Sixty Years, One Email, and an Apology That Told the Truth
The apology was better (and over the phone) than the sacking email.
Tim Goodchild, a man in his seventies gave AFC Bournemouth very nearly sixty years of his life . Two weeks before this season kicked off, he found out his services were no longer needed. He found out by email. The email itself was not cruel. It thanked him for his "commitment, professionalism and contribution" and said the club appreciated this would be "disappointing news". Somebody clearly drafted it with care, the way HR templates get drafted with care: correct grammar, a warm closing line, nothing you could point to and call rude. None of that stopped a relative posting it online and tagging the club’s chief executive, and none of it stopped the pile-on that followed. Within days, the club apologised. "We should have handled this better, and we will do better" , they said, and quietly offered him a different role. Read the apology next to the original email and something odd happens. The apology is the better piece of writing. It is shorter, plainer, and it actually sounds like a person talking rather than a template being filled in. Which means the club had a human voice available the whole time. It simply didn’t reach for it until the story had already gone public. Not that long ago (but long enough still), I helped build a communications plan for a reorganisation that was, on reflection, mostly a plan for how to say something difficult with words that sound good enough. We spent hours polishing the words. We left the actual delivery to the poor HRBP that represented t…