Apologies at Work: An Attorney’s Story of Burying the Hatchet
Quite unexpectedly, he approached me and volunteered he had acted poorly years before. He apologized he had said things about me he found out were not true, and he had been too proud at the time to apologize. I apologized, too, for my behavior. As a lawyer supposedly trained to bleed away emotion and vitriol, I should have looked past the other lawyer’s comments at the time. In retrospect, I have concluded my wrong was the larger of the two, a wrong compounded by the passage of the years. I had a clearer sight line on the issue, but I squandered it on a cheap angle: my own pride and anger. In one of life’s shadowy twists, it was the other lawyer who came to possess what I did not: humility. [linkback]