Peter Lohmann and a co-speaker explain why staff shouldn't apologize to clients when nothing went wrong. Unnecessary apologies make teams defensive and distort how clients see the situation. Instead, send brief, headline-style updates with a screenshot and minimal text.
You know, and these are headlines, right? This isn't like some technical process you need to explain over a 10-minute Loom video. This is like a screenshot with some text, and now they know, or at least they're primed.
Primed. You may have had this experience, Peter. I certainly have, where I've seen a team member, an employee apologizing to a client in a way that was not adding value. Decorum, sympathy, useful. Apologizing when nothing actually was done wrong is not actually helpful. It's warping the client's sense of what's going on. So I think Educating the staff, it's part of what puts them not on the defensive, and I don't want to have my team feeling on the defense when they shouldn't be.
