What value, to me as a manager or to the company, is an apology? Seriously–what value does it offer?
As a manager I don’t care if the person thanks me or apologizes or ritually sacrifices a chicken to atone for the error; what I want to see is improvement. Everyone’s going to make mistakes, and if you’re moving into a new role mistakes are inevitable. The question is, are you learning from them? Are you repeating the same mistake more than is reasonable? (I figure it’ll take a few times to understand what’s going on, and more complex things take more time.)
Further, what’s the cause for the mistake? Is it laziness? Is it a skill mismatch? For example, I’m great at applying complex ideas and turning huge amounts of data into action items, but I’m objectively HORRIBLE at editing my own writing, so if you ask me to write it’s not going to be perfect. Is it that you’re missing critical information or facilities? Is it a lack of understanding? All of these have different solutions, and some of them have nothing to do with the employee, they’re systemic issues that I need to deal with (or run up the chain to someone who can).
On an unrelated note, I want to verify that our quality control system is working. NO ONE can be 100% perfect (the concept isn’t even applicable in many cases), and any company needs a way to identify errors. If that system is working and the employee is actively trying to improve, congratulations! You’re doing it right! Nothing for anyone to apologize for; a system working as intended is not something that requires an apology, by definition. If errors are slipping through the QA/QC process, that’s the issue–but the issue isn’t with the employee making the errors, it’s with your review process. Which your employee almost certainly has no say over.
The absolute worst thing you can do is expect performative apologies. These merely teach your employees that you do not respect them, and to hide their errors.
This came up at work, not about apologies, but about texts. A former boss (now colleague) would send me texts saying “Do X, Y, and Z.” Normal stuff for my line of work. So I’d do them, and in my daily update email I’d call out that I did X, Y, and Z, or that I couldn’t because of [insert reason here]. My boss called to confirm that I was getting his texts since I rarely responded directly to them, and I explained my thought process (doing the work was more important than saying I’d do it, we’re both busy and this saves time). He appreciated the thinking behind it, and we worked really well together for years.
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