How Bosses Can Stop the ‘Meeting After the Meeting’

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Susan Lucia Annunzio is a leadership coach, author and president and CEO of the Center for High Performance. She also is an associate adjunct professor of management at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business. This will no doubt sound familiar to most people.

You’re in a meeting with the boss, discussing a difficult topic. Everybody offers their thoughts. Or so it seems.

It’s only later when you and a few colleagues talk do you say what you really feel. The meeting after the meeting—it’s too often only then when people say what they actually believe, not what they think the boss wants to hear. They say what they should have said in the formal meeting, whether it’s to disagree with a proposal, state a novel approach or confront an ethical dilemma.

When making difficult decisions, companies need full participation of the senior leadership team. People must be able to express their views, even if those views are unpopular. But too often critical decisions are made without a robust discussion because employees don’t feel empowered to be honest.

This is a recipe for low morale and poor performance. And it almost guarantees the company won’t make the best decisions. A top executive at a cloud-networking provider says he has observed two different types of meetings after the meeting.

The first is when participants text or chat with one another while the meeting is still going on, noting that the person speaking has said something inaccurate, or that they disagree with the direction the team is taking. The second type takes place in person or on a separate video call. Typically, a group has agreed on a decision, but after the meeting participants privately call it into question or play down its importance with their