Step 1: Create a mailing list for developers, but allow non-developers including higher management to join it.
Step 2: Tell developers off for using that mailing list to discuss things that development needs to discuss but that management shouldn’t know about until it’s resolved.
Step 3: Use ad-hoc collections of mail addresses for real development communications, and then yell at developers for missing meetings that they never got invited to because you left them off your ad-hoc collection of mail addresses.
Is anybody surprised that I’m both the developer who got told off for using the dev-list to talk about development issues and the developer who accidentally got left off the invite list for the Thursday weekly meetings and got told off for missing them? Is anybody surprised that the issue I got told off for using the dev-list for was a complaint that when I mentioned a particular issue in meetings people ignored me and went onto the next item, and the person telling me off said that he’d never heard me mention this issue, thus proving my point?