team at the end of the day. There is no ‘us and them’ in terms of stupid concepts such as rank. Nobody is above being wrong, but admitting it in front of a crowd takes character.
Of course you don’t need to go overboard on this. Saying sorry to the person and then sending out a slew of emails and instant messages repeating how sorry you are is actually, strangely enough, doing you a disservice. Apologizing once in front of folk shows you are adult enough to admit you made an error. Subsequent apologizes on the same topic belittle the sincerity of your first apology, maybe even going as far as to show you didn’t mean it at all and still think you were right all along.
At the end of the day it is all about knowing that there are better ways at communicating with others. You need to not be the person who needs an audience. These sort of situations aren’t for gladiatorial battles to entertain people around them, it is to address a situation in a manner that benefits everyone.
I suppose the TL;DR of it all is think twice, speak once.
