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Trust Tip Video: Managing Blame and Responsibility

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Blaming other people is generally recognized as bad behavior. Not much disagreement there.

But the flip side of avoiding responsibility is – trying to take responsibility that doesn’t belong to you – is equally ugly. We know it by names like “control freaks,” “micro-managers,” or just plain obsessively neurotic people.

That’s what this week’s Trust Tip video is about: Managing Blame and Responsibility.

For more on the subject of blame and responsibility, you might enjoy reading “A Tendency to Blame and an Inability to Confront.”

If you like the Trust Tip Video series, and you like our occasional eBooks, why not subscribe to make sure you get both? Every 2-4 weeks we’ll send you selected high-quality content. To subscribe, click here, or go to http://bit.ly/trust-subscribe

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Many Trusted Advisor programs now offer CPE credits.  Please call Tracey DelCamp for more information at 856-981-5268–or drop us a note @ [email protected].

The Best Business Blog You Probably Haven’t Read

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My nominee for one of the best business blogs ever is The Cynical Girl, previously known as Punk Rock HR. It may also be the funniest business blog going.

In a recent posting, Laurie Ruettimann explained what employers think makes a great employee: a super hardworking slob who labors for love of the company and its brand, who has no discernible self-respect, and cares nothing about money.

However, like all Laurie’s posts, this one featured a respectful and sensible alternative point of view, her definition of great employees:

1. They have skills. They can do something important and in demand.

2. They have integrity. Principles matter.

3. They can commit to the job and its responsibilities. They live up to those commitments every single day.

4. They enjoy working hard and challenging their brains. Great employees don’t shovel corporate dog poop.

5. When they make a mistake, they own it and apologize. They also expect a second chance to make things right.

I was especially struck by points two, three and five, all about people who have integrity, demonstrate responsibility and consistency, and own their mistakes. This is a pretty good definition of someone you can trust:

1. Integrity – someone who is whole, who acts the same way around everyone and in all circumstances, who doesn’t do expedient things for their own gain at the expense of others.

2. Responsibility – someone who takes work seriously, and is reliable in making commitments and following through.

3. Owning their Mistakes – someone you can trust, because they are honest about their mistakes and missteps and willing to bring them into the open and make them right.

Laurie could really call her blog The Common Sense Girl, or The No BS Girl, and she would still get my vote for best business blog. Check her out. WARNING: strong language and frank opinions!

Baseball, Billy Budd, and Business

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Dog bites man? All the time, no news.   Man bites dog? That’s news.

Art imitates life? All the time, no news. Life imitates art? That’s news.

It was big news indeed last week in the archetypal, but lately not-so-king-of-sports American world of baseball. Here are the bare facts. 

Armando Galarraga nearly pitched a perfect game for the Detroit Tigers. With two out in the 9th, umpire Jim Joyce mistakenly called a runner safe at first on a ground ball. 

For our many friends in the rest of the world, to whom baseball is a distant competitor to futbol, here is some context.

A ‘perfect game’ is about the rarest statistic in baseball. By contrast, no-hitters and shut-outs are positively commonplace. In roughly a century of statistics–I’m guessing about a quarter of a million official games—this event has happened only 18 times since 1900. That’s less than once every 5 years on average.

Help me out, All Blacks fans, what’s the equivalent? Those of you who follow Man-U and Juventus, what’s comparable? And hey cricket fans, am I right this is more rare than scoring 100 runs and taking 5 wickets in an innings?

Anyway, that’s what was at stake. And everyone admitted the umpire blew the call. Including the umpire. Which takes us to Stage 2.

Lessons in Taking Responsibility, Lessons in Acceptance

Within an instant, the fans, the announcers, the commentators, the media, were all over umpire Joyce in the massive condemnation of his blown call, and in enraged sympathy for Galarraga’s near-miss of sports immortality for a mistake patently not his own.

And then, it all went to a new level. Within minutes, Joyce—widely acknowledged as one of the best umpires in the game–knew what he’d done, and acknowledged his mistake. In fact, he went beyond acknowledgement. 

“I did not get the call correct. I kicked the s**t out of that call. I just missed the damn call. I missed it from here to the wall. At the time, I really thought I had got the call right. Now that I’m standing here and I’ve seen it on the replay…I missed it. This isn’t “a” call. This is a history call. I kicked the s**t out of it. And there’s nobody that feels worse than I do. I take pride in this job, and I kicked the s**t out of it, and I took a perfect game away from that kid over there that worked his ass off all night. It’s probably the most important call of my career, and I missed it.”

And what did Galarraga have to say about this assault on his lifetime record?

 “Nobody’s perfect…I’m sure that guy felt worse than me, twenty times. He’s a professional, I’m a professional…I feel sad…but it’s part of the game, nobody’s perfect.”

The next day, the Tigers made another great gesture by sending Galarraga up to home plate to deliver the day’s line-up to the umpire—Mr. Joyce. Joyce teared up; no words were exchanged, a knowing pat on the back conveying all that needed to be said. Then on with the game.

A total, Complete Class Act. By both parties. A diamond moment in a rough world.

But wait, there’s more.

Lessons from Herman Melville for Business

One of the ways in which baseball is an anachronism is its continued refusal to adopt the instant replay, a feature already completely accepted in (American) football and tennis. At moments like this, the hue and cry to change the rule was deafening. Yet Baseball Commissioner Bud Selig refused to change the call. 

Because to overrule that call, blatant though it was, would be to instantly change the nature of the commissioner’s job by making him the head umpire, the court of last resort on close calls.

It’s easy to critique Selig. It’s harder to see why he’s upholding something very valuable here. To get a better perspective on it, we have to go to literature.

Billy Budd was the book, Herman Melville’s posthumously published novella. I remember it as impossibly abstract—a morality tale with only the thinnest connection to reality. Until last week, when Galarraga and Selig made it real for me.

Galarraga is, of course, Billy Budd—the complete innocent, a person of grace, born illegitimate child and later orphaned—yet whom everyone loves. In a heated moment, Budd makes a mistake—a mistake no one blames him for. But the mistake calls, by law, for the death sentence.

The roles of Joyce and Selig are combined in the book in Captain Vere, the man who must decide against the morally innocent but technically guilty Budd. And he does his job well. Billy Budd’s last words before being hanged are, “God bless Captain Vere,” thus indicating his acceptance of the code over even his own life.

[Sidebar: I find the summaries in the Wikipedia entry for Billy Budd to be insipid and trivial. Literature has suffered over these last few decades from the attack on criticism by the likes of Jacques Derrida. The result is trivial speculation on metaphors for historical events and scenarios of subconscious homo-eroticism. Deconstructionists wouldn’t recognize a moral fable if Aesop hit them in the face with a 2×4].

Lessons from Baseball for Business

Baseball used to be the sports metaphor for business, and business delighted in metaphor. Interestingly, baseball was always the more individual of the sports—football being an extreme team sports, and basketball somewhere in the middle; this fit well with the focus on the heroic individual in business.

Baseball in the US is still big business. But in general, the “hot” sports and sports stars tend more recently to be from basketball or football. We haven’t seen a huge baseball movie since Field of Dreams—two decades ago.

Within baseball, the Detroit Tigers (my boyhood favorite team—shout-out to Al Kaline) haven’t been leaders for some time. Detroit itself is a city fallen on hard, hard times. 

So it’s all the more striking that this shot to the gut decent example comes from a Detroit Tigers pitcher, a workingman umpire–and a regulator.

Think of what lessons business could and should be drawing—if they were still following baseball for lessons like this.

Let’s just be clear what the lessons are here.

Lesson 1. From umpire Joyce: face facts. Deal with reality. And the minute you see the facts are against you, call it. Call it on yourself. Take full responsibility. 

(Suggested readers: William Weldon, CEO of Johnson & Johnson; Tony Hayward, CEO of BP).

Lesson 2. From pitcher Galarraga: accept life gracefully. Do all that you can; when you win, be gracious; and when you lose, that’s when you really demonstrate class.

(Suggested reader: Jeffrey Skilling).

Lesson 3: From Commissioner Selig. Celebrate the humanity of sports, business, life. The humanity of the sport really does transcend winning and losing. 

It’s not about win-lose. Life itself is not fair, as every parent momentarily recalls in that moment when they preach to their kids. What really does count is how you play the game. He who wins is the one who does the best job of accumulating points sufficient to cover the odds of random crap, i.e. life, showing up as coincidence.

(Suggested readers: Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein; and, to be fair, all the rest of us too).

Employment Law: When Solutions Make Problems Worse

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Continuing this week’s theme of highlighting the role of the personal in business.

I was at a reception the other day, and ended up at a table with doctors and an employment lawyer. The lawyer specialized in advising corporate clients about equal opportunity employment law.

This partly means advising clients who have been sued. I asked him whether clients also invited him to make themselves lawsuit-proof, or whether the bulk of his practice was after-the-lawsuit defense. "Once they’ve been sued, they get religion and invite me in to design policies," he said.

"And it’s a helluva business. I worried at first that it would die out, but it turns out it’s the law practice that keeps on giving."

Maybe I was being a little feisty, I don’t know. But that’s where the fun started.

Managing People, or Managing Process

"It would seem to me," I ventured, "that the best way to prevent EEOC lawsuits is to be really good at basic people management: telling people the truth, face to face, about the role they are expected to play, getting great at giving and receiving feedback about how well they are or are not doing it."

"Oh, no no NO NO NO!" the lawyer responded. "That’ll get you killed in court. You have to have processes, document those processes, train on them, document that you’re training on them, and do everything short of tape-recording every conversation with every employee you have to make sure that no one’s saying something that could be interpreted wrongly.

"I tell all my clients a simple story–a small off-color joke. They laugh at it and it helps them bond with me in my presentation. Then I tell them how that joke could cost them a million bucks. It puts the fear of God in them. Employment law is the gift that keeps on giving."

When to Talk, and When to Blog

I am gradually, over my many years of experience, learning when to pick fights, and when to walk away from them. There was no point in arguing with someone I’ll never meet again over an issue I’ll never convince them about. (I was reminded of this wisdom by Judy kicking me under the table). 

On the other hand, it’s a great topic to blog about, and I hope it’ll stimulate some conversation. So let me be very blunt about my point of view.

That lawyer is the kind of pompous bureaucrat who gives bureaucracy a bad name. His intentions are not bad; not at all.  But he is a highly paid content-expert who is sowing discontent, alienating people, and creating inefficiency, all the while believing he’s contributing to our great system of private enterprise.

Harsh?  Well, here’s a few caveats.  First, not all lawyers agree with him. Second, this is an issue hardly unique to employment law. Third, there’s nothing wrong with processes per se.

But still: what I said.

Why Good Management Mitigates the Need for Process Management

I worked for two consulting firms. One had detailed employee contracts outlining things like intellectual property and non-competes; it got sued a couple times per year. The other had no such clauses and its employment contracts were 20% the length of those of the first firm. It had no employee lawsuits in 20 years.

The reason is simple: one managed by process and contract, the other by people. The latter obviates much of the need for the former.

If you treat people as objects to be controlled, they will oblige by meeting your (low) expectations. If you tell entire industries that they’ll be managed by regulation and laws, they will stop behaving ethically and do what they please until you make it illegal.

If you start making process compliance the guts of employment law, you lose the very human relationship that makes employment work. The problem lies not so much in the law as in ignorance of how human relations work.

Lawyers have no training in management. No fault there, neither do doctors or rabbis or engineers. But managers do. They are supposed to manage. When they default their management tasks to lawyers, they get what they deserve–employees who are suspicious of the motives behind their communications. And the employees are not wrong to feel that way.

Managers abdicate personal management at their own risk. The cost of running bureaucratic compliance operations to compensate for a failure in basic supervision is massive.

The answer is not more bureaucracy–it’s more truth and honesty, transparency, and responsibility-taking.  Don’t treat people like caustic assets who might sue you unless you insulate yourself with processes.  Instead, treat them like human beings who can be developed through good management, and who will serve you well in return.

 

Blame is Captivity, Responsibility is Freedom

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This week we will be exploring a theme: that business is both scientific and human, but that it has become far too much the former, and far too little the latter. We began it yesterday by pointing out Martin Luther King’s profound focus on relationship to others.

The title of this blogpost is a quote from Phil McGee, who writes his own intensely autobiographical blog, MyTruthSite.com. It’s one of his meatier nuggets, and I had occasion to use it last week.

I met with an acquaintance–Susan–who is in the middle of a large and complex initiative, putting together a consortium of independent players. The group is long on vision and expertise, but short on tactical how-to and make-it-happen ability. That’s where she comes in.

As we talked, she told me of her concerns about roles, timing and execution. We’d had this conversation before. She is probably about 90% right about it all, but has become frustrated with her inability to generate movement. "It’s like pushing on a string," she said, and she’s not wrong. Meanwhile, she was feeling unappreciated, unheard and unhappy.

What Problem Are We Trying to Solve?

But this time, as we talked, another level of the issue became clear to us both. No one was going to do what Susan was suggesting needed doing. No one, that is, except her. In fact, probably no one else could do it–only she had the skills and perspective to make it happen.

We reframed the question from "how to get others to do…" to why she shouldn’t do it herself. I asked her just that: what are you afraid of? She is honest and reasonably self-aware. She reflected just a moment and said, "I guess I’m afraid it might not work, and others would blame me."

"And?" I asked. She answered the question. "I guess there are no guarantees, and someone has to own the risk. And if others blame me–well, if I have involved them along the way, then I guess I can live with that. Blame would be their problem, I don’t need to own it." Case closed.

Blame and Freedom

Susan had been blaming others for the team’s inaction. That had deflected her attention from being responsible for her own contribution. Once she stopped blaming and took responsibility, she freed herself–from the fear of other-imposed guilt. In retrospect, Susan herself held the keys. She and only she could stop the cycle, and could do so just by assuming  her part in the whole drama.

Blame is captivity, responsibility is freedom. Susan freed herself, and she didn’t do it with processes or incentives, rules or regulations. She did it by identifying what she was and was not responsible for. That’s pretty personal stuff.  But as McGee says, most of business is just personal.

A Tendency to Blame and an Inability to Confront

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts. I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

Over a delightful lunch last week, a client said to me, “I don’t remember where I got this, but I have a saying I keep nearby in my office:

"All management problems boil down to two things: a tendency to blame, and an inability to confront."

“I know where you got it from,” I said; “you got it from me, and I got it from Phil McGee.” Credit where credit’s due, Phil.

And here’s why credit is due.

A tendency to blame. To “blame” someone means to falsely suggest that they are responsible for some negative thing. The problem starts with ‘falsely,’ and gets worse.

To lie about someone makes you a liar. It means we cannot believe what you say. It means your motives are suspect, and therefore all actions that follow from them.

And lying about someone’s responsibility isn’t just lying–it’s lying about someone. It is an indirect form of character assassination. “Blamethrowing” is an apt pun, for blaming is ferociously destructive.

Finally, it’s evasive. “It-was-him” means “it-was-not-me.” Blaming means manipulating the listener—for the blamer’s own hidden purposes.

Inability to confront. Blame goes hand in hand with an inability to confront others directly with the truth. “The truth” is very simple—it’s what happened, what someone felt, what is. It’s reality.

I mean “confront” here not in a negative sense, but in a sense of being able to speak, to another human being, that which is true. Inability to confront means inability to have an honest conversation with another about the truth.

Evasion. Insinuation. Insincerity. Implication. Avoidance. Dodging, fudging, skirting, deception, fabrication, distortion. These are accusations we level against those who cannot confront.

Yet the accused doesn’t hear them—because their inability to confront extends to themselves. “I didn’t mean to hurt,” they say—often sincerely. But partially "good" motives do not excuse wrongful actions—or inactions.

Is Phil overstating the case when he says “all management problems can be reduced” to these two? Let’s see. What about:

• Giving and receiving feedback
• Interviewing
• Delegation
• Teamwork
• Engagement
• Leadership
• Morale
• Collaboration
• Crisis management
• Persuasion
• Trustworthiness
• Problem definition
• Project management
• Relationship management

Blame and inability to confront affect each item on that list, and that list covers a multitude of management issues.

What is the opposite of a tendency to blame and an inability to confront?

Someone who speaks the truth. Who speaks it in a way that can be heard by all. Someone who accepts his own responsibility—no more, no less. Someone who simply sees things as they are. And who is willing to assign responsibility exactly where it belongs, equally whether it’s his or someone else’s.

When we can see things as they are, and confront them as such, “blame” disappears. There is simply truth, and our various roles in dealing with it. Once seen, it is easily spoken.

The trick is to see things as they are.

Can Advertising Avoid Being Cynical?

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I saw a TV ad the other night that intrigued me. 

It showed a mother who had clearly been called to the police station about her son, who apparently had been hauled in for street racing in the family car.  The kid was clearly remorseful and ashamed, not wanting to talk about what had happened.  She was emotionally there for him, but also firmly asking him to tell her exactly what had happened.

The tag line was something like, “Responsibility.  Liberty Mutual.”

Not your everyday ad. 

Now, I like to think I’m as cynical as the next guy, but I have to say, my first reaction was not cynicism.  Instead, I thought, ‘Well that was gutsy.  I wonder if they can back it up?’

Turns out the ad is part of a broader campaign highlighting the notion of individual responsibility  , which in turn is the 2009 version of the company’s broader campaign several-year campaign about responsibility, begun back in 2006 and run by Hill Holiday.    It comes complete with website, www.responsibilityproject.com, which has had several million visitors since opening in 2008.

Without having looked deeply into it, I have to say I like this.  It’s a relevant issue.  It’s an issue they’ve done a nice job of framing, without overtly anchoring it to a particular political point of view.  And while they do say they’re about responsibility, it still has the flavor of sponsoring a dialogue, rather than of wrapping themselves in the flag. 

Business being business, some idiot had to muck it up a few years ago by buying google adwords related to an advertising exec’s suicide.  

And, my viewpoint is not shared by at least one critic, Jack Shafer at Slate, who calls it pandering on the scale of Chevron’s quasi-environmentalist ads.  

I’m glad Shafer is upholding the virtues of suspicion while I take a day off from it.  Still, at least Liberty Mutual doesn’t address me as “America” and  claim “that’s why we at [PickYourBigCo] is doing something about [PickYourBigIssue]. 

I give them credit.  A dialogue about the concept of responsibility at the individual and social level?  As long as they stand back and let the dialogue roll, I think they deserve the credit they get by associating their name  with it.  
 

A Tendency to Blame and an Inability to Confront

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I am on vacation this week, and will be going back to the vault for some ‘oldies but goodies’ posts.  I hope you enjoy them: I’ll be back in a week or so with new material.

Over a delightful lunch last week, a client said to me, “I don’t remember where I got this, but I have a saying I keep nearby in my office:

"All management problems boil down to two things: a tendency to blame, and an inability to confront."

“I know where you got it from,” I said; “you got it from me, and I got it from Phil McGee.” Credit where credit’s due, Phil.

And here’s why credit is due.

A tendency to blame. To “blame” someone means to falsely suggest that they are responsible for some negative thing. The problem starts with ‘falsely,’ and gets worse.

To lie about someone makes you a liar. It means we cannot believe what you say. It means your motives are suspect, and therefore all actions that follow from them.

And lying about someone’s responsibility isn’t just lying–it’s lying about someone. It is an indirect form of character assassination. “Blamethrowing” is an apt pun, for blaming is ferociously destructive.

Finally, it’s evasive. “It-was-him” means “it-was-not-me.” Blaming means manipulating the listener—for the blamer’s own hidden purposes.

Inability to confront. Blame goes hand in hand with an inability to confront others directly with the truth. “The truth” is very simple—it’s what happened, what someone felt, what is. It’s reality.

I mean “confront” here not in a negative sense, but in a sense of being able to speak, to another human being, that which is true. Inability to confront means inability to have an honest conversation with another about the truth.

Evasion. Insinuation. Insincerity. Implication. Avoidance. Dodging, fudging, skirting, deception, fabrication, distortion. These are accusations we level against those who cannot confront.

Yet the accused doesn’t hear them—because their inability to confront extends to themselves. “I didn’t mean to hurt,” they say—often sincerely. But partially "good" motives do not excuse wrongful actions—or inactions.

Is Phil overstating the case when he says “all management problems can be reduced” to these two? Let’s see. What about:

• Giving and receiving feedback
• Interviewing
• Delegation
• Teamwork
• Engagement
• Leadership
• Morale
• Collaboration
• Crisis management
• Persuasion
• Trustworthiness
• Problem definition
• Project management
• Relationship management

Blame and inability to confront affect each item on that list, and that list covers a multitude of management issues.

What is the opposite of a tendency to blame and an inability to confront?

Someone who speaks the truth. Who speaks it in a way that can be heard by all. Someone who accepts his own responsibility—no more, no less. Someone who simply sees things as they are. And who is willing to assign responsibility exactly where it belongs, equally whether it’s his or someone else’s.

When we can see things as they are, and confront them as such, “blame” disappears. There is simply truth, and our various roles in dealing with it. Once seen, it is easily spoken.

The trick is to see things as they are.

 

 

 

The Fallacy of Good Intentions

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Have you ever messed up? Messed up badly enough that you feel awful about it, can’t wait to apologize, to try and make it better? And to have others forgive you?

And have you included in your apology/explanation words like, “I really didn’t mean for it to come out that way, it’s really ironic because I didn’t mean for that to happen, I never meant any harm, my intentions were good, I didn’t mean to do anything wrong, I’m really sorry if I hurt anyone because I didn’t intend to, I feel bad because I never meant to, I apologize to anyone who might have been hurt because I didn’t mean to, etc.”

Let me guess: that part didn’t work out so well, did it? And it still feels so unfair, doesn’t it? After all—my intentions were good; why can’t they see I meant well and stop saying and thinking all those bad things about me?

Here’s why. Intentions matter greatly in assessing initial trust. We judge whether another’s words and deeds are aimed at their own self-aggrandizement, or whether they’re intended to help us. A sense that another’s intentions are good can overcome things like credentials and price.

But if things go wrong, intentions do not get you a pass. In fact, they can make it worse. Because when we trust someone and it bombs, we assume only bad things.

Perhaps we conclude you lied about your intentions—which means you took advantage of us. Or we decide it means you turned out to be incompetent—which means you didn’t even know your own weaknesses. Which means your good intentions were either lies or irresponsibly misleading.

Worst of all, however, is continuing to protest that your intentions were good. Because if they’re lies or worthless, and you keep insisting on them, it means you are incapable of learning, and of focusing outside yourself. Why else would you keep talking about it?

When you’ve messed up, let yourself feel the pain, or disgust, or regret, or whatever you feel. Then own up to it to yourself. Your intentions no longer matter. They turned out to be irrelevant. The other person now has plenty of reasons to mistrust you. Don’t make it worse by forcing your failed intentions in the other’s face. They. Do. Not. Care.

After a while, say something like:

Look, I really messed up on this. I realize I did X, and Y, and maybe even Z, and put you at risk for Q. I’m not even fully sure why I did this, but I know I did it, and I’m working on figuring out why. I want to make it better, if you’ll let me. This was my responsibility and my error. And I apologize to you for it; I am sorry I did it.

Period. Let it be. Resist the temptation to sneak a little bit of “I-didn’t-mean-it” in there. If asked “how could you do that, were you trying to do that?” you can simply say, “No, I did not mean to do that,” and leave it at that. Only if someone persists on wanting to know your mental state should you go past it. And even then, don’t let it be an excuse, just an explanation, and keep your answers real short.

The road to hell, they say, is paved with good intentions. And how often have you really intended to do something messed up anyway?

Let it go. Take ownership. Own it. Grow up.

Apologies, Forgiving and Forgiveness

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For some reason, I just ran across a September, 2004, article by Martha Beck titled “Always Apologize, Always Explain,” in Oprah Magazine.

It’s still a good read.  Part of what makes it powerful is a list of what is contained in a good apology (itself from Aaron Lazare, the man who—literally—wrote the book on Apology)

1. Full acknowledgement of the offense
2. An explanation
3. Genuine expresssion of remorse
4. Reparations for damage

It’s a fine list (and has prompted me to finally buy Lazare’s book). 

But what I want to focus on is Beck’s own additional thought:

The final gallant act of apology is to release your former victim from any expectation of forgiveness. No matter how noble you have been, he will forgive—or refuse to forgive—on his own terms. That is his right.

Quite right.

It’s instructive that the ninth step of the Twelve Step program literature (you know, the one that pops up in Seinfeld and other sitcoms—the one about making amends), also doesn’t allude to forgiveness. In fact, none of the 12 steps do.

I think this is because Beck, and the 12-Step program, recognize that life is a messy business. To forgive, one has to have a very clean heart in the first place.  And we—I’ll be clean here and just say I—rarely do.

If I’m in a rush to forgive people, I most likely am still judging them for some harm they did to me.  If I’m consternated about being forgiven, well, that’s all about me; and apologies don’t come from a good place if they’re all about me.

Apologies should not be tainted by forgiving, or by seeking forgiveness.  Those have their place, but it’s elsewhere. 

A good apology tries to set aright something that you set awry by impinging on another’s will.  It’s only appropriate that the apology itself refrain from further imposition of will. Hence the separation from forgiving or forgiveness.

Apologizing is fundamentally about taking full responsibility for your own role—no more, no less—in what goes on.  Fully owning your words, your actions, your life helps everything fall into place.  Blame is gone.  Wishing is gone.  Whining and tweaking and sliming and spinning are all gone when you take responsibility for your own role—no more, no less—in what goes on.  As Phil McGee says, blame is captivity, and responsibility is freedom.

In that vein, I want to apologize to (he knows who he is) for what happened back in (he knows when it was).  It was my doing—he knows that, and I want to say to him he was right.   And I’m sorry.