Listening and Mediation - 1

The intent was to build consensus over a dilemma that the team was going through - do we keep or let go of an overly competent team member who was abrasive, rude and downright awful to the rest of the team.

There were clearly two sides - they started talking to each other politely first, waiting for each other to finish sharing their point of view on whether the employee should be kept or let go. But after the first 5 minutes it turned into a full on argument - where no one was listening to anyone and focused only what they wanted to say.

Went on where 10 minutes, post which I intervened.

The conversation focused on our approach in the conversation - did we debate or dialogue? How do we differentiate between it? And focused on what helps us dialogue - listening and asking questions.

The activity was set up to bring alive listening and make them aware of how much listening do they actually do while they have to make someone understand their point of views. We talked about the focus we have on 'saying' rather than listening.

Listening is always assumed, and therefore the first prototype that I ran was around making the participants aware of how they listen and in a dialogue what should be the way they listened.

Acknowledging the need to listen was greeted with, 'why are you telling me the obvious?'. We moved as a group to acknowledge the varying degrees of listening that they normally do. The assumption is they always listen, well. Speech can have nuances but listening is listening is what they concluded. So introduced the Heidegger/Peirce three types of engaging, which is Sensing, Hearing and Listening - stayed at a very basic level as we needed to establish the importance of listening without making it a compulsory. This much with this group.