Imagine working for a company where you often provide valuable information during executive team meetings.

Then you’re assigned a new boss and banned from the meetings.

When your boss calls you from the meeting with a question, would you answer, or would you stay quiet and make him realize how valuable you really are?

This employee was in this exact situation, and he chose to time his response to his boss perfectly!

Let’s see how the story plays out.

Org Change

I was hired into this company a few years ago to get a struggling function straightened out.

I did that, while other peer functions struggled.

My boss decided to bring in a a new leader for those areas – however late in the process they decided, to make this leadership role more appealing to external candidates, they decided to expand the scope and tuck me and my group in under this new leader.

I thought Ok, whatever, I wasn’t interested in the overall role at this point in my career, i liked the size of my current job.

For this employee, there was a big side effect to this org change.

But my boss (former, now one -over boss) decided because i now report to his report, I was no longer part of the executive leadership team and meetings.

This was a small company, and most all decisions happened at these weekly leadership meetings.

My function had a lot going on, so I usually did a lot of the talking and reporting out.

This really irritated me because I knew how these meetings went, but the decision was made.

The new boss had a question.

So with my calendar now cleared of this obligation, I filled that time with other meetings to optimize my calendar.

It was in the next week, during the executive meeting that I got my first call from my new boss with a “quick question” that came up during their meeting.

Since I was in a 1:1 meeting, it would be rude to not give them the focus they deserve, so I ignored the message.

The messages didn’t stop.

Then I got another, and another.

Teams message, cell phone, all told I got 6 messages, 4 from my new, current boss, and 2 from others.

I didn’t respond to any of them because I was unavailable and its terribly rude to other meeting attendees.

Timing is everything.

As soon as the executive committee meeting ended, and coincidentally my agenda freed up, I fired off all the replies quickly. all questions answered.

My new boss after stopped by and said “boy sure wish I had that info in the meeting”

I told him of course just let me know beforehand what may come up and I’ll be sure to prep him.

Not being in the meeting sure had consequences.

Of course, it happened regularly and for a couple months my boss and former boss got a weekly reminder that I was actually the most knowledgeable and efficient person to connect with and their meetings were less productive without me there.

I ended up leaving that company for a new opportunity within a year, and while it wasn’t actually the dominant reason I did cite the disengagement that happened when I got removed from the executive committee team as a reason I was open to a move…

I’m surprised they didn’t let this employee back in the meeting after realizing they needed to know information that only this employee could provide.

Let’s see how Reddit reacted to this story.

Something similar happened to this person’s brother-in-law.

Talk about bad management!

They really needed to bring him back into the meetings.

I’m baffled by this too.

He did the right thing not responding right away.

Valuable employees need to be treated like valued employees.

Period.

If you liked that post, check out this post about a woman who tracked down a contractor who tried to vanish without a trace.