How - Dov Seidman [78]
In 2002, TriWest Healthcare Alliance, a health insurance company that serves primarily active military personnel, suffered the theft of two laptop computers from the company’s main offices. These weren’t just any two laptops; they contained the personal information of 550,000 TriWest customers. Names, addresses, birth dates, Social Security numbers, and in some unfortunate cases credit card numbers—essentially everything needed for a highly successful case of identity theft— walked out the door. At the time the theft occurred, it was the largest information theft to ever have taken place in the United States.33 The blow to TriWest was potentially mortal. What is an insurance company without trust?
Dave McIntyre, president and CEO of TriWest, did something remarkable. “The first thing I thought was, ‘What is the quickest way to tell 550,000 people that something has gone terribly wrong?’ ” He decided to immediately inform those affected customers and then launched a $2 million effort to correct the error. TriWest contacted the affected customers and set up an information hotline where people could call with their questions and concerns. Then McIntyre took it a step further, devoting himself to teaching both the public and business owners alike how to correct and prevent future security breaches of this sort. He did this so well, in fact, that he transformed a monumental mistake into an award of excellence from the Public Relations Society of America for the campaign against identity theft.34
Public apologies such as this understandably make an easy target for cynics. Cynics believe that people act almost exclusively out of self-interest. There is no doubt that an apology is an attempt to right a wrong, ideally with the result of lessening its harm to the transgressor. In a case like this, the admission and attempt at restitution can easily be seen as an attempt to create the illusion of due diligence. The cynic might say, “Where was the due diligence when the hard drives walked out the door? Why was the personal information of these customers left somewhere susceptible to a security breach and theft?” Apology is an antecedent act, to be sure. It answers the questions: “How can we best go forward from here? How can we rebuild the trust we have lost?” In this, studies show, to apologize is not only the right thing to do; it is the smart thing to do. Roy Lewicki, professor of management and human resources at Ohio State University’s Fisher College of Business, led a study published in the Journal of Management in 2004 that suggests that “a willingness to take blame and offer amends . . . may be necessary to help repair a loss of trust in a business relationship.”35 Cynicism exists, in all its corrosive forms, but this kind of proactive transparency flies in the face of cynics precisely because its authenticity disarms them. I’m sorry put McIntyre out ahead of the curve. By asking himself not “What can we do?” but rather “What should we do?” McIntyre was able to act swiftly and transparently to save his company.
Sure, an apology contains a measure of self-interest, but truly offered, it contains an equal measure of concern for others, and its nature of transferring power to the receiver tips the scales in its favor. In Chapter 6, we touched on the Ohio State University study that illuminated the corrosive effects of employee cynicism, and how that cynicism was responsible for the destruction of the tremendous goodwill employees bring to a new company when they are hired. But the study