Toyota’s Apology Reveals Teamwork

By Jen McGahan • February 11th, 2010

Hello there! If you are new here, you might want to subscribe to the RSS feed for updates on this topic.

Have you seen the TV ads?

It’s a sign of the times when a large car company stands up and admits it made mistakes. Owning those mistakes is another matter entirely. As a small business owner and coach, while I wouldn’t want to be in their position, my hat’s off to Toyota’s quick, seemingly sincere, and public response to their recent bad press. The car giant even declared that production will stop until all the recalled cars are fixed, an act of flexibility and remorse not usually seen in a large corporation, let alone a small one. A lot of folks are claiming it’s too little too late, but I disagree.

Responsibility is always a popular practice, especially in the era of digital flash forums. When consumers are faced with inferior products, we have hundreds of other options for future purchases, and Toyota will indeed lose customers because of the recent storm. Today we also have an outlet for our public complaints, so even a small screw-up can spread like fire.

Small companies learn this lesson the hard way, and many never recover from serious mistakes made from within, whether due to to a faulty process, negligence, poor or misleading documentation, outright wrongdoing, or even its culture. Larger companies can pass the buck and/or weather the storm. And yet, Japanese companies have traditionally held themselves to high standards of accountability, compared to recent failings of certain large American companies, which seem to point fingers at one person or department when things go wrong.

Don’t get me wrong; I love the indomitable American spirit of the individual. But when large companies fail on a large scale — and even when an individual, or any specific department or faction within a large company, fails; clearly the whole company suffers from loss of sales, time spent correcting mistakes, and a tarnished reputation.

I found it interesting that Toyota shows many different employees in the commercial, from the salesman on the showroom floor to the assembly line workers inside the factory, soberly laboring away while a compassionate voice apologizes for the whole mess. No heads on sticks, but no heads in the sand, either.

My feeling is that Toyota will earn trust back from its customers and recover (maybe even acquire) new respect as a dominant car company. This ad, while addressing the current problem from a whole-company point of view, did a good job of showing how a business can and should hunker down and quietly make things right.