For years, morning meeting was part of my routine.
We’d all come in, sit around the table, and go around the room while directors gave updates on their departments. Admissions. Clinical. Nursing. Utilization review. Operations. Whatever was happening that day, this was supposed to be the place to talk about it.
And then the meeting would end.
That’s when people would start showing up in my office.
Not one person. Not once in a while. People would congregate in there after morning meeting to debrief what had just happened. Somebody would sit in the chair across from my desk. Somebody else would stand in the doorway. Another person would lean against the wall, and suddenly everybody had thoughts.
“Okay, but what are we actually doing about staffing?”
“That’s not really what’s happening.”
“I wanted to say something, but…”
“Did you hear what she said?”
Initially, I enjoyed it.
I mean, I’m a therapist. People coming into my office and telling me what they’re really thinking is not exactly unfamiliar territory.
And there was something nice about being someone people trusted enough to talk to. I liked being able to listen, help somebody process what happened, or sometimes just say, “No, you’re not imagining that. That was weird.”
But after a while, I started wondering about it.
Why did these employees feel comfortable coming into my office and telling me what they actually thought, but they didn’t feel comfortable saying those same things in morning meeting?
We had all just been sitting together.
The floor had been open.
These were directors and leaders. Smart people. Experienced people. People who absolutely had opinions.
Yet somehow, the second they crossed the threshold into my office, the filter came off.
And that started bothering me.
Not because I didn’t want them in my office. I did.
But because I began to realize that my office had become the place where people felt safe enough to say what the organization probably needed to hear.
That’s a very different thing.
And once I noticed it, I couldn’t stop noticing it.
Because there’s the meeting.
And then there’s the meeting after the meeting.
And sometimes, the second one tells you a whole lot more about your workplace than the first.
The meeting after the meeting tells you what people really think
In the actual meeting, everything can sound pretty good.
“We’re working on staffing.”
“We want people to feel comfortable speaking up.”
“We’re committed to transparency.”
“We value employee wellness.”
Wonderful.
Love that for us.
Then the meeting ends and somebody comes into your office saying, “We’ve been short-staffed for three months and nobody is listening.”
Well.
That feels like information we probably could have used about fifteen minutes ago.
And this is where leadership gets tricky, because it would be easy to look at that employee and say, “Then why didn’t you speak up?”
Sometimes I did wonder that.
But eventually I started asking a better question.
What made speaking up in my office feel safer than speaking up in the meeting?
Those are two very different questions.
The first one puts the responsibility entirely on the employee.
The second one makes leadership look at the environment.
And if you’re in leadership, you have to be willing to look at the environment.
Saying “my door is always open” is not the same as creating psychological safety
I cannot tell you how many leaders I’ve heard say, “My door is always open.”
Okay.
Technically, yes.
The door may, in fact, be open.
But do people feel safe walking through it?
Because those are not the same thing.
People learn very quickly what happens when someone disagrees with leadership. They notice who gets labeled “difficult.” They notice whose ideas are taken seriously. They notice whether concerns get addressed or explained away.
They notice when somebody speaks up in a meeting and suddenly the room gets weird.
And once people learn that honesty comes with consequences, they adapt.
They get quiet.
They nod.
They wait until the meeting is over.
Then they go find the person they trust and say what they really think.
From a clinical perspective, that makes perfect sense to me.
People talk where they feel safe.
From a leadership perspective, though, it should make us uncomfortable.
Because if your team only tells the truth in side conversations, then you are making decisions with incomplete information.
And you may not even know it.
We make workplace culture way more complicated than it needs to be
Organizations spend a lot of money trying to understand culture.
There are employee engagement surveys, committees, strategic plans, consultants, leadership retreats, town halls, and somebody is almost always building a PowerPoint with arrows and overlapping circles.
Apparently, if three circles overlap in the middle, transformation has occurred.
But sometimes I think we could learn more about workplace culture by standing outside the conference room for ten minutes after the meeting.
What are people saying?
What are they afraid to say?
What do they joke about?
What problems come up over and over again?
What changes when the senior leader leaves the room?
That stuff matters.
Because culture is not just what is written on the wall.
It is what people experience every day.
You can put “Integrity” in twelve-point font underneath your company logo, but if employees believe honesty gets punished, integrity is now just wall decor.
And then there’s mental health
One of the strangest things we do in workplaces is act like people stop being human when they clock in.
They do not.
People bring grief to work. They bring anxiety. Family problems. Financial stress. Relationship problems. Health issues. Parenting stress. Aging parents. Trauma. Exhaustion.
And sometimes they bring an attitude because Brenda has sent six “gentle reminder” emails before 9:00 a.m.
People bring their whole nervous systems to work.
Then work adds its own issues.
Short staffing.
Unrealistic expectations.
Micromanagement.
Poor communication.
Lack of support.
Being expected to do the job of three people and then receiving an email reminding everyone to practice self-care.
That one always gets me.
Because I believe in self-care.
I’m a therapist.
Please drink your water. Take the PTO. Go to therapy. Do your yoga. Take the walk.
But we have got to stop pretending self-care can fix organizational problems.
A meditation app cannot hire another nurse.
Deep breathing does not correct chronic understaffing.
And lavender essential oil, lovely as it may be, has yet to make a dysfunctional manager develop self-awareness.
Some problems require more than coping skills.
They require leadership.
Being both a therapist and a leader changed the way I listened
Therapy taught me to listen to what people say.
Leadership taught me to pay attention to everything around what they say.
The hesitation.
The nervous laugh.
The person who has twenty opinions in your office and then suddenly has nothing to add when everybody gets in the conference room.
The manager who says, “My team is fine,” while the team looks like they just survived a shipwreck.
You start noticing things.
And you also learn not to dismiss every uncomfortable conversation as negativity.
Now listen, sometimes people are absolutely complaining.
Let’s not romanticize everything.
Sometimes somebody is upset because someone ate their yogurt out of the break room refrigerator and now organizational justice must be restored.
But sometimes the complaint is information.
Sometimes five people are describing the same problem in five different ways.
Sometimes the person everyone calls “negative” is actually the only one willing to say what everybody else is whispering.
That doesn’t mean leadership has to agree with every complaint.
It doesn’t mean every suggestion gets implemented.
It doesn’t even mean employees always have the whole picture.
They usually don’t.
But leadership doesn’t have the whole picture either.
That is exactly why the conversation matters.
And that is really what After the Session is about
I wanted a space to talk about the stuff underneath the official conversation.
Leadership.
Workplace culture.
Mental health.
Burnout.
Clinical work.
Career transitions.
The things organizations say versus the things employees actually experience.
The moments that make you sit in your car for ten minutes after work before you drive home because your brain needs a minute.
And yes, occasionally the completely ridiculous things that happen at work that you simply have to laugh about because apparently flipping a conference table is considered “unprofessional.”
I am not interested in spending this newsletter dragging workplaces or pretending every leader is terrible.
I’ve been the employee.
I’ve been the clinician.
I’ve been the supervisor.
I’ve been the executive.
And sitting in all of those seats taught me that workplace problems are rarely as simple as “management sucks” or “employees complain too much.”
There are systems.
Personalities.
Budgets.
Policies.
Pressure.
History.
Fear.
Ego.
Good intentions.
Bad decisions.
And usually about seventeen other things happening at the same time.
That’s the stuff I want to talk about here.
Not just what happened.
But why it keeps happening.
And what we might do differently.
Because after years of sitting through morning meetings and then watching people gather in my office afterward to finally say what they really thought, I still come back to the same question:
What would change if we could have the meeting after the meeting…in the actual meeting?
That’s the conversation I’m interested in.
Welcome to After the Session.
The meeting is over.
Now we can really talk.
