Another awkward workplace situation--To tell or not tell another coworker about a "secret" meeting

In My Humble Opinion
1

The other day I was invited to attend a meeting by someone who works in a different department. I noticed on the Outlook invitation that the meeting attendess would be this person, their coworker, me, plus some contractors. The purpose of the meeting was to discuss some work we’re going to have the contractors do.

Now, I totally understand why I was invited to the meeting. I’m going to be one of the end-users of the final product, and I was supposed to help explain to the contractors what we need. But a coworker on my team was not invited. She works on stuff like this on a daily basis and is considered a subject matter expert. So it struck me as odd that she wasn’t included in the meeting invite.

But I didn’t say anything. First off, I figured the coworker organizing the meeting wanted to keep the group lean, just to simplify things. However, I also suspect the meeting organizer didn’t want my coworker there just for general purposes. The two don’t have an overtly adversarial relationship. But I know the history between them enough to know there’s some tension there.

So when the excluded coworker asked why I wasn’t in the breakroom at lunch, I just told her “I had a meeting” and quickly changed the subject so she wouldn’t ask me for details. It wasn’t really a secret meeting (if she’d looked at my Outlook calendar, she would have seen where I was all morning and for what reason). And yet, I felt like I had to be very tactful. Based on things she’s told me in the past about a certain someone stealing her thunder and stepping into her territory, I believe she would have been upset about being excluded. So now I’m feeling a bit guilty. By not suggesting my coworker be present at the meeting (or at least aware of it), I feel I wasn’t a good team player.

Ever been in a situation like this, where you get invited to an important meeting and it seems like others have been intentionally left out? It’s tempting to liken this to a party invitation, where the host has every right to invite whomever they want. But that’s not a good analogy since parties are just social affairs. Meetings are where important decisions tend to get made. Plus, it just seems bad form to intentionally keep people out of the loop. It makes it so that the people who are “in the loop” are perceived to be on the ball and “with it”, while everyone else looks bad in comparison. Maybe they would be more “with it” if they got invited to more meetings?

This isn’t the first time this has happened, unfortunately. So I’m looking for advice on how to handle it.

2

I would have no sympathy with his desire to keep her out just because of their mutual tension. That kind of behavior is not businesslike.

I think I would have sent an email to the organizer of the meeting, suggesting that your co-worker would have valuable input to the meeting and should be invited. I would probably have cc’d his boss too, and maybe mine. If he had a good reason for not inviting her, fine. I would be on record and my conscience would be clear. Then I wouldn’t have to dodge her questions later. If she had a gripe, it would have to be with the two relevant bosses, not with me.

3

Just ask if the meeting organizer forgot to invite her. That does happen. The response should tell you what is going on.

4

I don’t think it’s necessary to invite every person who could be relevant to every meeting. A lot of time gets wasted that way. Sometimes one person more frequently gets chosen as a representative from their department for reasons such as their ability to quickly understand context and share relevant info articulately. I think if you’re invited to a meeting where it doesn’t seem to make sense that you were chosen instead of someone else, give the organizer the benefit of the doubt and call them up to say you were thinking that person x might be a good addition, and see what they say. If you think there might be some weird machinations going on, I think that mentioning it to your manager would typically be the best thing to do.

5

I would have contacted the person who set up the meeting and suggested that your co-worker be added to the meeting list. Explain why her presence would be helpful.

If the meeting organizer chooses not to follow your suggestion for whatever reason, let it go. No need to get involved in workplace drama, much less create it.

6

I would have mentioned the meeting to the coworker. I would have left it up to her to handle not being invited. If the meeting organizer got on my case for telling her, I would have simply said - “She’s good. She knows what she’s doing and I work with her every day. Obviously she’s going to be involved.”

7

I find this part of your narrative to be highly unbelievable :smiley:

Anyway, next time, call or email the meeting organizer and ask if they want “other coworker” to go to the meeting since she is the subject matter expert.

Similar to above, if they change the invite, good. If not, just go about your business.

8

I’m in the ‘too many cooks in the kitchen’ camp. Sometimes one person asks for an opinion and instead of 3, they end up with not just 9 or 12 or 30, but a half an hour of bickering and no resolution and you end up with a ‘you can’t make everyone happy all the time’ situation. It’s just easier to get a small handful of, well, not opinions, so to speak, but 'what do you need type input, then put that into action. All the others end up dealing with what they get. Sometimes it sucks but that’s just the way life is.

Barring some internal drama (and that may have played into it), the person who chose who to attend the meeting may have just wanted that handful of people. Maybe they wanted your input over your co-workers, maybe they valued it more, maybe it was a coin flip and their’s been other similar meetings you haven’t been invited to. But, either way, like I said, it may have been just a matter of trying to not get too many opinions. Think about how much longer the meeting would have taken if they asked for your input, your univited co-worker, the contractors, their supervisors, maybe any subcontractors or the actually employees who would actually be working with whatever you’d be doing. It just gets to be too much.

Anyways, as for telling her, I vote no. If she hasn’t asked I see no reason to volunteer yourself to (possibly) hurt her feelings. That seems like inciting office drama for no reason. If she does ask, well, you don’t know (you said not only that yourself, but you even said that you don’t know if she’s aware of the meeting), I’d say (and I have to say this a lot at my job, for various, similar, but unrelated to your situation) “I don’t know, go ask [person who made the decision], that’d be the person to talk to”. You could even add “your guess is as good as mine”.

TL;DR, leave well enough alone.

Hey, what if they’re grooming you for this kind of stuff. Don’t want to blow it by being the office gossip. You’d hate to get a call a day or two later from someone asking why you told her about this when they specifically didn’t tell her for [reason(s)] and know they have to deal with the fallout.

Hey (2). Could have been as simple as “Let’s invite Monstro to the meeting, I want get some input from her” and nothing more and you’re just overthinking it.

9

You’re not the organizer nor anyone’s supervisor. Go to the meeting you were invited to (if you want) and answer questions honestly about where you were, if asked. Anything else is just stirring up drama. IMHO.

10

Here’s yet another POV… perhaps someone with enough authority believes your coworker has No Need To Know about the meeting, project, etc. In which case, a conversation would go like this:

Q: Where were you at lunch yesterday?
A: I was at a meeting.
Q: What was the meeting about?
A: I can’t talk about it.
Q: Why can’t you talk about it?
A: What do you think about that attempted coup in Turkey?

It’s easier if you’re in an environment where you can just tell someone “You’re not cleared for that information” and they can just accept that.

11

I would say, you don’t have to handle it, or worry about how to handle it, or anything. This one wasn’t a secret meeting. And there are not very many important meetings (well, maybe in your industry; in all fields I have been in they are mostly a waste of time. With one exception. That was the meeting where we talked about who we were going to fire, and that was a very bad meeting not to get invited to. But a total drag.)

I think you’re okay, if the coworker asks, with either one of these responses: “Oh, I had this meeting. Be glad you weren’t there, it was a total bore.”

Or: “Oh, I had this meeting. I don’t know why they didn’t invite you, it was right up your alley. Maybe next time.”

This should work in almost any case except the dread who-to-fire meeting, that is to say, it should work whether it was an honest mistake overlooking her, or there’s some kind of political conspiracy going on in your company, or almost anything in between.

12

You didn’t call the meeting, or decide who would attend. Why your coworker wasn’t included is not your affair.

I’m not exactly sure what you feel guilty about? Attending a meeting you were called to attend? Over who was not included, when no one asked for any impnput from you?

The person who calls the meeting gets to decide, rightly or wrongly, who THEY think will bring valuable info to the meeting. Not you. You’re creating drama where it’s entirely unnecessary, in my opinion. Leave it alone.

If your coworker gets bent over not being in the meeting, how is that on you? (Unless you make it so out of misguided guilt or a need for drama?)

13

Honestly, we have no idea because (I assume) none of us here have any context for what you are talking about. Is this a meeting of senior executives at a trillion dollar hedge fund planning a corporate restructuring? Are you all a bunch of IT middle managers talking about some esoteric back-office project to automate some mundane aspect of your TPS reporting? I suspect it’s closer to the later.

I really don’t understand these sort of workplaces.

Here’s how the conversation should go:
Q: Where were you at lunch yesterday?
A: I was at a meeting.
Q: What was the meeting about?
A: Usual boring bullshit.

14

If I thought the coworker would be helpful at the meeting I would have sent an email to the organizer with the line “Do you want [coworker] to come?”

I would have done the same thing if I thought the coworker would be upset about missing such a meeting. That is, if I cared enough about the coworker or liked them enough.

The question would let me know about the organizer’s intentions without stepping on his or her toes.

Monstro, what do you want to happen in this situation? Do you think it would help if the coworker attended the meeting? Do you like the coworker enough that you would like to help her out at work?

15

I’m feeling guilty because my coworker has expressed her frustration about being excluded from stuff like this in the past. And just by coincidence, I have another coworker who routinely gets pissed off when I attend meetings that she knows nothing about. So, I’ve got a history of being favored over two individuals on my team, to their expressed displeasure, and it leaves me feeling awkward and guilty around them. I must confess that I have yet to develop the ability to be completely shut off all my emotions in the workplace. I know that’s what I must do, and I think I’m about 2/3rd the way there. But I haven’t made the full transition into corporate drone yet.

I’m not creating anything. Someone asks me to be in a meeting, I just show up, never putting my nose in anything. Like a good little worker bee.

But I’m finding it awkward when I possess information about something under another coworker’s purview–information obtained only through private meetings. If I share this information with the coworker, am I “creating drama”? Well laws no, I don’t wanna do that! But if I withhold this information and the coworker finds out that I knew about it all along, then there will be drama. I’m sorry you are unable to imagine how this might be a sticky situation.

If my boss calls a meeting with me to discuss a project that I’m not in charge of but he doesn’t invite the project leader, obviously it is the boss’s call to make. Not mine. But if I mention the meeting with the project leader because something important was revealed in the discussion, I need to be prepared for the leader to be unhappy with me and everyone else in that backroom. Maybe it doesn’t make logical sense, but it is an understandable response. I think I’d probably feel that way if I were in that situation.

Why are you speaking for everyone? It’s obvious that some folks get what I’m talking about. If you can’t imagine what workplace life is for us lowly peons, why even bother posting to the thread?

16

I agree with the advice to suggest co-worker’s name to the meeting organizer, along with the reason why. I wouldn’t copy his/her boss, or my boss unless I was absolutely certain that the meeting organizer deliberately excluded her because of their tense relationship.

Also, if a topic was discussed that would have been better served having your co-worker’s input, then I’d also say, “I think the best person to answer that question is x, since she works in this platform all the time.”

17

I don’t really know what I would want to happen. I just know I don’t like feeling like I have to tiptoe around the workplace. The coworker in the OP (the excluded one) does have some downsides that justify excluding her from a meeting. She can sometimes make a meeting drag on past its expiration date. She can make things overly complicated. She probably wouldn’t have been the most helpful person, despite her expertise, which is why I can’t blame the meeting organizer for not including her.

But I suppose I’m wondering if maybe excluding her from stuff just entrenches her interpersonal issues. Being a helpful meeting attendee is a skill that is only refined through practice. If she doesn’t get very many chances to practice, maybe she will always suck?

18

But her issue, is just that, HER issue. You seem to know fully both why you were included and why she was excluded. Why are you pretending otherwise?

Why are you making HER issue into your issue? If it wasn’t your friend, who’s complaints on being left out, you had often heard expressed, and the reason for exclusion was, ‘they run the meeting long and make everything more complicated!’, what would be your response, I wonder?

It seems self evident that the person being so excluded needs to come up against the truth sooner or later, that she makes things more difficult often. You’re her friend, and don’t want to deliver that chunk of reality to her, which is understandable, of course.

But it doesn’t change that this is HER issue, and that your friendship is getting in the way of a life lesson you really can’t expect to insulate her from. If it was someone not your friend you’d assume the meeting arranger must have a reason, assume it’s not probably your business or your issue, and wisely stay the hell out of it, in my opinion.

And that’s exactly what you should do now. Even though this is your friend. And even though you have heard her express regrets over being left out.

19

Maybe there is a good reason you are favored over those two individuals. Instead of getting frustrated or displeased with you, they should take a long, hard look at themselves and see what it is that you are doing right and change their behavior accordingly.

It’s not your problem you are favored, it is their problem.
You have absolutely no reason to feel awkward or guilty.

They need to grow up, deal with it and not dump it in your lap.
You need to tell them so, but probably a lot more diplomatically than I would.

20

I don’t KNOW why. I know she annoys me sometimes, but I don’t know that she annoys others to the same degree. Nor do I know that her annoying ways are why she was excluded.

Because she takes her butthurt on me, that’s why. If she finds out that she was excluded from a project that I was involved in, she’s not going to just lash out at her rival in the other department who organized the project. She’s going to also throw shade at me–something that would disrupt our working relationship.

She’s not my friend. She’s my team member. And no, it isn’t my place to tell her why she’s been excluded from a meeting. Especially since 1) it ain’t my meeting, 2) I don’t know why she was excluded, and 3) she isn’t likely to be receptive to the kind of feedback I might be tempted to give her.

She’s not my friend. She’s a coworker who I work closely with and is therefore someone I need to be on good terms with. I care about people’s feelings even if I don’t like them enough to call them a friend.