Why An Apology That Names Nobody is Worth Nothing

By Dr. Anthony Giannoumis

Nearly every leader has learned to say they got it wrong. Almost none of them will say who warned them, or what it cost.

It was my first trip to Mozambique. My student knew the country. Before I left, he told me to bring cash for the entry visa, and a second bank card, because the machines there don’t always take foreign ones. I brought neither. I had a doctorate, a US passport, and years of work across the Global South. He was a master’s student. That difference was my whole reasoning.

My student told me exactly what to bring

I met Jorge in Galway. I was guest lecturing on leadership and inclusion; the room was warm, and afterwards he asked me to supervise his master’s thesis. I said yes without hesitation. I remember thinking how awesome this would be for him. How much he would learn from me.

Jorge was building a library in Mozambique. For children. Out of recycled materials. He invited me down to collect data with him on a research project that nobody had done before.

Then he gave me two pieces of advice. Bring cash for the visa. Bring a backup card just in case. I dismissed his texts and packed neither.

What was my student going to teach me about travel? I never put it to myself that plainly. But that is exactly what I felt reading his texts, and I would have denied it to your face at the time.

Jorge at least got to tell me. My doctor never got the chance. I made sure of that. Two weeks before the flight, I had surgery on my right ankle. Two bolts, fusing the big bones. I planned to do the whole journey in a wheelchair. When I asked my doctor whether I was cleared to travel, I did not mention Mozambique. She said yes, no problem. She was probably picturing Spain.

I was shopping for a yes. I was an expert curating a question, and she gave me the answer I’d prescribed.

What happened when I arrived without it

Oslo was fine. My connection in Istanbul involved a motorised wheelchair driven by a man who screamed at the crowd in Turkish while my braced leg thrust out ahead of me like a battering ram. I screamed at him to slow down. He did not.

I landed in Maputo in the middle of the night. Hot, tired, a queue the length of the hall, and at the front of it stood a placard like a guilty verdict.

VISA ENTRY. CASH ONLY.

Behind the desk sat a woman in a khaki shirt, Mozambican flag on her shoulder, the one with the AK-47 on it. I asked whether I could pay by card. She pointed at the sign. I asked whether there was a cash machine in the airport. She pointed past security, past baggage claim, out of the building.

The man who had helped me off the plane was gone. So, I wheeled myself out, past my own suitcase going round the carousel, to the ATM. On the first try, it spat the card out. On the second, it spat it out again. On the third try, it took the card, asked for my PIN, which I’m 100 percent positive I entered correctly, and immediately died. Blank screen, no way to “turn it off and on again”.

I wheeled myself back in. Past the suitcase again. Up to the same woman. She shrugged.

At two in the morning I called Jorge, the student I was supposed to be supervising, and asked him to come and rescue me.

Jorge said, “Don’t worry. I’ve got you.” He arrived, spoke to her in Portuguese for about four seconds, paid my visa, and my passport got stamped.

The thank-you I gave him instead of an admission

I told him he was a saviour.

That is what came out of my mouth at the border. I meant it warmly, and it was a way of not saying anything. Praising the rescuer is a lovely manoeuvre. It puts the story on his resourcefulness and leaves my mistake alone.

The sentence I owed him had a name, a warning, and a reason in it. Jorge, you told me to bring cash and a second card. I ignored you because you were my student and I had a doctorate. You paid for that. Next time you tell me how your country works, I’ll listen.

I have never said it to him.

Some leaders admit fault constantly. They are trained for it now. I was wrong. I should have listened. I could have handled it better. Every one of those is free. No budget line, no three-year implementation plan, no cost-benefit analysis. Someone else has already paid the real cost. The leader names nobody and commits to nothing. Your Monday team meeting hears what happened and moves on, because there is nothing there to really consider. The admission is dismissed.

An admission gets expensive when it carries three things: who told you, when, and what you thought made you the better judge. That last one is where the cost sits. The first two are logistics. The third is character, on the record, in front of people who now know you had the information and thought you outranked it.

Almost nobody says the third one. That is exactly why it makes you a better leader.

Why seniority turns a warning into an option

Expertise is bound to its domain. The confidence it produces travels everywhere. Mine got on a plane to a country where I’d never been, and it never occurred to me to leave that mindset at home.

That kind of confidence reacts to warnings in a very specific way. It converts instructions into options. Look at the word I used earlier. Advice. Jorge gave me the operating conditions for entering his country, and I filed them under advice, which is the category for things you can take or leave. Then they sat alongside everything else I would weigh through the lens of my superior judgment.

The details matter. The warnings that get downgraded are always the unglamorous ones. Bring cash. Bring a second card. Nobody overrules the big strategic objection, because the big objection arrives with a slide deck and a 90-minute meeting with two agenda items. Present the strategy, then Q and A. The ground-level detail arrives from someone junior, in a sentence, on a Tuesday right before you have to leave to pick up your kids, stop at the store to get bread, and don’t forget to call your mom because it’s her birthday. Those ground-level details sound like admin.

What this looks like in your own office

In an office, the admin sounds like this.

• We are not going to hit that deadline. Your engineer, four stand-ups running.
• The client has asked the same question three times. Your account manager, in Slack.
• Nobody out there understands the new form. Your newest hire, six weeks in.

You have a plan. They have advice. You nod.

Then you miss the deadline exactly as your engineer said it would. Let’s call him Daniel. The expensive admission has his name in it, and it happens in front of the people who watched you overrule him. Daniel told me in March that we were not going to hit this date. I overruled him because I have shipped more of these than he has. He was right, I was wrong, and we are eight weeks late because of it. Anything less, and Daniel stops bringing up issues.

Who in your team has been telling you something important, and how long have you been nodding past it?

Then check how you’re asking for input. When you last consulted someone, were you trying to find something out, or collecting clearance on something you’d already decided on? I know what I did with my doctor.

What never got fixed

Years later Jorge wrote to thank me for my mentorship, for inspiring him, and for giving him access to my network. The man who paid my visa at two in the morning thanked me for what I had taught him. I accepted his gratitude with the easy grace of a man praised for doing the bare minimum.

I paid him back, because it made me feel like we were even. But he covered the cost of the two AM wake-ups, not me.

Credentials aren’t currency.

About the Author

Dr. Anthony Giannoumis is an Associate Professor at Kristiania University of Applied Sciences in Oslo and founder of Inclusive Creation, where he works on inclusive leadership and workplace culture. He is co-author, with Bridget Price, of The Big F#cking Book on How to Be a Decent Guy. He is also a stand-up comedian, which helps.