Watch Your Mouth Mister!
Posted on June 4, 2008
Filed Under Career Development, Gen X, Gen Y
We’re all familiar with the phrase ‘you can’t unring a bell’. In the past few months it’s become common place for our leaders and other public figures to say just about anything, then if a backlash comes, they just apologize. Just in the past week we’ve seen former President Clinton call a Vanity Fair columnist a scumbag because of some sharp comments on the President’s extracurricular love life. We’ve also seen current Vice-President Dick Cheney make some off color inbreeding comments about West Virginians. In both cases apologies were quickly put our via their respective spokespeople. But, that bell’s still ringing.
Certainly these sorts of situations happen everyday in corporate America, but usually the repercussions are more severe. What would happen if you were in West Virginia and made an inbreeding comment during a meeting or if you publicly called someone a scumbag. Chances are your job would be in jeopardy regardless of the quality of your apology. I worked with a woman once who call a client a ‘bitch’ after she thought the conference call we were on had ended. Those were some tense moments. Reminds me now of the commercial where the woman thinks she’s on mute and tells the boss off only to have the phone repair guy show up and tell her the mute button doesn’t work on that phone. I love that. In real life she’d be a memory by the end of the day.
So why do we forgive and forget so easily with our leaders, yet we’re held to a much higher standard? I suppose in some cases the endings are quite so happy. Anybody heard from Michael Richards lately? How about Mel Gibson? As for President Clinton and Vice President Cheney are we really that shocked by either of these two? I’d say their current behavior is sadly all too indicative of who they really are, apologies or not. Which is why this sort of thing seldom works in the corporate world. If you make an off color comment, even if the apology works, chances are your career will still be negatively impacted. You’ll always be the person who said ‘xxx’ or called the client a bitch. Those folks usually don’t have long careers. So as Mom used to say, ‘Watch your mouth mister!’.
Until next time…
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