The ultimate guide to when and how leaders should apologize—and when they shouldn’t

It’s inevitable: If you take on a leadership role, you are going to screw up. Some of those errors are going to happen because you try something bold that doesn’t work as anticipated. Some of those errors are going to be cases in which members of your team do not execute a plan well, and something goes wrong. Some of them will just be good old-fashioned mistakes where you blow it.

In all of these cases, it is up to you to make the situation right, and that starts with an apology.

Just to be clear, a good apology has a few key components:

• You have to accept responsibility for the error—being specific about what went wrong.
• You have express contrition for your role.
• You should also lay out your plan to ensure that the same error does not happen again.

Apologizing for your own mistakes

First, let’s talk about apologizing when you have made an error entirely on your own. Maybe you moved too quickly without getting enough information before you acted, or said something too harshly. You might have sent a document around before it was edited sufficiently.

It’s crucial to apologize for the error to everyone affected as quickly as possible. There is often a desire to kick the can down the road or to hope nobody notices. The faster you apologize, the more quickly you can contain any damage from the error. If there are ways to guard against this error happening again, you should also describe what you’re going to do.

These apologies give other people a clear sense that you are vigilant for ways to improve your performance, which creates confidence in your leadership. You might think that admitting errors undermines your authority, but it typically enhances it. Your apologies also model the behavior you want from your team. Ultimately, the faster you find out about errors made by the people who work for you, the easier it is to ensure that the consequences of those errors are not severe.

Apologizing for your team

One of President Harry S. Truman’s most famous sayings was “The buck stops here.” As a leader, you are responsible not only for your own mistakes, but of those that happen on your watch in your team.

When you discover a mistake made by a member of your team, you need to take responsibility for that to the people outside of your group. Other members of your organization, as well as the people you serve, need to see that you have own both the successes and failures of your team.

It’s really important that when communicating about the errors made by your team that you take the blame yourself. Great leaders accept blame, but spread the credit for good deeds across the team. Even if you ultimately take disciplinary action against a member of your team for what happened, you should generally shield the team from that external scrutiny. This approach creates good relationships between your team and your colleagues and clients. It also helps to build loyalty among your team members.

Apologizing for bad outcomes

Sometimes, you may go through the right process to reach a decision and still have a bad outcome. After all, there are often things that happen out of your control that lead the best-laid plans to go awry.

In this case, you may still choose to issue an apology that will read more as a recognition that the situation did not go as you had hoped. The reason for an apology in this situation is that any negative outcome is a potential learning experience. There was likely to be some sign that you missed that might have tipped you off that the course of action you were taking was not going to work. By focusing on how you and your team can do better in the future, you are recognizing that bad outcomes are not to be dismissed, but rather to be analyzed and understood.

When you shouldn’t apologize

Finally, while you should take responsibility in many cases, do not get in the habit of apologizing for the actions of people who are not on your team. You may have colleagues who act badly, are sloppy, or otherwise cause problems for projects. You can empathize with people affected about the frustration these individuals cause. You can even work to clean up the mess someone else made.

But, you should not shoulder the responsibility for these individuals. There is a tendency for some people to try to accept responsibility for other people’s behavior. This is something that women in leadership roles do more often than men because of societal pressure, but it’s a bad idea.

You may be tempted to apologize for someone else’s behavior, but these apologies undermine the power of the apologies you make for mistakes that you have some control over. You cannot guarantee that the offending individual won’t do something similar again in the future. If you try to own that person’s mistake, you will now receive some of the blame when they do it again. That is not good for your leadership. It also helps to absolve the offending party from some of the responsibility for their own behavior.