our boss has been using her management coaching sessions to trash-talk our team

by Alison Green on March 24, 2026

A reader writes:

One of the directors at my company, Meredith, has been undergoing executive coaching sessions for around six months. These are supposed to be to give her management coaching and experience, as she currently has none and has three direct reports, including me.

However, it’s come to light that instead of using these sessions to learn how to manage and learn leadership skills, she’s essentially been using them as free therapy/counseling and has been aggressively running down members of the team instead!

One of the members of the team accidentally discovered the full transcripts from Meredith’s sessions on our company cloud — in a public folder, not even hidden! In fairness to the coach, he does try to redirect Meredith’s vents to management tactics, but she quickly diverts and carries on.

In them, she talks awfully about many members of the team, referring to one of my colleagues as “difficult and annoying” and says she’s “glad she doesn’t have to manage her,” all because my colleague lost a family member to suicide last year — which she gives as the reason she doesn’t want to manage her and dislikes dealing with her!

She also talks about me, saying that she finds my personality “weird,” “doesn’t like dealing with me and would rather not,” that I “think I’m better at my job than I am” and she “could do my job and often does anyway” (spoiler — she doesn’t!). She calls other colleagues “dumb” and even refers to an ex-colleague as “an easy crier, which gets her out of everything.”

I also believe she’s been running me down to the CEO, as our relationship has soured out of nowhere recently and I had no idea why — but they work quite closely together and now it all seems to make sense.

We’re a small remote team and we’re all younger than Meredith. I should also mention that we don’t have a HR department, so we have no idea what, if anything, to do, even though a few of us are obviously incredibly upset with this. What would your advice be here? Should we talk to external HR agencies? Is it worth going straight to the CEO, even though there is trepidation about doing so?

I’m curious what you had been seeing from Meredith before finding the transcripts. Did you feel she was a reasonably effective manager, although inexperienced, or has she been struggling to do her job effectively? (And is that by chance the reason the company got her a coach?)

If it was already clear that she was a bad manager, then the problem is that, much more that than what she’s doing in her coaching sessions. And if she hasn’t been a terrible manager, then finding the transcripts is uncomfortable but not really actionable; in that case, it would be more like background info about what she really thinks (something you don’t normally have the advantage, or disadvantage, of knowing).

My guess is that she hasn’t been a great manager up until now — hence the coaching.

To be clear, it’s a problem that she’s using her coaching sessions this way. And it’s an even bigger problem that the coach isn’t doing a better job. Executive coaching isn’t supposed to be therapy or a place where a manager just vents; while there might be some venting, the sessions’ focus should be on building the manager’s skills and helping her become more effective in her role.

As someone who has spent years doing management coaching, if I had a coaching client saying the sorts of things Meredith is saying, my job would be to use those things as openings to work on making her a better manager. For example, if a client said an employee was difficult and annoying, my job would be to dig into why she felt that way and help her come up with more effective ways to work with the person. If she said she was glad she didn’t have to manage someone because the person lost a family member to suicide (!), the coach should ask why that feels hard so they can figure out how to move past it — not just let that go unchallenged. And on and on. These sessions are supposed to be focused on building skills and working through problems, not just being a sympathetic audience to someone’s complaints. So the coach is a problem.

The fact that you found the coaching transcripts gives you some insight into what’s going on, but it’s not something you should escalate. Meredith’s own boss should be very concerned about how she’s using these coaching sessions (and presumably the fact that she’s not becoming a better manager despite them), but as Meredith’s employees, you don’t really have standing to address it. But what you can focus on is whether your team is getting what you need from Meredith as your manager — and if you’re not, that’s something you can escalate.

Whether or not to do that, though, depends on the internal dynamics of your organization. If the CEO likes Meredith and your own relationship with the CEO isn’t strong (you mentioned it’s soured recently, maybe because of Meredith), you might not be well-positioned to do that. Are any of your coworkers? Or is there anyone else who would be logical to talk to, like a manager in between Meredith and the CEO, or a second-in-command type? Or someone above you in the hierarchy who has influence with the CEO and who you could discreetly talk to about what the team found and the fact that it’s causing consternation because it’s so ugly and personal? (You mentioned external HR agencies, but unless your company is contracted with one specifically to handle this kind of issue, those aren’t really a thing that would help here.)

If there’s not anyone like that and none of your coworkers are well-positioned to talk to Meredith’s boss either, then the situation is basically that you have a bad boss and you’ve gotten an unusually candid look at what she really thinks of you all — but not a lot of recourse beyond that, unfortunately.

{ 255 comments }

{ 255 comments… read them below }

  1. CityMouse*

    Yes, it shouldn’t have been on a public folder but I find it really problematic everyone read Meredith’s coaching session transcripts. This seems like a situation where you come across something like this, it is more appropriate to stop reading and alert someone of this.

    1. Owl*

      I was thinking this as well! I can’t believe OP is quoting these transcripts at length, these were definitely not for them to see, regardless of whether they were in a public folder.

      1. CityMouse*

        Yes, what LW needs to be very clearly warned of here is that if LW raises a complaint based on this, there is a very good chance it is LW and their colleagues that will get reprimanded. This clearly wasn’t intended for you and exercising judgment on access to documents is crucial.

        You want to raise concerns about your boss based on her actions with you, have at it. But LW would be best off never letting anyone know they read these transcripts.

      2. fhqwhgads*

        My thinking is this very public folder was likely a place for automated meeting transcripts and notes in general. In other words, in a place where everyone is expected to be able to read the contents. Whether anyone should’ve started reading, realized this probably wasn’t meant to be public is a different thing, but in my job there’s a certain spot where, if the meeting’s contents are there and available, it’s supposed to be stuff anyone might read to catch up on. And if a person said stuff in any of those meetings that they didn’t intend to be public, that’s them screwing up, not sus of the reader for reading.

        If, however, where they found these is not some location like that, maybe a bad choice to keep on reading.

        1. Name here*

          This is firmly the fault of the person who put those files there (be it the manager or the coach). I can’t believe this is being treated as a minor detail and that people are trying to blame the people who read information/lies about them, fully accessible to others as well.

          This is a huge problem, quite aside from the bad management.

          1. Office Party Unicorn*

            Thank you. The fault is absolutely not with the people who read this information.

          2. Claire*

            It was a mistake to put the files there, but that doesn’t make it ok to read confidential meeting transcripts. If you stumbled upon misplaced transcripts of your colleagues’ performance review meetings, would you read them? What if a manager accidentally left a confidential personnel file on the copy machine, would you sit down and page through it? Hopefully you wouldn’t, you would realize it’s private and accidentally left out and return it to the appropriate person.

            1. Adultiest Adult*

              This answer. The situation absolutely sucks, but if you stumble upon something that has been accidentally made public that shouldn’t have been, you’re supposed to flag that for a higher-up and then leave it alone, not disseminate it to others. And people can and in some cases will be disciplined in the workplace for deliberately looking at something that they should know is not for their eyes. I feel bad for the OP, but honestly I think the only solution is to job-hunt.

    2. Dulcinea47*

      in before someone says it’s a hipaa violation! (IDK if it is- I question whether management coaching falls under “medical provider”)

      2. AyNonnyNon*

        I can’t see how it would be. The coach is meant to be helping her be a better manager, not serve as her work therapist.

        1. Qwerty*

          Plenty of executive/management coaches use the phrase “work therapist” when describing their role. Last time I attended a panel of coaches, this was the main selling point they leaned into.

            1. Qwerty*

              Sorry AyNonnyNon – I misread your comment as part of a different discussion thread further down rather than the HIPAA question you replied to, so had the completely wrong context.

      3. CityMouse*

        Almost certainly not, however, something doesn’t have to be a legal violation to demonstrate poor judgment.

        1. Estrella the Starfish*

          And things can be confidential and obviously supposed to remain confidential without a legal framework

      4. Ask a Manager* Post author

        It’s not a HIPAA violation, because the coach isn’t a healthcare provider. But even if they were, the only party who can violate HIPAA would be the healthcare provider, not Meredith herself or the coworkers.

        1. Amateur Linguist*

          It would probably be a data breach in GDPR countries. Certainly not something to encourage even if it’s technically not against any laws. (As for the fact it was accessible in the first place, that’s a problem of the company’s making, but it doesn’t give anyone justification for accessing it or sharing it — employees have access to a lot of things that they should be trained to know not to read, but also if they are conscious of their own privacy should generally know not to do it anyway.)

          1. TheOtherLaura*

            If it’s a data breach,under GDPR, LW would have to inform the responsible data security person so that they fix it/get it fixed, and can determine how to limit the damage done and who needs to do it. That would be in interesting route to take, but without the laws and the infrastructure demanded by them, probably not safe.

      6. Glitsy Gus*

        This made me laugh.

        As others have said, the HIPPA Hippo does not care about training sessions. (Due to a very funny typo at one of my jobs, the HIPPA Hippo was born and he is the ultimate arbiter of what is and isn’t under his purview.)

    3. Charlotte Lucas*

      The fact that they read it signals to me that Meredith already was a bad manager and they might have wanted to protect their own interests. (As in she’s not just a bad manager but also untrustworthy.)

      1. CityMouse*

        And if LW has grounds to complain based on that behavior, have at it. Raising these transcripts, however, risks the issue becoming the access and sharing of the documents and not Meredith’s actions.

        If you’re going in to take action you have to anticipate stuff like this that will get the process derailed or focused onto your own conduct.

        1. Charlotte Lucas*

          Yep. The transcript is something to be aware of but not mention to anyone when discussing Meredith’s actual behavior as a manager.

        2. MigraineMonth*

          Yeah, it’s reasonable to complain if a manager is badmouthing you in the break room and you overhear. It isn’t reasonable to complain if a manager is badmouthing your in a private meeting and you had your ear pressed up against her office door.

          This is going to be interpreted as the latter, and you’re much more likely to get in trouble than the manager.

          1. EarlGrey*

            I would also be worried that if these got read more widely, the message the reader takes away will be “X is difficult” “Y cries easily and uses it to get away with stuff” “Meredith does all of LW’s work” and not “wow, Meredith sucks.” Maybe it SHOULD be obvious to anyone who reads these that Meredith sucks, but someone coming at it with no context, or worse, with prejudice against the employees, might not get that message. Just another reason (however unfair) to leave it alone.

    4. Owl-a-roo*

      Eh, I don’t know that every employee necessarily realizes that executive coaching can get personal. I can see somebody skimming the transcripts with the hopes of gleaning some kind of secret, career-boosting tips, then getting hooked on the drama after seeing recognizable names.

      To your point: when it became obvious that grievances were being aired, the right thing would have been to stop reading…but I’m getting the sense that OP is in one of those norm-warping situations that make rational reactions less possible. If I had a terrible manager and stumbled upon secret meeting notes that might provide some clues about why they are so terrible, I might find myself reading on and wondering what to do next.

      1. CoffeeTime*

        I’m sure lots of people would snoop, myself included, but you don’t need to know that the sessions get personal to know that reading the transcript of a one on one coaching session isn’t exactly kosher.

        I was honestly a bit surprised Alison didn’t really mention the risk of revealing that they’d read through it.

      2. Great Frogs of Literature*

        If I found something like this clearly labeled, I would *hopefully* have sufficient self-control to not click into it. But if it was just like “meeting notes 2025-07-03.docx” or whatever, I could easily see opening it to figure out if we needed it, or to organize the drive.

        If I’d already started reading it enough to know a) what it was and b) how bad it was, I’m not sure I’d be able to stop reading. I would know that I SHOULD stop reading. But it could be really difficult to actually close the doc and go focus on my job. And I could easily see telling a colleague about it, either from a WTF AM I READING???!!! perspective, or “So, this is terrible and it will probably make you feel bad, but I don’t feel comfortable knowing that this is what Jane thinks about you and not giving you a heads up.”

        1. Amateur Linguist*

          Hopefully that’s when the information governance training would kick in and you know you need to alert someone to the data breach.

          1. Media Monkey*

            is this really an information governance issue/data breach when it is within the company? struggling to see this as a gdpr issue either.

            1. amla*

              Probably depends who saved it there. If it was Meredith, there’s no breaching of anything. It’s her personal information and she can leave it lying around it if she wants.

    5. Yes And*

      Alert who? How, without tripping over the content? That seems to circle back to OP’s original question without changing the answer.

      I think this reflects more poorly on Meredith than it does on OP. Even if Meredith had spent her coaching sessions gushing about how wonderful all her employees are and how honored she feels to be working with them, you still don’t leave confidential discussions of personnel in places where said personnel can access them. That in and of itself is cause for deep concern about Meredith’s qualifications to manage anybody.

      1. CityMouse*

        IT, the coach, etc. I don’t know if it’s the norm in most workplaces but I get PII and BII training and in situations where information gets compromised, we’re instructed to alert our IT office to have access revoked.

        1. Yes And*

          Fair, if IT exists. I guess I’m assuming that a company with no HR also has no IT, but maybe that’s not fair of me.

          1. Technically Australien*

            That matches my experience. I’m a programmer but too often “IT” is some random technical person who’s been around since the company started and does what they feel is necessary when they have time. Which usually means that when something goes wrong everything stops until it’s fixed.

            An issue like this is more likely to result in a company-wide email saying “stop browsing round the shared drive looking at stuff that doesn’t concern you” than a sudden switch to managed permissions.

            One big step forward in my current company was denying people permission to create files in the root of the shared drive. You get full permission to your folder, and read permission to everything. That’s it. The root drive no longer has “Document(1).docx” times 300 variations!

      2. EarlGrey*

        And however confidential the sessions were supposed to be, I don’t love Meredith’s judgement in saying these kinds of things in an employer-provided (versus personal therapy or even coaching she sought out herself) session and while she knows she’s being recorded / transcribed!

        I don’t really have an opinion on LW’s behavior here – yeah, I know it’s not the best choice, but could I have held myself back in their shoes? Probably not! But woof, there is some clear bad judgement on display by Meredith.

        1. MigraineMonth*

          Meredith sounds genuinely awful, both as a manager and a human being. I hope that LW takes what she’s learned as the strongest incentive to search for a new job (or at least transfer to a different manager).

          However, LW, you can’t complain about what someone said in a private context without admitting that you violated that privacy. I’m afraid that will reflect even worse on you than on Meredith.

      3. RIP Pillowfort*

        We don’t know that Meredith produced the transcript. With Teams or Zoom there’s a few ways that transcript came to be without Meredith’s involvement at all.

        1. EarlGrey*

          good point. Depending on the setup, it might be the coach’s error here in not informing Meredith that the transcription was happening and would be saved. Or software acting in a way neither of them expected (yikes).
          that’s a good thing to flag to…someone involved in the coaching, and I would be very tempted to do it in a terribly passive aggressive way (“given the sensitive nature of the discussions about me and other individuals in this session, i thought you should know to prevent them from being read widely!”)

        2. Tracy Flick*

          Also, it’s possible that Meredith is a trainwreck. BUT if the transcripts are AI-generated and uploaded without any review (because nobody knows it’s happening!), it’s very likely that they’re inaccurate.

          1. Bespoke Budget Formatting*

            It’s very likely there are inaccuracies, but the chances of the specific quoted comments being complete fabrications are pretty low.

            1. Amateur Linguist*

              Yeah, after years of working with AI transcripts to provide meeting minutes, the text might be full of questionable translations of what was said, but they wouldn’t be so bad as to be basically fabricated.

            2. metadata minion*

              Yeah, if it was a summary I’d be more suspicious of complete hallucinations, but transcripts usually have at most unfortunate misparsings of individual words.

        3. B’Elanna*

          Happened in my company in a team who wasn’t aware where their meeting auto-transcriptions were ending up. In that case it wasn’t catastrophic (nothing sensitive or confidential was leaked, it was more “messy brainstorming that wasn’t ready for prime time”) and was easily fixed. But it’s a wake-up call as more and more companies opt for meeting transcription, given that the configuration of what happens to the logs is extremely variable.

      4. Tracy Flick*

        This is all deduction on my part, but I’d bet Jeff Bezos’s entire fortune on it:

        She didn’t leave them where people could see them. They’re automatically AI generated and filed. She didn’t know they were being created, and she definitely didn’t know they would be publicly available. I doubt very much that her coach knows either.

        1. MM3891*

          This is likely, IMO. I was on a Zoom call for professional development last year and the organizers used AI to record it and generate a transcript. This was explained to everyone before the call. But somehow (still not 100% sure how), whatever button I clicked allowed Zoom to automatically record and transcribe my subsequent Zoom calls. It took me two or three calls to realize it was happening. The calls didn’t discuss anything sensitive or problematic, but it was a little creepy. I was able to turn the feature off, though, so that was good.

      5. Another One*

        I think this could get put into essentially two buckets.

        Ideally LW would pick a supervisor/director/someone senior that they trust to handle this appropriate. Go to them and say- while looking for something on the intranet, someone in our department came across the transcripts of Meredith’s management coaching sessions. I assume these aren’t supposed to be stored publicly.

        However, they’ve now been widely shared throughout our department. This now means that people seem to feel they know Meredith’s unedited views of them. Senior management may need to step.

        No opinion on what Meredith said. No opinion on whether this should have been shared. Just factually this is what has happened. It’s created a problem (that Meredith won’t be able to resolve.)

    6. Farewell bear facts*

      Honestly, anyone who saw these should have stopped reading as soon as they realised what they were.

      1. TeaCoziesRUs*

        Yeah… but most humans, myself included, would be REALLY hard-pressed to stop reading. In a perfect world we’d all have the self control to stop reading as soon as we figured out what this was. If my brain caught up to that about the same time I saw my name or the griping caught my interest, I would read through it voraciously with no thought as to how appropriate I was being.

        1. CityMouse*

          And look, it’s already been done. But it’s just a “do not let anyone know you did this” situation. Don’t bring it up, don’t hint, don’t email about it. I’m not saying the LW is a bad person, just trying to give the warning of “this could go really wrong for you”.

    7. la de la*

      Everyone in the replies saying they’d never read through it or can’t believe LW would read it should put stones down when in a glass house.

      1. CityMouse*

        People are human, but you have to be careful in situations like this or stuff blows up in your face. You have to consider when raising an issue whether something about how you raise it comes back onto you.

      2. MigraineMonth*

        At my current company and with my current manager? I wouldn’t read it. I trust him.

        At my former ToxicJob with a manager that I was convinced was laying the groundwork to fire me? Yeah, I would have. Not proud of that, but I was scared and making pretty bad choices, one of which got me fired.

        It is important to point out, though, that complaining about the contents of a document that should have been private is likely to get LW in more trouble than their manager.

      3. CoffeeTime*

        There are 6 months worth of transcripts they read through, that’s likely to be 50-100+ pages and LW indicates it’s multiple files.

        There’s a difference between reading the first page or two, even the first full transcript, saying “oof, I really shouldn’t be snooping this deeply” then closing it out and reading it in its entirety with the level of focus that would give me the ability to pull direct quotes from it and characterize the trainer’s teaching style.

        LWs colleague really shouldn’t have shared it around in the first place, but reading 6 months worth of transcripts crosses over the line of “a little bit of justifiable snooping.”

        Meredith sounds like a super crappy boss, but this was also such bad decision making on the part of LW and their coworkers

        1. Silver Robin*

          I actually would not assume LW and colleagues read through all of them. They may have very well skimmed a random selection, the first three, the last three, or even just one transcript and generalized from there!

        2. Toot toot*

          I really disagree. It’s in a publicly accessible work folder and the LW is called out by name. There is no expectation of privacy – it’s a work meeting. It’s not medical or salary information. It’s transcripts of meetings that the parties involved are clearly and obviously told that they’re being recorded (every meeting recording software makes itself known!). It’s not a moral failure to read it in its entirety in this scenario.
          Should LW REVEAL that she read it? No. But pretty much anyone in her shoes would (and I would argue, SHOULD) read the transcripts.

      4. Caryn*

        Yes and no. Early in my career, I definitely would have been tempted. But I am more mature now, especially in a work setting.

        More recently, I was evaluated by colleagues at work. I was not supposed to see their evaluations of me, but someone sent them to me by mistake.

        Once I opened the doc and realized what it contained, I deleted it. Because if I have issues with colleagues at work and/or they have issues with me, I can just ask them and discuss these things face to face. I didn’t feel the need to read what had been written.

        I understand the letter writer’s upset at what they read, but that is a risk you run when reading something you know is not meant for you.

      5. Amateur Linguist*

        Nope. IT training is very strict on this that it would be a disciplinary offence at best and a serious information breach that could cost me my job and the company a sizeable fine, at least in my jurisdiction. That’s why I’m not in the habit of reading anything I don’t need to read for my job. (And I’ve worked in several HR cases where I’ve taken notes in some meetings, but not even been told the outcome, so important is the privacy of even the worst of those people I’ve taken notes on.)

      6. Strive to Excel*

        Read it? Maybe. Admit to reading it? Not a chance. The most I’d admit to would be to send a quiet email to the coach and/or whoever at work is best suited for network privacy – maybe HR IT if there was one – letting them know that the documents are on a public folder.

      7. B’Elanna*

        Not reading things that you recognize are private, and instead notifying your supervisor or IT, is infosec 101. I fully believe that someone who hasn’t worked in an environment where security is important might not know that, but it’s standard for huge industries with millions of workers. Acting like obviously everyone would read it is simply factually incorrect.

      8. Media Monkey*

        yeah i don’t believe people who say they woudn’t read this. to read through some standard management coaching transcripts i would believe you wouldn;t bother. to read through when you realise that you and your team are being trash talked? i think the vast majority of people would, and tbh if this was someone on my team using company provided training in this way, i would want to know.

    8. Caryn*

      I totally agree.

      Sometimes these AI transcripts save in unusual places, and not everyone is tech savvy enough to realize it. Instead, the team seemed to feel that transcripts being left in a public place necessitated them opening and reviewing them.

      While I do have empathy–it can be tough to read negative comments about yourself (justified or not)–this situation reminds me of someone leaving a diary closed but out in the open. I’m wondering why the team felt they needed to read it. I can’t honestly think of a reason that would have necessitated this privacy violation.

      I also wonder if the team doesn’t care for Meredith–were they hoping to find dirt or a reason to disparage her further?

      I believe we all have opportunities for growth and I can only hope the letter writer and lw’s colleagues grow and learn from the choice they made. I also hope whatever is frustrating the letter writer about workplace relationships gets hammered out.

      1. Kilted*

        Expanding on this as I’m having complete WTH were you thinking moments. I’m struggling to understand what the file might have been named that in any way made it seem like something LW needed for a work task and got mistaken and opened it in error?

        Surely it was obvious at the time that it wasn’t a file you needed to do your job? You might see it in a folder along with other docs you actually need, but I’m finding it hard to imagine a circumstance where you could reasonably say I was looking for xyz file for the Pinkerton’s account and as this was named similarly opened it by mistake?

        1. Meredith LW*

          Hello, I’m the LW and this is exactly what happened.

          My colleague who found the transcript is NOT a snooper and found it purely by accident when searching the keyword “transcript” in our company cloud looking for a client transcript (I mean, that’s how public these are. I do understand the confidential discernment on the other comments but this is literally how widely available they are).

          The two document names had the format “transcript-10-12-26.docx” and shared the same date – she happened to click on Meredith’s. She started reading expecting it to be a client she perhaps hadn’t onboarded yet, ended up skimming and then noticed names – including hers which also contained incredibly disparaging comments. Sure, she probably shouldn’t have carried on reading – nor shared – but she reacted from a place of pure emotion and anger and felt like she had a ‘fall on her sword’ duty to heads up the rest of us as we are all a very close working team.

          1. Username required*

            If you think your relationship with CEO has soured now just imagine how he’s going to react when he finds out what you and your team have been up to. Forget what you saw because if you disclose this info you and your colleagues will be the ones being held accountable not Meredith. The documents shouldn’t have been there but that doesn’t excuse going through and reviewing them as a team. All IT has to do is a quick search to see how many times the documents were “accidentally” accessed.

    10. jojo*

      I’d print them out. And put it on CEO desk when nobody around. With a note that management coach should be replaced as he gossiping instead of providing management coaching.

      1. MigraineMonth*

        This is a terrible idea, IMO.

        First, it wouldn’t be anonymous, since IT would probably investigate and discover who opened the document, possibly getting LW’s entire team in trouble.

        Second, LW and their team have no standing to complain about what is being said in a private meeting (not to mention LW said the coach was trying to redirect Meredith to coaching topic).

        Anonymous notes are almost *never* the way to solve an issue; it just creates an atmosphere of paranoia.

      2. Username required*

        You forgot the /s for sarcasm at the end of your post. Because if your suggestion was real you’re going to get them fired. All IT has to do is check who last accessed and printed the documents and so long LW.

    11. Lex talionis*

      I’m torn re to read or not to read. There’s something to be said for knowing what your boss really thinks of you. If your boss is not honest how can you improve? And if your boss is an unreasonable jerk, and no one points out their unreasonableness, how can the boss grow? Knowing that it’s not always you and sometimes it’s the boss can be mentally helpful getting through the week. And frankly if the boss is dumb enough to post in an unsecured location then lesson learned. Or maybe not.

    12. Shipbuilding Techniques*

      Wow, I would have no qualms at all about reading a publically available document that is full of information pertinent to my work situation. OP is free and clear of censure in my book at least!! It’s so interesting how different we all are.

      1. Striped Badger*

        Do you also open up mail addressed to other people, just because you live in the same house?

    14. Striped Badger*

      While all humans face temptation, “accessing and reading something I know I shouldn’t just because I can” shows a gross lack of judgement or sense of responsibility so extreme that it actually makes me question how biased LW’s interpretation of Meredith’s words is.

  2. Trudy's Blue Summer's Dress*

    This probably isn’t germane to the letter but I’m curious what an “external HR agency” is and why you might call one in this case

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      Something like fractional HR that provides guidance and support for multiple clients

    2. Busy Middle Manager*

      it is germane, I think they mean something like how ADP offers “HR.” It’s not someone you can walk down the hall to visit, but they still do all HR functions including mediating complaints

      1. Trudy's Blue Summer's Dress*

        Ok, I knew you could hire companies like that to handle payroll, PTO, benefits, etc but didn’t realize they could get involved in weightier issues

        1. Amateur Linguist*

          There has to be at least someone to do that kind of colleague relations thing otherwise the company would be playing with fire.

    3. Saint Florinda of the Cinnamon Rolls*

      My small business has a contract with Insperity, which does a lot of HR functions like payroll/benefits administration/EAP/compliance and training (on things like cyber security, anti-harassment, etc.) If the LW’s company works with a company like that, they may be wondering if that’s a resource they can use, since they replace some other functions of HR in a big org. For my org/Insperity, they offer an EEO hotline that could be contacted if the concerns were specifically about discrimination/harassment, but I agree with Alison that this specific problem isn’t one that it would make sense to take to them since they’re not involved in this kind of people management that an in-house HR might be.

    5. The Unspeakable Queen Lisa*

      My last job had an HR hotline you could call as a backup in case internal HR wasn’t doing their job. They got called when internal HR was supporting bullying and unpaid overtime. Internal HR got investigated by the external agency. But I don’t know if that hotline is a thing as a replacement for HR.

    6. Media Monkey*

      i’ve worked with these in multiple small companies who don’t have their own HR. they provide advice and a point of escalation for issues within the company. they also provide legal advice on disciplinary issues etc. some also help with recruitment.

  3. zinzarin*

    LW, you definitely shouldn’t do this, but what I really *want* you to do is to print out choice quotes in large type–with attribution–and post those all over the facility.

    That’s an easy path towards getting fired though. Definitely don’t do this, no matter how satisfied it would make me.

    1. Not on board*

      I’d be tempted to work specific things Meredith has said into conversations with her:
      “I never know what to do if someone is an easy crier and it gets them out of everything”
      “Somebody once told me my personality is ‘weird’, what a strange thing to say”

      Meredith would either not remember saying it and nothing would happen, or she would think the coach is leaking what she’s saying in the sessions and start to spiral. I would do this while remaining scrupulously professional and just wait to see what happens.

    2. ElliottRook*

      No one is going to recommend that, but I’m sat with popcorn and want an update if it happens. That’s the logical next step for the average movie character, not IRL people haha.

      1. A Simple Narwhal*

        Yes! What I would actually recommend and what would be maximally entertaining are sadly rarely the same.

    4. Morning person*

      I’m glad I am not the only sinister, spiteful thinking person here LOL. Of course you can’t and shouldn’t but human nature really wants to make someone do things like this after reading all that stuff!

    5. Gumby*

      I might not do that, but I do think job searching and then quoting liberally from the notes in my last days at that job might not be entirely out of my wheelhouse.

  4. Reality.Bites*

    Would the person doing the coaching be allowed/expected to report to the CEO how things are going?

    1. bamcheeks*

      Quite possibly, but there’s no pathway for LW or her colleagues to make that happen (or even know if it happens.)

      1. CoffeeTime*

        It’s also entirely likely that this is happening. If the bosses are paying for these sessions it’s reasonable to think that they’re getting regular status reports and insights.

    2. holdonloosely*

      Oh, this is a situation where I’d be quite tempted to send the CEO the transcripts from an anonymous email address, partly because of Meredith, but also because I’d want to be sure they knew the coach was not being effective. I don’t think I’d actually do it, but I’d really want to!

      1. Thin Mints didn't make me thin*

        see, I would send an anonymous email to the coach, not the CEO, because the coach needs to know that their confidentiality has been breached in a way that violates whatever agreements they have with LW’s company. And then, in the LW’s shoes, I would go get another job. This place sounds like it’s full of bees.

      2. B’Elanna*

        Warning to anyone tempted to do this: make sure there is absolutely no IT monitoring of what files are opened, when, and by whom. At my company this would automatically trigger an investigation of who had access to the file and opened it, and the leaker(s) would be in significant trouble.

        The fact that the breach hasn’t been found could mean that they have no logs and you’re “safe,” but it could just as easily just be that they as yet have no reason to look at those logs. An anonymous email would give them immediate reason.

    3. Somehow I Manage*

      I think there’s not a one size fits all answer to your question, but I have to believe that if the company is hiring the coach to assist an employee, there would be some type of feedback provided to the company. Otherwise it seems like an investment that doesn’t have the type of payoff you need.

    4. Qwerty*

      I think that could undermine the sessions and the trust between employee and coach, making them useless. You’d want to only say things to the coach that you’d say to the CEO, so each session would feel more like a test than a way to learn or get support.

    5. HorrifiedCoach*

      Generally a coach employed by a company would have general discussions with the CEO/Manager on how a person is progressing, but would not divulge details of topics or anything specific said by the Coachee.

  5. Resume Please*

    It’s interesting to learn what an effective executive coaching session should look like, and what redirects should be used if things go off the rails. From having a bad manager who was pulled into coaching and left it with the exact same behaviors, it’s an interesting to see that perhaps 1) The coaching just wasn’t great, and 2) They spent the entire time venting and lying about their subordinates. I just assumed my former bad manager ignored what was being said (also possible!)

    1. Snarkus Aurelius*

      Therapy and executive coaching can fail for the same reason: the person receiving counseling has to *want* to change. If they don’t, then what’s the point?

      I suspect Meredith is one of those types who think everyone else has to change to her specifications in order for her to function successfully as a manager. No…

      A good therapist or coach will redirect when venting begins. For example, “Wakeen is so weird and annoying. I hate him because he’s dumb.” I might say something like, “Okay how is he annoying? Is it your personal opinion or is there something that he’s doing that affects outcomes and productivity?” Then if she says his TPS reports are always late, we can go from there. I’d redirect everything back to the work at hand.

      It could be an ineffective coach or it could be that the CEO is forcing Meredith to receive coaching until she gets better. If she’s not going to change, then no leadership coach on the planet can help her.

      It’d be easy money for the coach though.

    2. Not a Girl Boss*

      I previously had a Bad Boss (she was a manager of managers, as her very first leadership job, so mistakes were made all around). Our VP of HR performed the “executive coaching” sessions herself, after holding a start/stop/continue with Bad Boss’ directs. That start/stop/continue itself was pretty brutal/firery/passionate/mean, since by the time it escalated to that conversation, we had been frustrated for over a year. I’m curious to know how the results were actually presented to Bad Boss.

      Anyway, a month or so into the coaching sessions, Bad Boss ran in late to my 1:1 and started talking about how she was late because she had a coaching session, and how much she lovveesss those sessions because “its like [her] own personal therapy session, except VP HR actually knows all the players, so the character development takes less time.” and “its like sipping tea on the set of a reality show.”

      Safe to say, she didn’t survive her 90 days.

    3. The Coolest Clown Around*

      This varies a lot, I imagine, but there are a few good executive coaching-like resources out there – The Look and Sound of Leadership springs to mind. Generally, it works better when it’s a good-to-decent executive/manager aiming to improve in specific ways as opposed to a bad executive/manager being coached in response to bad behavior.

  6. Qwerty*

    I’m not thrilled that OP read the transcripts and surprised the response did not address that. The coworker found them accidentally and should have stopped reading when she realized what it was, not shared the transcripts with the rest of the team. Common sense says these were not intended to be public.

    OP, there are some parallels here to reading someone’s diary or journal. You sought out the unfiltered thoughts of a person that they never expected to be public and didn’t like what you found. That was a risk you chose to take.

    These transcripts could have easily had personal information in them. What if the boss had been sharing struggles of balancing work with a medical issue, divorce, or other very personal issue with their coach? OP willfully invaded their privacy in reading these transcripts.

    1. Not on board*

      Meh, Meredith has been running her mouth about her team and saying she doesn’t like someone because their loved one (checks notes) committed suicide! She presumably has bad judgement and has probably been saying this kind of stuff to other people too. The coach isn’t a therapist and while it probably would have been best not to read the transcript, Meredith is a bad manager, creating a toxic environment to the point of needing coaching, and I don’t blame the employees for reading the transcript once they discovered it.

      1. CR Month*

        You might be right about Meredith overall but typically executive coaching is not a punishment or disciplinary . It’s usually considered a benefit because imo we could all use it

        1. Not on board*

          Yes, but a professional coaching session, just like work emails, aren’t expected to be private. And if Meredith’s boss read the transcripts, they might seriously reconsider keeping her in that role.

          1. Person Person*

            I feel like this comment is working against how you intended, if Meredith’s work emails were distributed without her knowledge by people she outranks, that would be bad! I feel like it is possible to believe that her behavior in these sessions is wrong but it’s not OP’s place to address.

          2. RNL*

            If it’s external coaching by an International Coaching Federation certified coach, they are absolutely intended to be private and confidential even vis-a-vis the organization. When I hire coaches for people I agree that the sessions and what was discussed is private, and at most I can get a report of whether they attended. *Sometimes* agreements can be made for reporting on progress on particular issues, but only with the coachee’s specific consent.

          3. HorrifiedCoach*

            Coaching sessions are absolutely expected to be private and confidential between the Coach and the Coachee.

          4. metadata minion*

            I know that my work email isn’t private in that IT could go in and look at it, and my supervisor or HR or whoever if there were some serious issue they were investigating, but if I were somehow accidentally logged in somewhere weird and a coworker started reading my email, that would be completely inappropriate.

      2. CoffeeTime*

        That’s actually not what the transcripts said, there’s plenty to dislike about Meredith but the exact quotes were given is that Meredith finds the employee “difficult and annoying” and that she doesn’t want to manage her and dislikes dealing with her because of her personal tragedy.
        We genuinely don’t know the context of those statements, it could be that Meredith is callous or it could be that she she was expressing how struggles to manage in emotionally complex situations (or both!)

        Meredith sounds crappy enough without mischaracterizing her words.

    2. Smithy*

      Yeah – because while it may be that Meredith is the type to want a transcript of her sessions to reread (people are diverse!), there are a number of other reasons why this transcript was generated.

      Possibly the coach is doing it for their records/notes, and Meredith didn’t realize that a copy was being generated into the broader company cloud. Or Meredith’s system is set up to transcribe all meetings she sets. Or the meeting is on the coach’s online meeting system and set up that way, so Meredith would have no reason to assume this. Etc etc.

      For the initial employee who read it, I get that something on a public folder that contains so much personal information is hard to just stop reading. But the right move at that point was to flag it as being public and likely not intended to be so (because maybe everyone’s evaluations or 1 on 1’s are also being transcribed and available across the company). When the OP was told about it, I also get that it’s hard to not engage, but it just becomes a poisoned chalice.

      This doesn’t mean that the OP can’t flag any management issues – but the reality is that flagging they know anything about these notes will only harm their case.

    3. LinesInTheSand*

      I agree. OP now has a whole lot of information they shouldn’t have and can’t take action on. Coaching is private, and whatever other faults Meredith may have, holding her feet to the fire for saying things in a setting she understood to be a private settings seems counterproductive. Sort of akin to “I was spying on you in your own bathroom. How dare you pick your nose?”

      1. Not on board*

        I disagree that coaching is private. Anything and everything you say at work, out loud or in an email, (unless you are HR), is not expected to be private.

        The coaching is professional development, not therapy. And if Meredith said something illegal (for example, I prefer managing men because they’re easier to deal with, I wish I could fire pregnant women), the coach would probably be required to report that.

        1. Smithy*

          It may not be private in the sense of legal liability, but that’s a pretty terrible way to set up a work environment.

          In my 1 on 1 meetings with my supervisor, I understand there’s not the kind of privacy that’s applied with a doctor, lawyer, or religious leader. News may be shared with my larger team or to higher ups. But that’s not the same as sharing the entire transcript of my one on one meetings with the entire team. And if for any reason a transcript or recording did happen and was made available to the entire team, if that wasn’t treated as a mistake to fix, but rather standard practice – that’s not a place I’d want to work long term.

        2. Amateur Linguist*

          Would you be prepared to have your coaching sessions available to read? I’m not so sure I would want that myself.

          1. fhqwhgads*

            My perspective is if you don’t want your coaching sessions available to read, you ensure they’re not recorded. Maybe I’m wrong, but this screams “recorded teams session with autotranscription”. It’s very obvious when a session is being recorded. This is not some sneaky, snooping kinda thing. This is a work meeting, or a work training. No expectation of privacy. Certainly not a confidential meeting. Expect the transcript to end up where all meeting transcripts end up and thus searchable by anyone looking for anything in any meeting transcript.

            I’m really surprised by everyone being all “data breach!” and “OP’s in the wrong for reading!” because A) OP made clear someone else stumbled on it and OP was told and B) if this shouldn’t have been public that’s on Meredith or the coach or both. It’s on them to not say private things while knowingly being recorded or to not record.

            OP’s role in all this is no different than if they had the meeting loudly in a spot where OP or the coworker in question could hear it.

            1. pinkponyclub*

              This sounds a lot like blaming Meredith for when it was the coworker did the blabbing and bullying.

              1. Bluefox*

                Your take is “how dare people blame Meredith for talking crap behind people’s back, it’s the person who revealed the crap talking who’s the bully”?

        3. r..*

          Coaching only works when there is psychological safety. Without that, the client cannot speak candidly, and the coaching relationship becomes ineffective.

          That is also one reason many coaches work as external consultants rather than employees: their disclosure obligations can be defined precisely by contract in a way that is usually not possible for internal staff.

          In practice, the strongest coaches I know will not coach a client’s employee unless it is explicitly agreed that, apart from legally required disclosures, any sharing of coaching content with the client happens solely at the coach’s discretion.

        4. LinesInTheSand*

          “Anything and everything you say at work, out loud or in an email, (unless you are HR), is not expected to be private.”

          Not really. There are plenty of conversations that are meant to be private, even if the major details are known within the company. Performance improvement conversations, for example. If you’re on a PIP, your whole management chain probably knows, and some of your peers might be privy to the details of what’s on the pip. But no sane boss would put you on a pip, have a meeting about it, and then share out the meeting logs. It’s hurtful to you, to the process, and to the business.

          Yes, if it comes up in coaching that Meredith is bound and determined to, say, systematically fire all women, the coach might have an obligation to report it. But that’s not at all the same as releasing a transcript of the coaching session.

        5. Malarkey01*

          I think that’s a weird take. I have several conversations a week with subordinates, leadership, my boss where everyone has some expectation of privacy and people have absolutely been fired for sharing information in meetings outside those with a need to know. We also mark many documents as Confidential and if you come across those the expectation is that you will not read them unless you have a need to know.
          Not reading and discussing your supervisors coaching sessions should fall under obviously not your business to read and I’d have a serious conversation with anyone I knew read and SHARED that.

        6. Claire*

          Coach here. Coaching sessions absolutely are meant to be private. And no, coaches are not required to report illegal behavior.

    4. oranges*

      Yeah, I don’t blame OP for reading it all (my nosiness wouldn’t let me NOT read it), but it should really be used as internal confirmation to start searching for a new job.

      We had an “executive coach” for over a year for a director that was clearly terrible at her job on day 1. She eventually left, but the firing process drug on for years and years, and we lost several great people along the way.

    5. Nameo*

      I don’t feel that coaching sessions are equivalent to diary entries. Is there something I’m missing? Coaching is about learning how to do your job better. and LW states that the reason for the coaching is that the exec hadn’t managed before, not that this exec has a track record of sucking.
      How is it so obvious that these meetings are private? Is it just because of the content of what LW found?

      1. Claire*

        Of course coaching is meant to be private. Just because something is meant to help you be better at your job doesn’t mean you give up privacy. The same way you aren’t privy to the transcripts of your colleagues yearly evaluation sessions with their supervisor.

  7. Lee Plum*

    “ as Meredith’s employees, you don’t really have standing to address it. But what you can focus on is whether your team is getting what you need from Meredith as your manager ”

    I want to pull on this thread a little bit. The coaching transcripts give you significant insight into how Meredith works. You do not have the standing to address what happens in the coaching sessions, but you can probably connect the dots between what your experiences with Meredith as your manager are and the way she expresses herself during her coaching sessions. You absolutely do have standing to have this conversation with Meredith’s manager/your skip level manager.
    Whether that conversation is worth having will depend very much what that person is like and what the company culture is like. If you have a culture of bringing concerns about somebody’s management style and/or working style to their management to address, and if the specific individual who is Meredith’s manager/your manager is people oriented enough to want to work on both the relationship and the impact on the work style, then bringing your concerns to them will be constructive. Those are two pretty big ifs.

  8. RIP Pillowfort*

    OP- I would get out. Something is really wrong with the norms here.

    You read someone’s transcripts from a meeting you would have never been privy to. That’s a huge issue! It doesn’t matter that Meredith is awful. Ya’ll read transcripts of a coaching meeting. Regardless of whether it’s public, that’s something that would get you in serious trouble or fired at a lot of companies.

    1. Not on board*

      If they read the entire transcript word for word and divulged it, maybe. But the fact that it was stored where it was and someone came across it accidentally, isn’t an offence. They can also claim to not have read it if it comes up. Also, clearly someone knows that Meredith sucks at managing or they wouldn’t be giving her coaching sessions.

      I think OP should focus on the problems with Meredith that anyone in the office could see, and work on repairing their relationship with the CEO. If that doesn’t work, start looking for a new job.

      1. Claire*

        Coaching sessions are a form of professional development. Working with a coach doesn’t mean you “suck” at your job any more than going to a work-related training or workshop means you suck. Lots of top executives work with a coach, it’s considered a perk.

    2. Somehow I Manage*

      I would agree that the signs all point to leaving. But in pointing out that the team shouldn’t have read the transcripts, it is important not to leave out all of the other information that should lead to leaving. Yes, reading the transcripts is a bad idea. But it sounds like management wasn’t good and the CEO appears to be aligned with bad management. Add to the manager’s attitude, as highlighted in the transcripts, and it all leads to this not being a great place to work.

    3. Not on board*

      I forgot to add, Meredith made some very cruel and unprofessional comments. In the CEO’s place, I would seriously question Meredith’s professional judgement and her ability to be a manager.

    4. Qwerty*

      This is a really good point. The whole team read the transcripts and apparently no one had a problem with that. Dysfunctional workplaces can warp your sense of what’s normal.

      Most places I’ve worked, these files would have been unlikely to be opened by the original coworker or stopped reading immediately when they realized what it was. Either the manager, file owner, or IT would have gotten a message like “um, this filename looks like something that shouldn’t be on the public drive, can you take it from here? I don’t want to open it in case its from a meeting I shouldn’t see”.

      1. Smithy*

        Yes – when it comes to the world of tech, to immediately assume intentionality vs incompetence/mistake isn’t a great starting point. If someone’s HR file becomes available to the entire organization the first assumption is not “well let’s read this” vs to flag that perhaps it shouldn’t be accessible to begin with.

  9. FG*

    This is one of the rare occasions where I disagree to some extent to Alison’s answer. How this is approached has some nuance, but, “You just have to sit and take it,” doesn’t work for me. True, the answer isn’t necessarily to come out with knowledge of the transcript, but …

    Yes, if the upshot is that M is a bad manager & it’s impacting the work, or the team cohesion or whatever, that’s the best angle to take. But the point at which she’s possibly damaged LW’s relationship with the CEO, that needs attention. (And does CEO have info about the coaching sessions, in which case …? Or is M poisoning the well in other ways?) In a small company where the LW has a relationship with the CEO at all, much less one that has changed, can LW not approach CEO to find out about that?

    All of this to say, no, the fact that the team has inside knowledge doesn’t have to be divulged, but that cat is now out of the bag & can’t just be ignored, unless LW & other team members want to just leave the company.

    1. My Useless Two Cents*

      A thought and/or a question that I think relates to your train of thought… individually LW should not mention the transcript but as a group? If the transcript has become public knowledge within the office in general it makes sense that LW read the part that specifically disparages them. Like an email complaining about a coworker accidently sent to the coworker or payroll files being left in a copier that lead to the women in the office learning they are severally underpaid. Once it becomes public knowledge, how LW came across that knowledge becomes less important. The impact becomes the relevant information.

      Also, would keeping a copy of the transcript be a good idea? Given that M specifically disparaged LW. Could the transcript help make a case for constructive dismissal if LW is fired and denied unemployment?

      1. Amateur Linguist*

        It would be important inasmuch as Meredith should be fired for making the comments and LW and their team should also be fired for the flagrant data breach. No one in this situation looks good.

        1. FG*

          A file in a generally accessible location is not a data breach. Maybe the high road would have been at stop reading it when the content was known, but there’s no hacking here. The existence of the file wasn’t even known but was stumbled across.

          1. Amateur Linguist*

            If it’s been wrongly placed there then it’s like a letter on the photocopier, which is the standard question in our statutory IG training. So yes, the answer is always to make sure something like that is in the right place, which would be in a secure folder.

            Either way, reading it and passing it around the office sounds awfully like a data breach to me. People here want it not to be because they don’t like the person who is the subject of the discussion, but that doesn’t make it not a data breach.

            1. B’Elanna*

              Yes. In many industries, including mine, it is a data breach and is named as such in some state and federal regulations surrounding specific types of data handling. In other industries it might just be an oops, but it’s not accurate to blanket label it “not a data breach.”

          2. Technically Australien*

            IMO the data breach is where whoever first found it shared it with coworkers rather than reporting it to IT/management. That’s not good and may be fireable depending on the workplace policies.

            OTOH employers like this often have a whole collection of similar problems (as seems likely here) making reporting the document tricky. LW may be able to tell the CEO (since there’s no IT) and keep their job, or they may be best advised to STFU. I don’t think we have enough information to give sensible advice.

  10. Busy Middle Manager*

    Only possible area for self-reflection and to try to go to the CEO or whoever to discuss (I get the feeling this is a small company) is the “often do anyway” part. That doesn’t even mean you did something wrong, she may not be delegating down, so Meredith may still be the problem. This was a constant issue I had as a manager so I think other people must face it to. For example, an emergency happens at exactly the moment no one is online or on a Friday at 4:55, so you end up dealing with it. Or you try to delegate something and the person sort of freezes or gets busy with something else, and doesn’t register that they’re sort of missing one of those opportunities they said they wanted. Another thing was, I could not get other people at my level to deal directly with lower level staff. Everyone called me. I’d say “Jim is perfect at that” and then I’d add Jim to the call. He’d do well. Then next time, they’d call me first, again. So sometimes I’d just finish the request because I didn’t have time to train everyone to use proper channels. But I should have

    1. zinzarin*

      “The last time you contacted me about this, I brought Jim in because he’s an expert and handles these things well. Moving forward, please just contact Jim first for these issues. Thank you!”

  11. Nat Romanov*

    This is why AI doing transcripts of every video call and saving them wherever it likes is not OK.

    1. Unauthorized Plants*

      ^this. The director of a mostly-volunteer-run organization I’m in has transcripts turned on for all meetings right now. This is 100% because this organization is going through some necessary-but-messy culture change and a record of exactly what is said is very useful: relying on the notes taken by the volunteers that see nothing wrong with the current culture can be unreliable. (The culture that needs changing includes a lot of conflict-avoidant gaslighting) But a few transcripts/summaries were directed very weirdly before they adjusted who got sent the transcripts and summaries–that was also messy!

    2. allathian*

      Recording video calls may or may not be an option, but video transcripts are notoriously unreliable. I haven’t used AI much yet, but the video transcripts I’ve seen were messy, and in a couple cases omitted a negation or two, so the transcript claimed the opposite of what was actually said.

  12. cloudy*

    It sounds to me from the letter that the full team has seen these transcripts. This feels like it could significantly impact the manager’s ability to do her job, in a way where it seems like someone, like the manager herself or the CEO (since there is no HR), ought to be informed about this. Obviously it would have been preferable if the coworker to find them didn’t share them, but once everyone saw them, it can’t really be undone.

    I’m unfortunately not sure how realistic it actually is to expect her entire team of employees to pretend they never saw what they did and go back to interacting with their manager like before, given how cruel some of the comments seemed to be. If it were just one employee, I think that would make sense, but if they were widely circulated? Not sure what the best way forward would be, but it does seem like some kind of group relationship-repair may be required to fix this.

    1. HonorBox*

      This is a really good point. It seems like on one hand, you have a manager who is not great at managing and has strong negative opinions about her team and others. And on the other hand, you have a team that has read her statements that show her true feelings about them. I don’t think you can come back from this, and I don’t know that there’s a great first step.

      Because it is a bad manager and the team knows they do not have her support at all, it would probably be easier and better to bring in new management, but there would still be remaining questions about everyone reading something that was clearly not for their eyes.

      1. cloudy*

        Yes, I really don’t know how someone might fix this. The reality is that, justly or not, there is now significant damage to many of this manager’s relationships, and it’s not an easy kind of damage to repair. I have been on teams for extracurricular/hobby type activities that have completely crumbled when it gets out that someone has been trash talking the rest of the team, because a lot of people have a hard time coping with this sort of thing.

        This team is probably going to struggle to build a healthy, collaborative dynamic with their manager unless there is some kind of debriefing or conversation. Collectively ignoring the problem seems likely to make resentment stew and potentially escalate things further down the line.

        I would be really interested in what advice to the CEO or manager would look like in this situation, where deeply unflattering private correspondence has been leaked and has damaged a team’s relationships.

  13. Apple White*

    The Petty Betty in my soul wants to suggest dropping direct quotes from the transcripts into conversations with Meredith, just to let her know she’s been found out with some plausible deniability. Don’t actually do that, though.

    I am surprised at how many people are surprised OP read this document. It’s not actually a private diary or a journal – it’s a document saved in a public folder for the workplace. I always assume if I have access to something at work, it’s because I’m meant to. I’ve learned a lot things I wouldn’t have known to ask about by digging through workplace shared drives. That, and all the letters over the years of people seeing chats/emails/DMs of things they weren’t meant to see.

    There’s no real expectation of privacy at work – I thought we all knew that by now.

      1. Apple White*

        Get in trouble for what, exactly? I don’t know the way the folder system is set up for OP, but if I’m an Assistant Llama Groomer, and I go into the shared Llama Groomer Folder and read the Llamma Groomer Meeting Minutes from a meeting I missed, I don’t see how that on its own would get me in trouble. That’s about the extent of what I do, and it’s gotten me praise for initiative more than anything.

        If the Meeting Minutes had gossip I wasn’t supposed to know because the note taker didn’t realize I would read it, that’s on the note taker, not me. Meredith and/or the coach should’ve taken better care of saving the transcripts somewhere private.

        1. Eldritch Office Worker*

          If you start reading something, realize it’s not intended for your eyes, and keep reading anyway, you can get fired. You can get fired for poor professional judgement, for not escalating a clear IT issue, or for acting on information you’re not supposed to have. This isn’t about reading notes for a meeting you were supposed to be at, and I think you know that.

          1. CoffeeTime*

            Absolutely this, and to that end, this isn’t a single document LW and their coworkers read, it’s SIX MONTHS of transcripts. I’d wager it’s 100+ pages.
            It’s one thing to have a casual look at a doc or an email for 5 minutes and go “oops, my nosiness got the best of me, probably shouldn’t have done that”

            This is opening multiple files, probably spending an hour (or many hours) reading dozens of pages with the level of attention that allows you to pull direct quotes, characterize the trainer’s style and discuss it all among your coworkers – even if there were team members who didn’t want to read the transcripts they would have likely been roped into the conversation and couldn’t have avoided learning about it’s contents.

            Honestly, if I were the manager I would probably consider firing the coworker who found the transcripts and shared them, that’s a seriously bad judgement call.

        2. CityMouse*

          Yeah, no, you’re supposed to exercise judgment about access. Unauthorized access happens all the time in workplaces. If you’re accidentally given access to documents that clearly aren’t for you, that does not give you carte blanche to go through them.

          This is part of my organization’s IT training as well as PII and BII training.

          1. Eldritch Office Worker*

            And depending on the documentation there could very well be an audit trail of who accessed them (and how many times, if you went back)

            1. CityMouse*

              Very much so. In government/medicine for instance, they’ll put flags on celebrity files so they’re given an alert for anyone who opens them. But opening files in many places leaves an access log.

        3. Celeste*

          It’s clear from the letter that the LW knew they weren’t intended for everyone to read though, and it would be pretty disingenuous to pretend otherwise. Stuff gets left in public spaces by mistake. If all your coworker’s performance evaluations were left in a public folder, I don’t think you’d think it was okay to read them, just because of their location.

        4. xrunnerx*

          Well ultimately, in the US anyway, you could be fired for reading documents management would rather you not read even if it’s management’s fault for putting the documents in a shared drive to begin with.

    2. Eldritch Office Worker*

      There is no expectation of privacy but there are expectations around behavior. IT can see all of your emails, but if they were going through and reading them without direction to do so that would still be a problem in most workplaces. There are many personnel conversations that are not for public distribution. Private conversations with your manager, or your coach, are on that list of things that no one else has any business accessing, along with your HR file and a myriad of other workplace documentation.

      “Expectation of privacy” is about sending inappropriate messages on slack, it’s not about all information being public to all parties.

    3. LinesInTheSand*

      “There’s no real expectation of privacy at work”.

      That’s not entirely true. There are settings where there is an expectation of confidentiality, and this is one them. Others include: insider information that would affect stock trades, when not everyone in the company is classified as an insider, employee disciplinary records, unannounced product launches, and so on. And that’s not even getting into government jobs with security clearance implications.

      Technology is used to enforce policy, but the technology itself is not the policy. Just because something is public, doesn’t mean it was intended to be. Should people be extremely careful with tech and vigilant about checking privacy settings? Yes. Are you going to build bridges and improve your image by willfully misinterpreting technological mistakes as intent? Not in the slightest.

      1. Amateur Linguist*

        Agreed. For instance, someone might have access to medical records because their job demands it, but that doesn’t inherently give them the right to look up their friends, family, coworkers, celebrity or even their OWN data.

    4. Qwerty*

      Let’s say its files about you that got accidentally placed in the shared drive. This clearly was a mistake – I doubt anyone made the deliberate decision that the entire company should have access to these coaching transcripts.

      Do you want all the transcripts of your 1x1s to be read by everyone?

      If you have a medical situation or a personal issue that you want to keep private and only between you and your boss or you and HR, do you want that transcript read by everyone?

      What about coworkers PIPs and disciplinary plans? If those accidentally land in the shared drive, should we all open them and read the juicy info on how Fergus is struggling to hold onto his job? Or Jane’s harassment complaint that she only agreed to because she thought it would be confidential?

      Have you never said anything at work that you did not want shared with the entire company?

      People get accidental access all the time – incorrectly added to an email chain, folder doesn’t have the right permissions, IT snafu, etc. It’s a “when” not an “if”. An important part of security is to alert someone and stop reading, not to start spreading the information around to more coworkers. Doing the latter would get someone disciplined or fired at most places I’ve worked at.

      1. Apple White*

        Look, I get what you mean, but to answer your question “Have you never said anything at work that you did not want shared with the entire company?” The answer is NO. I make sure there’s never transcription services on in any meeting I’m in. I never say anything about any medical issues I have, or even anything I deem too personal to share with people at work. I never even connect to the work wifi. I protect myself.

        Because you’re right, “It’s a ‘when’ not an ‘if’,” and I assume if I do or any anything at work, on slack, email, or otherwise, that it WILL be looked at at some point in time. Paranoid perhaps, but as this letter shows, mistakes can happen.

        Anyway, we can all keep arguing about LW and if they should’ve read it, but the fact is, they already did. There’s been other letter to the same effect of seeing things they should’t have on company tech, but this is the first time I’ve seen so many commenters up in arms about it.

      2. Salsa Verde*

        I think this is one of those situations that feels like it’s always going to be resolved in favor of the company. We have all worked in places where the organization emphasizes that nothing you do on company resources is private, which is meant as a warning to you as an employee that if the company finds you doing anything they do not approve of with company resources, they can use it against you.
        The people saying “there’s no expectation of privacy at work” are saying that this should work both ways – if they company can use anything they find against the employee, then the employee can use anything they find against the company (or company’s representative, the manager). Or at least that if the company can use anything they find against the employee, the employees should be able to use anything they find against each other.
        It feels like this is yet another protection for the company that is not extended to the employee, which I understand is a thing that happens, but I can understand the people who do not think this seems fair.

    5. Alexandrine*

      There are also times where something get shared by mistake and it’s quite obvious if you have good judgment that you should not actually be seeing that thing, and you should at the very least close on out of that thing (if not alert someone to what happened to fix it so other people can’t see the same thing). It’s pretty obvious that something like this is not meant for public consumption, even if someone accidentally made it available.

      Before Zoom updated their settings, when I was an Outlook calendar and Zoom delegate for multiple C-suite-level folks, one of them put a private meeting on their Outlook calendar (which I could not see details on in Outlook), but it included a Zoom meeting, and that Zoom meeting happened to include a title that reflected that a particular staff member was being put on a PIP. I only know that because I pulled the Zoom app up on my computer, and that meeting happened to be the next scheduled meeting in the display list. I immediately minimized the app, but I couldn’t exactly forget that very direct piece of cursed knowledge, so I messaged that person and let them know that their delegates could see the details of Zoom meetings, even if they were on a private Outlook invitation, so that they wouldn’t repeat it in future (and could correct the existing meeting), and I promised that I would not share what I had seen.

      The person on the PIP was eventually let go, and because I’d shown good judgment, I wound up as the point person for discreetly working with various managers on revoking their permissions for various systems. (This normally would not have been my job, but the C-suite person knew I could be trusted to keep the firing quiet to respect that former staff member’s privacy, but also do what had to be done from a risk perspective.)

  14. mreasy*

    If I had a bad manager, who I thought could be harming my reputation in the company, I would absolutely read the transcript. Sure, it should be “private,” but this person holds my employment and financial security in their hands. I think it’s understandable why people who have been made to feel anxious by a bad manager would do so. And now OP and their colleagues have learned valuable information about the manager.

    1. Abundant Shrimp*

      Same here. I want to know what I’m up against. My livelihood and healthcare access are on the line.

      Of course, after I would read it, I’d:
      – not breathe a word of it to anyone ever again (including to others who also read it)
      – put it in my back pocket as “this is how Meredith feels about me”
      – do good work, help other impacted teammates do good work, and document everything
      – if Meredith, or other managers whose ear she has, are acting towards me in ways that reflect what she said about me in the transcript, time to make like a tree and leave.

      1. Abundant Shrimp*

        Adding to the previous. I’ve had far more good managers than bad ones in my career. If I found a transcript like that, but from a manager who I have a great working relationship with, a lot of respect for, and who I trust to have my back based on my experience working for that person, guess what. I wouldn’t look at the transcripts.

  15. pinkponyclub*

    Honestly LW you read something you shouldn’t have, that should have been private. You’re mad because she dissed your work and called you weird, in a conversation that should have been private. What do you really want to happen here? I mean we can validate your feelings that you are upset, but what honestly do you want done here?

    If it were me I would be looking to transfer out of the her management line or a new job. Sure you can escalate this, but any decent company isn’t going to fire/discipline Meredith for this.

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      This. She’s being candid with her coach. I’m sure it hurt to read, and those files being public is a huge problem (I agree it’s probably an AI setting no one noticed). But Meredith didn’t do anything wrong here.

      Now does Meredith sound like a bad person and a bad manager? Yes. But she’s supposed to be honest with her coach so they can help with that.

      1. Raida*

        I think there’s also the issue that she’s not a good manager, so she’s sent to do manager training, and now the transcripts (entirely apart from sh*t talking staff) show she’s not engaging with the training.

        The staff knew she wasn’t a good manager to start with, they will be particularly critical of her management skills now – and I don’t know if they’ll ever be able to work with her well enough to create or see good management happening.

        Because of that I’d be going a level above her to say “Hey this shouldn’t have been public but it was, and it should’ve not been read, but it was, and now the whole team has the *very strong clear impression* that their manager who needed to improve is refusing to learn or improve as a manager… On top of… well… you should read the transcripts and see.”

    2. Not on board*

      You really think that if Meredith’s boss was privy to some of the things that Meredith said, they wouldn’t think twice about keeping her?

      She said she didn’t like someone because their loved one committed suicide! Also, a professional coach isn’t a therapist, and what you say to that coach doesn’t have to be kept secret. Professional training, work emails, etc. or not required to be kept private. If Meredith said something that was potentially illegal, the coach would definitely report it to the CEO or whoever had hired them.

  16. FattyMPH*

    Is anyone else thinking of this as an information security problem? Like, I actually think the contents of the transcripts are one of the least interesting aspects of this story. If these transcripts were hosted in the cloud where anyone can find them, is your IT team competent and compliant with relevant laws? What other data are being improperly stored and/or accessed?

  17. la de la*

    This is a very American comment section with the pearl-clutching around LW reading the transcripts. It explains an awful lot about the state of affairs at the moment.

    1. i like hound dogs*

      I’m American but I’m also very confused about all the scolding. I definitely would have read the transcript. It was in a public place! It was about her and her team! I don’t see what the OP did wrong here.

      1. workplacesurvivor*

        And if I were your boss and found out you did this- I’d fire you. That’s why the pearl clutching.

        1. Abundant Shrimp*

          Plot twist, Meredith can fire her subordinates anyway, for being annoying or having a loss in the family.

          1. workplacesurvivor*

            Ah well, sure. That’s part of the fun of being American! Whooo freedom!!!

            (I live in a right-to-work state lmao)

      2. CoffeeTime*

        it was 6 months worth of transcripts they read, not just one.
        one-on-one meeting transcipts being accessible does not mean you’re invited to read them.

        Like, would you be fine if your boss snooped through your phone because you left it in the lunch room? It’s in public and there’s definitely messages about her on your phone.

        Grown adults should be able to be trusted to see a document that’s clearly not for them to read and choose not to read it.

        1. Abundant Shrimp*

          Uhh, I recall seeing multiple letters on this site where LW or LW’s teammates trash-talked their management on company messaging systems and it got back to the management. The consensus always being “never assume that anything company-owned is private”.

      3. Reluctant Manager*

        100%. That’s the third issue: Meredith shouldn’t have said these things, the notes shouldn’t have been stored where they were, and the OP shouldn’t have read them. It makes no sense to me that OP should be the only party scolded.

        1. Amateur Linguist*

          I don’t see anyone here supporting Meredith, and the OP is the one who wrote in. Had the LW been Meredith or the person that let the file get out into an unsecured area, then the advice would be different.

        2. B’Elanna*

          It’s not that LW is the only one who should get scolded, it’s that there is no action LW can take that will ensure that the other people get consequences and they don’t. Best case scenario is everyone gets scolded, so LW needs to be aware of that.

    2. CityMouse*

      It’s less about pearl clutching and more anticipating that something could go badly for LW.

      And as someone who’s lived and worked in multiple countries, data privacy is not just an American thing.

      If we were to not warn LW that raising the transcripts could backfire on them and become the issue at work, we are doing a disservice to the LW. This is ultimately an employment blog, what you personally think in some ways matters less than “how could this play out in a work situation”.

      1. Eldritch Office Worker*

        Yes, thank you.

        LW is asking if they should escalate what they found and that would be a huge personal risk to them. Many of us would have read something we were mentioned in, we are human beings. But the professional judgement piece comes in with knowing what consequences you may be facing for doing so, and how to navigate holding that information once you have it. You can’t just go running to the CEO and expect your boss to get in trouble.

    3. Trudy's Blue Summer's Dress*

      Can you explain the connection between the transcript and the state of affairs, because I don’t get what you mean?

        1. B’Elanna*

          All employees of the company are required to act according to the data handling requirements of GDPR. If the finder was not an employee of the company, then you would be correct. Cases like this are much more complex and generally must be determined via investigation and/or lawsuit. But otherwise it would be an enormous loophole to GDPR having any teeth at all.

        2. Amateur Linguist*

          Yes, but that doesn’t mean they should have read it, and passing it around is likely to amount to the same sort of breach as the original placement. There’s no way where the LW and her colleagues get a pass because it was improperly stored — just like if you have access to healthcare records in general, you’re expected not to go looking up specific records you don’t need in order to do your job.

          The company might be liable but they can still sack an employee for the breach of trust that opened them up to liability.

          https://www.azeusconvene.com/en-gb/articles/what-happens-if-an-employee-breaches-the-gdpr

          This clearly states:

          >If an employee sends a database to their friend to look over, this is considered a data breach, as that friend does not have consent.

          which is basically what has happened here.

          The article stops short of suggesting the employee who shares the documents (and I don’t think they will be particularly interested in parsing out that difference between the person who originally found and accessed it when it comes to an investigation, since workplace disciplinary proceedings aren’t subject to the same standards as a legal investigation) but I’m sorry, LW can’t just blame the company or the person that left the file unprotected. Everyone in this situation needs to be sacked to be frank — Meredith for being a poor manager, the person responsible for the breach in the first place, and the people who read the document and didn’t report the breach. Meredith, as horrible as she is, would have good grounds to sue, and the company might well go under trying to fight this. It’s a whole clusterfudge and LW should look at getting her ‘why did you leave your last job?’ explanation ready.

          In short, there is no fig leaf here in Europe that LW can use to excuse her own part in this. There probably isn’t any fig leaf here in the US either.

    6. Snarkus Aurelius*

      Keep in mind American workers have far, far fewer protections and rights than in, say, Europe. Capitalism by its very nature sets up the employer/employee relationship to be adversarial.

    7. Happy*

      I find it interesting that you call this an American thing…I would expect stronger norms around privacy in the EU.

    8. Gaelic storms*

      Uhhhhh, the GDPR was a European invention, babe. This whole situation just really speaks to a severe lapse in judgement too (and data security).

  18. Trudy's Blue Summer's Dress*

    If these were AI generated transcripts, Meredith can use the “hallucination” excuse.

  19. Cosmerenaut*

    The “you shouldn’t have read that” scolding is so unnecessary. It’s like believing HR actually works for the benefit of the employee and not the company. Achieve high enough rank and you reach escape velocity for accountability, the public firings of higher-ups are a spectacle precisely because they are the exception rather than the rule, and grunts getting let go for contrived unjust reasons because Your Boss/Work Sucks And Isn’t Going To Change is just the water we swim in. Mull on that.

    LW knew that the CEO had “soured” on them lately, and now has an explanation as to the reason. And since there is no way to bring this up without it turning into a disciplinary episode against LW instead of Meredith, LW knows that this souring will continue to occur, likely putting their job at risk in a terrible economy that gets worse by the tweet, for stupid, personal-grudge reasons. I’m not going to shame LW for being a tad mercenary in this case.

    1. Eldritch Office Worker*

      It’s necessary because of the LW’s question. It’s not scolding, it’s acknowledging that LW committed a profession faux pas and that if they move forward with going to the CEO that is likely to be the focus of the conversation, not what the boss said.

      Advice needs to be based on reality, not the way we wish things were.

      1. Abundant Shrimp*

        Oh yeah, absolutely don’t do anything about this, LW. I’m fully on the team “I would’ve read it” and I still think LW should not say anything to anyone. LW’s next steps are act like you never saw the wretched thing. But also, keep the information you got from it in mind.

        Admittedly, most of my knowledge on how to survive in corporate America came from the ASoIaF books, that I started reading while working at my first Fortune 500, worldwide corporation, so take it with a grain of salt. I did survive this far, though. Coming up on 30 years in the environment that my now adult children say they wouldn’t last a year in.

        1. Eldritch Office Worker*

          That is a wild reference text for surviving corporate hahaha but hey if it’s working!

          1. Abundant Shrimp*

            Haha, I know! I was very new to corporate America, and fresh off from the experience of being very confusingly places on a PIP for vague reasons, then, just as confusingly, taken off the PIP for extraordinary improvement (the only improvement being that I started documenting everything and being careful about who I share things with). Whole thing turned out to have been my boss’s unsuccessful effort to distract his higher-ups from his own terrible performance (unsuccessful because he was demoted, then transferred, then let go, and I lived to tell the tale). I started reading soon after book 3 came out, and was, “oh hey, that’s like what we have at work” (minus the sibling love, of course, we were professionals).

      2. Cosmerenaut*

        Both parties committed unprofessional behavior, but only Meredith’s is protected by privacy, hierarchy, and social engineering. Based on policy, is it more likely that LW broke the letter of the policy and would receive the brunt of discipline, but I’m sure all company handbooks contain generic, cover-all language about having respectful, productive relationships with other employees – something which Meredith would not be abiding by and getting away with based on the previous factors.

        In a slightly different scenario, everything is the same except that the transcripts included slurs that Meredith used to describe those under her. I’m sure that changes the calculus of unprofessional behavior and liability a bit.

        Or LW and Meredith are the same tier on the hierarchy and Meredith used this resource to complain about her coworkers. I’m sure that hits a bit differently too.

        Or reverse the situations, LW used this resource to complain unprofessionally about their boss and boss-Meredith found these transcripts by accident. Do we really think LW would be protected by “these files should have been private so actually Meredith let’s talk about you instead” in that case? I don’t. It’s funny how that works out in reality.

        The entirety of what I’m saying is that I acknowledge the deck is stacked against LW and my sympathies are still with the busybody instead of the boss.

    2. Amateur Linguist*

      It’s a data breach. Just because Meredith is a jackass, it doesn’t leave her open to privacy violations.

      1. Cosmerenaut*

        Technically I think this is categorized as spillage rather than breaching. And I could return that with just because Meredith is a jackass, it doesn’t entitle her to jeopardize the livelihoods of what sounds like her entire team by poisoning the CEO against each and every one of them. I’m aware that one of those is more likely to be in the policy handbook than the other. I am also of the opinion that both of those should be in the handbook and that the latter weigh much more than the former.

    3. Zarniwoop*

      Not gonna shame her, but will advise she not reveal she has this information.
      Use it to her advantage in surviving her dysfunctional workplace, yes, but only in ways that doesn’t reveal she has it.

  20. HonorBox*

    OP, I think you have two choices, and they’re not mutually exclusive. First, you can talk to your CEO. You say that your relationship has soured recently, and you have every right to address that. Do so with the observations you have outside of the transcripts. Ask them if there’s anything in your work that they’re concerned about. Mention that you have noticed a shift in how you both interact. Ask if there’s something you need to be doing that you’re not.

    Second, look for another job. Just because you’re looking doesn’t mean you must leave, but you want to keep your options open. You know (rightly or wrongly) more information about how your manager feels about you, your team, and others in the company. There’s a chance that after this coaching, your CEO decides that your manager isn’t right for the job. But there’s a non-zero chance that nothing comes of this, and you’re still working for the same manager. Is that somewhere you want to be long term? Can you respect her, knowing what you know? Bad manager is bad enough. A bad manager whose true negative feelings about you is even harder to move forward with.

    1. Anxiety - keep on tryin' me*

      I like this approach – mention you’ve noticed a change in the relationship, if something happened to cause that, and if there’s something that you should be doing differently to improve things again. And definitely start searching.

  21. Ana*

    My first thought when reading it was whether there is a way to get these transcripts to the CEO.

  22. learnedthehardway*

    Odds are the executive coach is reporting back to the CEO about how successful (or not) the coaching is going. Part of their job is to not only provide guidance, coaching and development, but also to assess whether the employee being coached is developing the skills as expected. The coach themselves is evaluated not just on whether the employee is successful in gaining the skills, but on whether the coach accurately assesses their management and leadership capabilities, potential. Sometimes, people do NOT have the capability to develop the required skills. If that is the case, the coach’s job is to inform the company that the person is not suitable for the role.

    So, one way or another, the CEO is going to find out whether or not Meredith is capable of leadership growth. Currently, it doesn’t seem like she’s being successful in assimilating the coaching feedback.

    That said, while the coach is no doubt reporting back that Meredith seems to have serious issues wrt to her leadership and management skills and capabilities, I would still want leadership to know exactly what Meredith is saying about her team. And I would also not want leadership to know that I personally had seen the transcripts, but I would want them to know that the transcripts HAVE been seen.

    Does your company have an ethics hotline? I would report it anonymously that way. Save and send a copy of the file, just to show that a) it really exists and b) that deleting it won’t make the problem go away.

    If you don’t have an ethics hotline, I would print it out as screen shots and mail it to HR and to the CEO.

    1. Amateur Linguist*

      You are having a laugh!!

      If you rang our ethics line and said you’d seen the transcripts and wondered what to do with the information, you’d be fired. It would have been a GDPR breach and open us as a company to huge legal liability, fines, etc from the regulator, and given we’re also in healthcare, we’re trained from day one on the consequences of data breaches in general.

      Maybe Meredith would get the sack at some point for being a jackass independently of that — my old supervisor got sacked recently and given what I know about her I can’t say I’m surprised (although I do feel sorry for her because she worked her butt off; she could just be a little abrasive and that doesn’t go down well at our org).

      Data breaches happen but what LW should have done is notify the IT and IG department or HR and have them handle it.

      But there is no way you could ring any ethics hotline with substantive details from this report and not be sacked for gross misconduct. I’m sorry, I can’t even begin to think why you’d think the ethics team would be interested in this and not the actual data breach. Just because you don’t like someone, and even if that dislike is reasonable, you don’t get to snoop on stuff like this.

      1. Sarah*

        The person committing the data breach to start with is the coach, or whoever set it up / failed to realise that the transcripts were so easily accessible. Someone reporting that they’d stumbled across the files is not committing the data breach – the breach has already happened.

        I agree this situation is a mess, but your comments are implying it was the LW and her colleagues who can be accused of a data breach, when the responsibility lies with the coach (assuming they set up the transcript).

        I mean also, this is a US setting so GDPR isn’t actually relevant here?

        1. RNL*

          They absolutely can. Knowingly accessing information that is inadvertently disclosed to you is can absolutely be a disciplinary matter.

        2. Amateur Linguist*

          The employee might not face legal consequences, but they will definitely face disciplinary consequences. Two wrongs don’t make a right. At least in GDPR jurisdictions, data security is everyone’s responsibility, and while it would be the company’s legal liability, they can definitely fire people who causes them that liability in the first place.

          The IG training we all have to take when we start a job has the age old question ‘You find a private letter from HR to a colleague on a photocopier. What do you do? A. Take it and share it with your friends to gossip about them in the office B. Leave it where it is. C. Return it to the colleague D. Report a data breach to your manager.’ That’s like literally the first question on the quiz.

          This forum baffles me so much. People won’t put an authenticator on their personal phone, but they will happily defend majority breaches of IG protocol because it’s about a jerk manager. If you want a just, ethical world, you have to act justly and ethically. even when it might hurt you.

          1. Lexi Vipond*

            You can justly and ethically believe that GDPR goes too far – it’s a law belonging to a tiny handful of all the countries in the world, not some kind of unquestionable moral right.

            The relevant moral question in that case is whether they would feel it was ok for someone else to read *their* private information because it was left lying about publically.

  23. workplacesurvivor*

    Normally I love Allisons advice- but I think it’s a HUGE miss to not mention the LW and coworkers reading something they should not have accessed. It really doesn’t matter that someone messed up the security permissions.

    If I found out you’d been snooping like that on my team, I’d be advocating for you to be fired. No trust is a huge problem.

    1. Zarniwoop*

      “ No trust is a huge problem.”
      Seems like the manager has already lost her employees’ trust, and deservedly so.

    2. Dog and Dahlia Lover*

      Yeah… this is where I’m at too. This wasn’t just an accidental skim. And it’s not like the documents were sent to the LW via email. The LW and her colleagues read private transcripts that were put in the public file storage AND presumably didn’t tell anyone they were public! That’s bad.

    3. Raida*

      If my manager sh*t-talked me on record, I found it, and they tried to get me fired for that, they’d be a FOOL.
      They’d only be able to press the issue by showing the full transcript, having focus on their (failing) manager training/coaching, having *everyone* in HR know they talked shit about their staff, lie about doing all the work, don’t do their own job…

      I’d welcome it.

      And I’d get some information security re-training – because firing me isn’t following the policies and procedures correctly, and it would look like the company was siding with the foolish manager, and it’d be clear I *wasn’t* being managed so hey maybe poor lil ol me wasn’t effectively up to date on these policies…

      1. Amateur Linguist*

        No, they wouldn’t. Firstly, if you’re in the US, you can be sacked for wearing the wrong T-shirt.

        Secondly, in our jurisdiction, this would be gross misconduct. You’d be put on leave with pay, we’d investigate, interview colleagues, look at electronic records, possibly suspend some other people, and secure the transcripta. (You would be allowed representations at the disciplinary stage, but that’s about it.) European law leans heavily on everyone’s responsibility towards their conduct at work; our GDPR and health and safety regulations make it clear that the culture starts with the employee as well as the employer. You can’t just argue your employer should have kept the documents secure; it’s your responsibility nor to read them even if they are secure or you have access.

        I’ve been present for things like this as the note-taker and HR don’t care about what other people did. Maybe we’d look at Meredith too, but that’s part of a separate case. Meanwhile, we have all the facts to hand: you found an unsecured file, you didn’t report it within 72 hours leaving the company open to huge fines we’ve now got to fund our of money that could be used for other purposes, and we’ve got an open and shut case of gross misconduct. If you came to us and jabbered on about how you shouldn’t lose your job because of what Meredith was saying in documents you should not have read…then you would be out the door. I’ve been in a meeting where we gave someone the evidence of misconduct and the guy was totally like you, blaming other people and demanding we do something about them. I don’t know what happened afterwards (I’m not allowed to know and I didn’t make inquiries) but the upshot was that we fired him for what he did.

        So people who bluster and huff and puff and they really don’t impress me, nor do they faze HR. All I’d be thinking is ‘what a twit’ and ‘you don’t get to break the law just because your boss said something mean about you in private’. The breach can be handled independently of whatever is happening with Meredith, and you would have limited recourse because if you took it to tribunal, it would show that you commited a major breach of GDPR.

        1. workplacesurvivor*

          THANK YOU lol. I legit would treat Meredith’s behavior as a separate, and frankly lesser, issue. I’d take the sh*t talker employee over the illicit file reader every time. Neither is great but one is far more untrustworthy.

      2. workplacesurvivor*

        This is so charged of a response… I’m sorry if you’ve had to deal with bully managers! Cause same.

        But yeah no… Meredith wasn’t sh*t talking them as gossip to others. She was in a supposedly private coaching session.

        “Eavesdroppers never hear anything good of themselves.” This really is the reading version of eavesdropping- OP read something they shouldn’t have and now they feel bad. That’s just a risk you take putting your nose where it doesn’t belong.

  24. MtheR*

    Honestly, whether you would get in trouble for reading that transcript is going to depend a lot on the culture and infrastructure of your workplace, and a workplace with no HR and a very flat org structure seems like it probably isn’t going to have great structures in place for 1) information security or 2) info access policies. It would probably end up coming down to how the CEO feels about it.

    Which is really its own problem. This workplace is clearly broken in a lot of ways, and how best to address that is going to be complicated and difficult.

  25. Van Wilder*

    Gotta disagree (it’s rare.) Meredith said very personal, ugly, and hurtful things about her employees. Yes, they shouldn’t have found out, but they did. Meredith needs to work on repairing the hurt she caused. I would take it to the CEO at least to say that you’re surprised to learn that your manager finds you “weird” and that she claims to do your job for you. Tell the CEO that you’ve never been given feedback on how to do your job better, and if she has any for you, you would love to hear it. For example, CEO, what parts of my job are Meredith doing for me?

  26. Somehow I Manage*

    Question for the group: Given what we know about the workplace from the LW, what’s the best way the LW could have reported that these transcripts were available to anyone in the organization, once they learned from colleagues that these were not private? And how does that get done without putting themself at risk of repercussions because they could have read the documents, even if they didn’t and just made a report that they were aware that ? We know there’s not dedicated HR. We don’t know about IT, of course. But to whom should this report have been made? Is it to the outside HR company? Is it to IT? The CEO? What’s the right script to use when making the report?

    1. Amateur Linguist*

      I’ve been in this sort of situation in a microbusiness and it was when my boss found those scam messages on our Facebook page and panicked that someone had got in through a lapse in our own security. There wasn’t a script as such, more of a discussion about making sure I had up to date antivirus on my computer and had locked everything down with passwords.

      More generally, with a simple search on information governance for small business, I found sites like this one here offering information and products to go with it.

      https://fundcount.com/a-guide-to-data-governance-for-small-businesses/

      It would probably be the responsibility of the CEO to be delegating this. In a small organisation it’s probable that LW knows who might be responsible for, say, contracting out services like this and securing files. There should be mandatory IG training for everyone (ours is part of statutory training, which suggests that it’s a legal requirement for all workers).

      This won’t get LW off the hook, though. Just because it’s available doesn’t mean she should have read it, and while the company needs to pull its socks up, it’s no justification for what happened here and the breach here overshadows the problems with Meredith quite significantly.

    2. pinkponyclub*

      She put herself at risk once she decided to follow the directions to read the transcripts. LW never discovered the transcripts. LW is no place to say, oh I was following some good gossip to info I was not supposed to read, you guys need to fix this data security issue.

      1. Somehow I Manage*

        I get that part, and you can’t unmake that bed. Moreso I was thinking that if coworkers accessed it and then told LW about it, or at least that they should go read the transcripts, is there a way to appropriately report that in this situation? If it is reporting that someone alerted them to the existence of the transcript, they’re outing a coworker. If they come across the notes randomly and open them up, only to realize what they are and close them, there’s still potential that they get in trouble. It seems like a really difficult spot to be in and make a report that doesn’t cause oneself trouble in the process.

    3. B’Elanna*

      If there’s IT, it’s IT. You tell them that you found files that look like they might be confidential and you’re concerned that they may be improperly stored. The faster you do this, the better—if they have access logs, it looks much better if you reported it within the hour of accessing the files than if you waited two weeks. A good IT department will thank you and take care of it. It is not in their best interests to fire people who are honest about what they found. It’s the same reason why if your laptop is lost or stolen you need to tell them immediately—stopping a potential breach is more important than punishing you for the loss of a laptop.

      If you don’t have any kind of IT, well… this was probably inevitable but you also probably won’t get caught so long as you keep quiet about it.

      Now. Could a bad company still fire you? Yeah, of course. There’s no magic charm against it. But if you do have competent IT, what you’re weighing is whether you’re going to get caught having opened it vs. whether you’re getting fired for disclosing that you found it. Once you’ve opened the document, neither route is fully safe. In a typical company with functional IT, immediate disclosure is going to be the safer bet, though, *especially* if the information is already floating around your colleagues—that greatly raises the likelihood of getting found out.

  27. pinkponyclub*

    She put herself at risk once she decided to follow the directions to read the transcripts. LW never discovered the transcripts. LW is no place to say, oh I was following some good gossip to info I was not supposed to read, you guys need to fix this data security issue.

  28. Reluctant Manager*

    It seems to me like the solution is obvious: send an email to Meredith and the CEO with a link to the file and ask, “Came across this the other day—should it be stored in a public location?”

    Did the transcripts have any notes about being confidential? If not, I think the “you shouldn’t have done what if we’re honest 99% people would have done” is misplaced.

  29. Raida*

    Take the transcripts and go as high as you feel able to.

    Hey, you personally have interacted with the CEO? Ask ’em “I’ve been shown transcripts of my manager refusing to engage with required management training and shit-talking our team mates. Who do you suggest I take it to?” “Obviously it can’t be her, but is one person up the right way to go, or should it be HR or…?” “I don’t know how the team’s going to be able to trust her when she’s wasting company resources on training she isn’t doing *on top* of not learning the skills to manage, *on top* of these transcripts, y’know?”

  30. Some thoughts*

    I’m going to be a bit of a devil’s advocate here. Meredith has to be honest in the coaching sessions for them to be effective. Some of her managerial issues may stem from the fact that she has a low opinion of many of her direct reports. That’s an issue that should be brought up in the coaching session, with the assumption that it’s not leaving the room. Even the thing about not wanting to manage someone whose family member committed suicide could be an understandable thing to say in a certain context — say, she finds it really awkward and doesn’t know how to handle the situation effectively and wishes she didn’t have to do it, or the worker is insisting on accommodations that Meredith thinks is unreasonable. Or Meredith could be a jerk. We don’t know.

    What I’m struck by is that the direct reports didn’t know what Meredith thought of them. She seems to be more discreet than one might think. She’s saying these things to her coach as she should but covered up her feelings when interacting with the direct reports.

    Meredith doesn’t have to think highly of her direct reports to be an effective manager. I’ve had many clients whom I think are weird or make poor decisions or are just jerks. That doesn’t mean I can’t handle their needs effectively. But a transcript of my conversations with my co-workers about some of these clients would not be enjoyable reading material for those clients. The problem here is that the cat’s out of the bag, and I don’t see how Meredith can effectively be a manager for her team anymore.

  31. HorrifiedCoach*

    As a professional coach I am absolutely APPALLED that the transcripts were able to be seen to exist, let alone be downloaded and shared. That is an incredible breach of coaching ethics and management. My own partner, who is also a coach, does not see any recordings, transcripts, or notes from or about my coaching clients, even though we’re in the same company. That is an incredible breach of privacy and confidentiality.

    1. HorrifiedCoach*

      Adding to my own comment, Meredith trusted the Coach to maintain confidentiality in everything that was said in the coaching sessions, and that is likely to be documented. To now discover that none of it was/is confidential, and that it has been available to, read and shared by the very people she was discussing in the coaching, will be devastating for her. It is a huge breach of trust between Coach and Coachee. I really feel for Meredith here.

  32. Thomas*

    A big thing OP needs to consider: **Those transcripts might not be reliable.** If they’ve been made by an ‘AI’ tool they could easily have errors ranging from small but serious ones like an omitted ‘not’ reversing the meaning of a sentence, up to the AI completely making stuff up that was never said at all.

    That said, regardless of whether people should have read them, people DID, and I can only see this as causing a complete breakdown in trust between Meredith and her reports. It’s likely to end in either Meredith or most of her reports leaving the company.

  33. xrunnerx*

    This is an oddly off-base response. You can’t put the toothpaste back in the tube. You can’t management-speak away the fact that all the people on the team now know that their boss thinks they’re terrible and weird. I don’t understand how one *doesn’t* escalate this to upper management immediately. The relationship between the boss and her direct reports is irreparably damaged. If I were Meredith’s boss I would absolutely expect to be informed about this somehow or other.

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