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

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/counsellng 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 necessarily 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 necessarily something you need to or 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 those aren’t really a thing. Companies manage this stuff themselves.)

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.

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