I think we need to make an important distinction between a “secret meeting” and a private, non-public meeting. The difference has everything to do with context, purpose, professional legitimacy, and—perhaps most important, whether the participants would be comfortable acknowledging that the meeting took place.
As a principal or superintendent, it is entirely appropriate—and happens all the time—to have a private, non-public meeting with a labor union representative, particularly when an employee’s confidential personnel information is being discussed. In fact, such a meeting can serve a very constructive purpose. It might provide an opportunity to resolve a problem informally, to mitigate or completely eliminate the need for formal disciplinary actions, clarify a misunderstanding, or find a mutually acceptable solution that prevents an unnecessary grievance from being filed.
Those are private meetings, not secret meetings.
I never had a “secret meeting” with a labor union representative because the very characterization would credibly suggest that we were “up to something”—something one or both of us believed needed to be hidden from one or both of our constituencies.
And that is an entirely different matter.
Think of the married man who is caught walking out of what the old folks once called a “house of ill-repute.” (I know, I’m telling my age—look it up, youngins.)
His explanation?
“You see, I only went in there to emphatically explain to the proprietor that I believe intercourse should occur exclusively between married couples, and further, to inform him that I intend to vigorously hold him and his associates accountable to those standards and rules!”
Good luck selling that. Because at some point, what people reasonably observed will overwhelm whatever elaborate explanation you construct after the fact.
That leads to a leadership lesson I regularly offer prospective school administrators—and, for that matter, anyone entrusted with organizational or institutional leadership:
If you find yourself expending enormous amounts of energy after an incident explaining why your actions were appropriate, innocent, ethical, or misunderstood, you may already be standing on very shaky leadership-credibility ground.
Effective leaders should certainly protect confidentiality. And they will sometimes need to meet privately. They will sometimes engage in sensitive conversations that cannot and should not—be conducted publicly.
But privacy and secrecy are not the same thing.
Privacy protects legitimate confidentiality.
Secrecy protects something from being discovered.
And whenever leaders find themselves repeatedly asking people to disregard what they plainly saw and heard and instead accept an increasingly complicated after-the-fact explanation, they should remember that old comedic vaudevillian line:
“Who are you going to believe—me, or your lying eyes?”
