Communication Mistakes: The Path Back From Embarrassment

Any person who has any contact with the outside world will inevitably make a social error. How can you really embarrass yourself socially? Let me count the ways . . .

an honest mistake
thinking out loud
boring your audience
expressing a thought better left unsaid
poor choice of words
interrupting
prejudice or ignorance
yawning inappropriately
typos, spelling and grammar errors
forgetting someone’s name/birthday/anniversary
poor sense of humor or timing
mean-spirited or insulting remarks
misreading the sensitivities of your audience
self-absorption

I am sure there are hundreds more and I (and probably most people) have committed every single one of them at one point or another. Since it is really almost guaranteed that we are going to make a mistake in our communications, there are only a few options to minimize the damage:

1) Avoid communication. Become a hermit. Stay off of Twitter and Facebook. Don’t respond to email. Best expressed as my favorite line from Woody Allen’s Bullets Over Broadway, “Don’t speak!”

2) Become a perfectionist about your communication. Delay your speech until it is absolutely perfect. Be wary of saying anything until you have thought it over 10 times first. (The way of publicists and PR departments everywhere.)

3) Have the recovery plan ready. For most of us, this is the only realistic option. We need to be ready to say, “I’m sorry.” “I made a mistake.” and to be sincere about it.

Since sometimes it is easiest to learn from other people’s mistakes, I wanted to share two examples of communication goofs with you.

The first goof is a minor one and kind of funny. It involves a form letter sent to us recently by one of our 401(k) providers.   There was an error somewhere in the printing or production process. In all of the big bolded headings in the letter, the letter “o” was replaced with a capital letter “A.” The letter “r” was replaced with a capital letter “C.” The letter “t” was replaced with a capital letter “E.” The result was almost completely unintelligible and, even worse, was personally signed by one of the Executive Vice Presidents of the firm:

When I first opened the letter, I thought “What?” and set it aside to share with my husband as a good laugh. About a week later, the company sent an apology in the mail along with a corrected version.

The lesson for all of us here is that if you are in a business where details, intelligence and integrity matter (as I would hope it would at any investment firm handling something as important as a retirement account!), issue a quick follow up to correct the error, no matter how inconsequential the mistake was or how expensive it might be in postage to issue the correction. Give a short explanation as to what caused the error but don’t dwell on it.

Because this company was so quick to issue an apology and correction, I now remember them as a company who values the communications they make to their customers rather than a huge corporation with weak processes where details are lost.

The second goof is only slightly more serious, deals with oral, impromptu communication errors and comes to us from comedian Mo Rocca. About a year and a half ago, Mo was on the “Wait Wait . . . Don’t Tell Me!” game show on NPR.

Mo happened to make a comment about handmade sweaters during a bizarre discussion of animal sweaters.

“I hate homemade sweaters . . . Homemade sweaters are always itchy.”

This small comment angered the nation’s knitters who retaliated by sending in letters to the show and organizing a sweater-knitting campaign for Mo to prove to him that handmade sweaters don’t have to be “itchy.”

Mo issued an immediate apology the following week, acknowledging the mistake (using the “i-word”) and adding his characteristic humor and charm. He even went further and learned how to knit! Now, rather than being remembered as the knitting-basher he became the hippest face of knitting! Below is a video from Mo describing the experience.

So, if you make a major goof, particularly one that causes offense to a group of people, take a lesson from Mo and apologize immediately but also follow up your apology with actions to indicate your remorse and your willingness to learn from another point of view. If you can use humor in an appropriate way to defuse the situation, so much the better!

What people do you admire for recovering from a communications misstep? What lessons have you learned from your own mistakes? Please share in the comments.