102. How To Apologize Part 1 - Front Line Team

Hey, my friend Kenny Chapman here. Welcome back to leadership in a nutshell where we're cracking the code of that driven mind. And sometimes that driven mind can kind of get us in trouble, so to speak. So welcome to episode 102, how to apologize, part one, the frontline team. So today I'm going to dive into kind of the conversation around when we need to apologize to Frontline. And then next week when we we're gonna go with how to Apologize part two, and we're going to address how you would apologize to a leader in your business or the entire leadership team, depending on your situation. So apologies. You know, I just was. I've been thinking about watching some different things and some different activities, and I just thought it was something that I hadn't really covered here, something that I might be maybe a master at in life in general as well. When I really kind of look at my life as a leader, how much I've evolved in my career over nearly 30 years in leadership now, and just like wildly, I feel like an incredibly different person, truly born again as a different human being. And so as I navigate this, I've had to apologize a lot. And I thought sometimes I've worked with some mid level leaders recently and it can be challenging, you know, whether you're kind of apologizing up or down or vice versa. But I want to talk to you today about, as a high level leader in an organization, how you go to a frontline team member and apologize. And so let's take this to the family unit. If you're not in leadership and you just are loving the family and somebody had turned you onto this podcast, then it could be a parent to a child role or possibly an older sibling to a younger sibling as well. But for that context, today I'm focusing on higher level leader, quote, unquote, to a frontline team member. So we all make, quote, what the world calls mistakes. I don't personally believe in problems. I don't believe in mistakes. I believe everything happens exactly how it's supposed to, and we have massive will in making that happen. But we all create situations in order for us to learn. So sometimes we create situations that we might, you know, blow a gasket, get upset, lose our mind, whatever, say something either inappropriate or out of context or out of the heat of the moment, whatever that is. There's all kinds of different reasons. And I'm gonna run you through six different steps today to kind of think about. And it's not all that much. So if you're taking notes don't worry, it's not all that much. Obviously, we keep these short for a reason, but I just want to kind of frame and talk through the first two things I'll say are intern, and then we move to external. So that's one of the challenges with apologizing is a lot of times we go, oh, crap, I effed up. Let me go make it right. I want you to slow down and learn if you made this mistake consciously or unconsciously to learn. Let's not miss the lesson. That's why we make the same dumb things time and time again. Or I'll say kind of crazy stuff until I really take a step back and go, where's that coming from? What does that mean? So step one is to understand your why. Like, really understand, understand why you feel what you feel like. So internally, there's some disturbance, there's some disruption. You know, hell, in today's cancel culture, maybe you need to do it because of something you said and you're concerned about how you're viewed or whatever that may be. I'm talking more. You did something, said something, had a program roll out and your team didn't respond, or you hurt somebody's feelings or something like that. So I'll give a couple scenarios and forgive me if we run a little bit long today. I just. I'm into this topic right now and just want to share with you. So as we think through, what's the understand of the why that you feel that you need to apologize? Is there a disruption in you? Do you have a gut feeling? Do you just not feel right? Did you say something and then resonated after the fact? That's an internal thing. The second step is to set an intention that is also internal. So I understand why I need to apologize or want to apologize. Then I'm going to set my intention of how this is going to look and how this is going to be. Because again, you don't want to just go into this kind of quote blindly and just roll through it. You want to have some intentionality behind what you're doing. So why am I doing this? What's the intention, the outcome? How do I want to attempt to make them feel? And more importantly, and the only thing I really have control over is how am I going to feel when this is done? Then we move to the third step. Take full ownership. You have got to take complete ownership, complete responsibility. Whether you did it on purpose or not, it happened. You did it, you said it, you rolled it out. You made the action, the activity Whatever it is, you did it. You can't blame anybody else. It doesn't matter circumstances, it doesn't matter what was going on. It doesn't matter how little sleep you had, it doesn't matter how tired you were. It doesn't matter if you were drunk or high. It just matters that you did something that doesn't align any longer. So take full ownership. Don't try to blame anything, including yourself. By the way, we're not looking to blame ourselves here either. We're just looking to take ownership. So once you take full ownership, then you can describe and explain. Not justifying, just explaining kind of where you were coming from and what might have lined up in order for that to take place. What does that look like? Was it something from previous conditioning? Was it something that stemmed from the way that you were raised? Did you get caught up with some joking that was going on or a collective agreement that society holds around a certain judgment? You're not justifying your behavior. You're just helping them understand why it might have happened and where it may have come from. Okay. And then again, focused on this mainly Frontline. Next week I'm going to talk about a leadership apology. When you're apologizing to a peer that's a leader or your entire leadership team, if you're the CEO or the president, you need to apologize to your team on that behalf. But this is specifically for Frontline. And that's why step five, I'm going to say keep it brief. Your frontline just needs to know where you're coming from, how you feel, why things might have happened, if you were out of alignment, where there was a lack of congruency. But you don't need to belabor this thing. So oftentimes when we get into step four. So going back, if I've under, if I, number one, I understand why I'm doing it. Internal. If I understand what my intention is, what I'm looking to get from this Internal, then I go external and I take full ownership. Now I get into explaining it. I can ramble here. Like I see people just go along and you're just trying. Your ego basically is attempting to justify why you did it because you know, you've got reasons. And it might be from deep seated pain, it might be from parental conditioning, it might be from a previous relationship, it might be from a team member you had before that this individual reminds you of. It might be something that took place five years ago, but this triggered a memory for you. And so you can explain yourself to death and Wear them out. And they don't really care. They just want to know that you're sorry that you effed up and you're owning it at the end of the day. So that's why five with a frontline team, we just keep it brief. And then when we roll into step six, you just ask for, you know, buy in for the future, ask if they can support you again, ask if they can believe in you again. And maybe if it's for you, you know, if it feels right for you to ask for forgiveness. I'm a little careful with the word forgiveness, personally, because I've studied and I work with human behavior enough, and I. I do some pretty deep, intense coaching and consulting. And what I know is that if I ask you to forgive me, you have to have the ability to forgive yourself if you're going to forgive me. And so when I ask you to forgive me, I'm almost subconsciously or unconsciously asking for you to make things right for me. Right? So I don't want to belabor. Hell, I could probably record an entire episode on forgiveness as I'm kind of thinking through this and talking through it. I don't want to get too deep here, but the reality is forgiveness is never about the other person. It's about me really forgiving myself for doing this. Whatever I said, whatever I did, however I acted, it wasn't incongruency for me. It doesn't resonate with me. It doesn't feel. Feel good for me. So if I ask you to forgive me and you say yes, okay, then that means I can forgive myself. You see what I'm saying there? Give me a little head shake. I know we can't see each other, but you got to love this podcast platform stuff. So what I'm saying is whatever works for you. Because if you're a leader and you're asking a frontline team member who you employ and you have a job, or they have a job because of you, you write their checks, so on and so forth, you know, ah, man, can. Can you forgive me for this? What are they going to say? No, you're still an a hole? I don't. I don't forgive you for this. Like, the problem is with that is they're probably going to say, yeah, I forgive you, but you're really looking to forgive yourself. So whatever it is, again, just frame it. Whatever works for you. If you need to go that route, that's fine. I'm not saying there's a right way or a wrong way. I'm Just saying that words matter and the why behind words matter. So, you know, hey, can I. Can I get you on board? Can you support me again? Can we. Can we agree that I messed up and I'll continue to do my best and move forward, whatever that is. Draw the line and let it go. Don't keep on revisiting it from here. Let it go and move on. So, you know, this can happen in different ways in different times, in different. You know, I've seen this in different businesses that I've owned in different times. One time, I rolled out a pay plan in my service business because I had gone and visited who ended up building the largest company in the US and he was pretty small at the time, and I looked at his pay plan and went, yeah, I want to do that. So I went back to Colorado and I rolled out this pay plan where everybody had to win in order for everybody to get this bonus. It was like a shared bonus thing, and it was on billable hour, and I'd been commissioned for 10 years straight and never really paid on billable hour. And I shifted all this stuff around, and it was a nightmare, my friend, an absolute nightmare. I was like, oh, my God, what have I done? I rolled it out in shoulder season, so it was slow, so leads were a little. A little light. Then I jacked with their pay, and I had my top people not getting bonuses even though they produced because my lower people weren't producing as usual, you know, for their own normal production, I should say. And now that was penalizing my top people. I just. I remember looking at my GM at the time, and I went, dude, we. You know, I'll own it. We screwed up here. Like, what. What are we going to do? Like, we got to get in front of them. And I called a meeting, and I just went. And I've always been a fairly vulnerable person. I think I've known that. I've lived a lot of life in my short time on the planet. I've made a lot of mistakes, and I've had a wicked awesome experience, from the way my father lived his life to the way mom lives her life, to my sister. And I's relationship was very close now, but hasn't always been that way. All the different things that I learned, it's like, I don't know. I just. I've always been a little vulnerable, but I had ego and some things blocking it for sure. But I. I was trying. How about that? I was trying to be vulnerable, and I just got in front of my team, was like, man, I think we messed up. I take full ownership for this thing. But I did it for these reasons and for that I apologize. I made a mistake here. I. It's affecting people and I, I'm not going to justify why we did it, but I'm sharing the why. But I'm not saying that that makes it okay. And here's what we're going to do moving forward and da da da da da is there, you know, can we get on back on board? Can we know that I'm going to make another mistake in the future, but I'm going to rock and roll and do the best that I can. And you know, and we moved on another time. I made a tweak in the sales process that really affected my top players and I had to go back and go, you know, I had a. Even though I was a high paid, high level consultant, I still brought consultants into to my business. When I own the service business, which now I own Blue collar and we have consultants at blue collar as well. We literally eat our own. What's the saying? I eat my own dog food. I don't eat dog food. So I'm not going to say I don't make dog food and I don't eat it. So I take my own medicine. How about that? My own medicine is clarity of mind, meditation, movement, all the journaling, all that stuff. But the reality is I do believe in outside coaching and consulting. And so I had a consultant that came in and said, oh, you don't need to do all this. And they were H vac only and we did a lot of plumbing too. And I rolled it out company wide and it wrecked some of my top plumbers and all. Right, here we go. Get in front of the team again. And so I'm giving those examples kind of as an overall, but then sometimes it's an individual perspective. And I remember in the early days at blue collar after we'd moved to Arizona, I, I made some decisions and had some things that took place and I had one key team member that was really being affected by some of the decisions I was making. And this is before I actually got sober myself and got clear of mine and went through some self love process and understood why I kept making some poor decisions. And I got with her and I was like, look, I've made some massive mistakes and I've made it hard on you and here's why and here's what's going on and some of the this and did the best I could to share with her but Kept it to a point and asked her if she can believe in me to move forward. And it's magical moments. I find myself almost getting emotional. Not almost. I'm very emotional thinking back through that one specifically because it was over the last several years that that one happened. And I get emotional because of her response of, yeah, I'm here with you. I'm going to continue on to, you know, do my best. And we've been through a lot together and that's an amazing thing. But I hope that some of that is my transparency and I encourage you that, you know, again, I've recorded episodes on vulnerability and leaders are, you know, we're kind of tasked with we have to be perfect and all that. Forget about all that. This is about apologizing to a frontline team or team member. Number one, understand why you're doing it. Number two, what your intention is, what you're looking to get from it. Number three, take full ownership of whatever you did for whatever reason you did it. Own it, Take responsibility. Number four, describe it. Explain kind of the why not justifying, but explain what took place and led up so there's an understanding of why you did what you did on some level. Number five, keep it brief. You don't need to belabor your frontline team. They just need to know that you made a mistake and you care about them enough to honor that with them and not just turn a blind eye to it and hope it goes away. And number six, ask for buy in for the future. Ask for forgiveness if that's what you want, but obviously we already talked about that a little bit. So then move on and keep on rocking because it's probably not going to be too long and you're going to mess up again or you're going to make another. What the world calls mistakes, I call them learning opportunities. You communicate through them and everything just keeps on getting better and better. My friend. Episode 102 how to Apologize Part 1 thank you so much for being with me. Please share this with somebody. Recommend this to somebody. A lot of people need help apologizing and owning their stuff, so to speak. Really? Do me a favor and share this with somebody that you care about. Also write us a review. Share this on any platform that you can help us continue to grow this community. But until we talk, my friend, make it a better than fantastic week and I'll see you next week for how to Apologize Part two. Thanks.