The goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.
The fact that your boss pulled in other coworkers could be interpreted as a red flag, as something fundamentally wrong with your boss. However, without more information, I think this situation could be workable. In other words, there are things you can do.
Again, the goal is to have a good working environment to live good lives and do good work.
I think a good working environment is one where errors can be talked about openly and without fear. I do not think the solution is “praise publicly criticize privately”. I think the solution is for your team (including your boss) to create psychologically safe environment. How? By emphasizing the goal, the purpose of your work. By admitting to mistakes or lack of knowledge to accept fallibility. This is especially helpful if your boss does it. By appreciating when someone openly shares concerns or mistakes. By creating rituals or habits of inclusion, such as well run meetings or effective information-gathering methods.
Do all of those recommendations sound hard to implement and naive? I think for many teams they are. But the reality is that psychologically safe teams exist, and they perform better than teams that don’t have it.
If it’s hard to implement it, why am I bringing it up? Because I think it’s important know exactly what went wrong with your meeting with your boss. It’s better to have an accurate map that shows a steep canyon than a fake map that shows a nonexistent bridge.
So what do you do?
Here are a couple of suggestions:
- learn about psychological safety. Amy Edmonson is the authority on the subject.
- learn to have Crucial Conversations. It’ll help you now and it’ll help you forever.
If you vibe with what I’m saying, let me know and I can give you more suggestions. At the same time, it’s totally understandable if you don’t think my path is viable.