Are you sick of apologizing for things you can’t help?
It was a bad morning for C. The chronic illness (take your pick: colon, migraine headache, muscle fatigue, breathing problems) was horrible. Only able to pay attention to how badly she felt, she made a quick decision not to go to work. She sent an email to her supervisor saying she wouldn’t be in that day, she went back to bed.
Later, when she felt better, she read her messages. Her supervisor wrote he’d noticed C’s calendar indicated she was to present a report to key clients with M, a colleague. But when he contacted M, M had left for the meeting already — without C’s part of the report.
Caught unprepared, M couldn’t make the presentation and now they could lose the account. Here’s where the story gets even more painful.
When C called M (who knew about C’s illness), M focused on C’s absence, saying that he couldn’t work with someone who is unreliable. Although C hadn’t missed an unusual amount of work, she felt terribly guilty.
If her unpredictable illness could mean the loss of this account, what else might happen? Maybe she should quit.
How did she get there so fast? In fact, C’s error was not in missing work that day. Her mistake was not that she works while living with an illness. Nor is it that she chose to stay home. C’s mistake was that she didn’t prepared and relied on her memory .
These were errors that she could learn from. But only when she recognizes the real nature of the error.
C didn’t have to attend the meeting. But she needed to prepare for the possibility that she could get sick. She could have made sure M had what he needed – should she not be there. To make matters worse, she didn’t have a system to double check herself when she canceled her day. And that’s how she forgot to contact him.
Now that deserves a sincere apology. C does not have to apologize for living with an illness that is unpredictable and, at times, debilitating. But she can apologize for her very human error. Nothing more but that’s a lot.
I thought of this reading the post in the blog, A Chronic Dose, “When Things Go Awry: Making Sense of Medical Errors”. Laurie Edwards points out how medical errors are the result of human interaction and, no matter how we try to create systems to eliminate errors, they are inevitable.
Saying you are sorry might not regain a lost client (in a bad case business scenario). It will certainly not bring back a life (in the worst case medical scenario). But saying you are sorry for your error gives everyone the opportunity to learn and to move on.
Are you sick of apologizing for things you can’t help?
It was a bad morning for C. The chronic illness (take your pick: colon, migraine headache, muscle fatigue, breathing problems) was horrible. Only able to pay attention to how badly she felt, she made a quick decision not to go to work. She sent an email to her supervisor saying she wouldn’t be in that day, she went back to bed.
Later, when she felt better, she read her messages. Her supervisor wrote he’d noticed C’s calendar indicated she was to present a report to key clients with M, a colleague. But when he contacted M, M had left for the meeting already — without C’s part of the report.
Caught unprepared, M couldn’t make the presentation and now they could lose the account. Here’s where the story gets even more painful.
When C called M (who knew about C’s illness), M focused on C’s absence, saying that he couldn’t work with someone who is unreliable. Although C hadn’t missed an unusual amount of work, she felt terribly guilty.
If her unpredictable illness could mean the loss of this account, what else might happen? Maybe she should quit.
How did she get there so fast? In fact, C’s error was not in missing work that day. Her mistake was not that she works while living with an illness. Nor is it that she chose to stay home. C’s mistake was that she didn’t prepared and relied on her memory .
These were errors that she could learn from. But only when she recognizes the real nature of the error.
C didn’t have to attend the meeting. But she needed to prepare for the possibility that she could get sick. She could have made sure M had what he needed – should she not be there. To make matters worse, she didn’t have a system to double check herself when she canceled her day. And that’s how she forgot to contact him.
Now that deserves a sincere apology. C does not have to apologize for living with an illness that is unpredictable and, at times, debilitating. But she can apologize for her very human error. Nothing more but that’s a lot.
I thought of this reading the post in the blog, A Chronic Dose, “When Things Go Awry: Making Sense of Medical Errors”. Laurie Edwards points out how medical errors are the result of human interaction and, no matter how we try to create systems to eliminate errors, they are inevitable.
Saying you are sorry might not regain a lost client (in a bad case business scenario). It will certainly not bring back a life (in the worst case medical scenario). But saying you are sorry for your error gives everyone the opportunity to learn and to move on.