“No matter how hard I try to involve my colleagues in the meetings, they just watch but don’t contribute.” When working with colleagues, situations can frequently arise where colleagues do not engage.
There is a positive motivation behind this behaviour too. Methodologically, one approaches such a problem in exactly the same way as one would the misunderstood behaviour of a person. In this case, one can look for an example from one’s own experience. One then considers what impulse, what drive lies behind this behaviour, and puts oneself in their shoes.
Erika reports: “At the last meeting, we discovered something important regarding a person’s behaviour. But a few colleagues didn’t seem interested in it at all. They didn’t ask any questions either. Instead, they simply moved on to the next item on the agenda.”
In my role as a trainer, I look for the movement behind this behaviour in my own experience, so that we can discover the positive drive behind it: “I recognise this in myself during operational support training sessions: I always hope it will be over quickly. I then think, ‘Surely we’re finished already!’”
I describe this movement as ‘leaping while aheading’. You do this, for example, when you start a fire with tinder. You let the sparks fly. Creating sparks goes hand in hand with making space. When you embrace this impulse to act, you leap, but you let go.
For the meeting, this means not going in with the attitude that you have to discuss something to a conclusion, but rather tackling a topic, letting it go, and picking it up again next time. The expectation that you explain something and the other person will understand it immediately and simply go along with it is not productive. Instead, you can open up small thematic windows between which you can hop from one to the next. Next time, you can start somewhere else, and so on.
