“How dare you make up a dead child to manipulate us here?”
The words came from diagonally across from me. Loud enough to cut through the silence that had settled after hours of talking. I looked up and saw her. Her face had flushed red, her eyes fixed tightly on me. Not searching. Not questioning. As if nothing more needed to be examined. Around her, the circle seemed to fall still for a moment. Someone looked at his shoes. Someone else let his gaze rest on an indistinct spot somewhere between the floor and the wall. A colleague folded his hands together even more tightly. Farther away, someone took a deep breath and slowly let the air escape again. No one really moved. No one seemed surprised. The words remained hanging in the room, heavy and uncomfortable, as if they had been there for much longer and had only now been spoken aloud. I let my gaze move around the circle. Faces I knew. People I had laughed with, worked with, traveled with, met with. People I had tried to understand. Some looked away when my eyes met theirs. Others kept looking. The tension was almost tangible. Not the tension of an argument that still had to erupt, but of something that had already taken place. As if the air had disappeared from the room and everyone was waiting to see what would happen now. Only the soft sound of breathing broke the silence now and then. Nothing else. Only her words, which still seemed to hang between us.
Time seemed to slow as I calmly repeated her words in my head, thinking about how I would respond. This colleague had openly attacked me before, but never this fiercely. It felt like her last resort, as if she had fired her final shot. My thoughts went back to a crowded cafeteria, where she had been angry too. Not red with rage as she was now, but white-hot. Like an unhinged teenager, she stood there cursing at me and humiliating me. I remember the faces around us, not the exact words she used. Everywhere, people were having lunch, at tables of three, four, six, or eight. One man held a sandwich still in front of his half-open mouth, while someone else hovered with a spoon above a bowl of yogurt. Conversations fell away and chairs slowly turned in our direction.
Everyone watched. I did not know most of the people present, but they knew her. Maybe there were fifty of them, maybe more. What stayed with me above all was the silence – not because nothing was happening, but precisely because so much was happening. A room full of people who simultaneously decided to stop talking, as if they sensed that something was taking place that would be discussed later. I remember looking at her and letting her scream, waiting until she finally fell silent. Then I answered: “I think it would be better if, from this moment on, you kept your mouth shut and calmly went home. If you ask me, you have just made a complete fool of yourself.” After that I turned around, without blinking before I turned away from her completely. I walked back to my table, where my lunch still stood exactly as I had left it. But I had no appetite anymore.
My thoughts went further back, to an online meeting. Small boxes on a screen showed faces and names, while cameras went on and off. The subject was a planned inspection of the supervision of truck cleaning, a task that had barely been directed for years and that some colleagues did not even see as part of their work. The discussion revolved around the question of how an investigation should be set up: announced or unannounced. I do not remember all the arguments, but I do remember how the conversation slowly and almost imperceptibly changed. The words were still about the investigation, but the faces, the tone and the sighs changed. Before I knew it, I was in the middle of something that seemed bigger than the subject we were officially talking about.
She was sitting on the other side of the screen. I can still see her before me, her voice growing louder and louder, her irritation giving way to anger, and that anger to something else. It was the first meeting in my life that I left early, not because I had run out of arguments or thought I was wrong, but because I no longer wanted to listen to the barrage of abuse. That same woman was now sitting diagonally opposite me, in a circle, in a session meant to bring people closer together. No one said anything, no one moved, and her words still hung between us: “How dare you invent a dead child to manipulate us here?”
How I had dared to do that. Actually, that is quite a good question. At least it could have been if it had been asked by someone who truly wanted to hear an answer. Someone who would truly listen. Because the story of the dead child was actually the final piece of the answer to that question. Not a story about a dead child alone, but the existential struggle of a child who was alive. A long life journey that had indeed led to the fact that I, despite having felt the day before as if I would have to bring myself to the slaughter like a lamb – and that feeling had moreover been justified – and even after the stoning of that day, had still dared to make myself vulnerable. I think that someone who had truly heard that, received it and understood it would not even have asked this question. It was not meant as a question either, I realize. It was an outburst of anger, grief, fear and powerlessness from the mouth of a woman who, however understandable it may be, after more than fifty years on this earth still does not dare to look at herself.
The session had started that day at around ten in the morning. Our team works on an outreach basis, so colleagues had to come from every corner of the country. Ten o’clock was early by our standards, although in exceptional cases a meeting was sometimes scheduled for nine. Not that it made much sense, because the result was that the first hour of being together was spent waiting for colleagues who had come to a standstill somewhere in a traffic jam or were making their way through the Dutch rail network. Ten o’clock was a good time. The session that day was facilitated by two internal team coaches. My employer has things ‘well arranged’ – for every problem there is a solution perfectly worked out on paper, a clever excuse function, and in every room there is also an enormous imaginary carpet under which the problems can be neatly swept at the end of every useless gathering. Two women strong, the team coaches came to do their little trick. True professionals who had assessed that it was especially important for the colleagues to be able to speak out in a safe environment.
As these things go, the day began with coffee or tea, an introduction from the team coaches and a short ‘check-in’. The inevitable question: ‘how are you arriving?’. One person was having an even harder time than the next, but almost everyone felt awful, tense and ill at ease. Even during the check-in it became clear that a number of colleagues had sharpened their knives the evening before on the whetstone of two colleagues who had already announced that they would not be appearing that day. They had already become so sick from the tension beforehand that they would not be able to make it that day – and that is exactly what happened. Of course, for the most combative colleagues, that fact was a strong opening move already made during the check-in. The team coaches made a weak and above all hopeless attempt to bring these fighters back to themselves – but the damage was done. The first stones had been thrown and the tone set.
My assignment for the first part, which would last until half past two in the afternoon, was seemingly simple. I only had to listen, nod and – regardless of whether I agreed with what I heard, whether it was correct, or even if it had once been invented to discredit me – acknowledge and validate. My turn would come in round two. Then I would be allowed to respond; first I would have to take the blows. I managed it with difficulty. Of course there were certainly colleagues who stood up for me as well. Over time, different camps had formed. And I, I was the center – how you stood in relation to me determined which camp you belonged to. That also made my position lonely, because it naturally meant that I belonged to none of the camps. Others saw me as the root of all evil, a genuine demon. And still others saw me as the savior, someone who, despite the hard blows and the resistance, remained standing and held on to what they too believed was right. I saw myself as a black sheep, a role and position I had been assigned many times in my life – or had taken on myself.
The man who cast the first stone that day was certainly not without sin himself. A veteran colleague. Someone who had been walking the organization’s corridors for so long that he knew not only the rules, but also the exceptions, the detours and the places where it was better not to linger too long. He himself had more than once fallen victim to the same organizational culture he now seemed to be defending. All the way to court. The man had taught himself survival well. Otherwise he would never have made it to almost retirement. Everything put before him he saw as a stick with which, sooner or later, he would be beaten. His body seemed to respond before his head did. As if every question was already a hidden assignment. Every invitation a trap. Every movement towards development the beginning of the next reorganization in which someone else, at the drawing board, would decide what he was still worth. I think it was in the second month of my employment that I first really had him sitting opposite me. At my manager’s instruction, I held conversations with all team members about their training needs for that year. Most conversations were exploratory. Sometimes cautious. Sometimes a little awkward. With him there was little to explore.
He was clear: he had no training needs. By now he had been working for the organization so long that he was fully trained. Perhaps even beyond training. He did not support the team’s direction of development and made it known that he would not be taking part in it either. Later it turned out that he had thought my manager had required him to speak with me. When I told him that this was not the case, and that we might just as well use the conversation to get to know each other a little better, he remained on his guard. He had, he said, found a mode that allowed him to get through the working week. For a very long time he had been saving up IKB hours so he could work one day less as soon as possible. He had been burnt out several times. The company social worker had advised him above all to do things he enjoyed. Training, development or moving along with changes no longer gave him any energy at this stage of his career.
As he spoke, I watched him turn into a little boy who folded his arms and kept a close eye on my mouth, so that at the first movement of my lips he could quickly stick both index fingers in his ears. I accepted that then. Not because I thought it was wise. Not because I thought it was good for him or for the team. But because I was sitting across from someone who had already experienced so many times that change mainly meant something was being taken away from him. For him, this was the umpteenth transition. And in government, reorganisations are strung together as if no one sees that the same people have to walk underneath them every time. I told him I found it sad that he seemed to take so little pleasure in his work. That it mattered to me that he could go to work with energy, and that the coming change might also be an opportunity to think about a role that suited him better. Not as an assignment. Not as pressure. More as an opening. At the end of the conversation I left the door ajar. I suggested talking further another time. Perhaps during a walk. A different setting, nature and fresh Frisian sea air. He did not accept the invitation.
Just over a week later he attended a team meeting that I chaired. Before the meeting, I reminded him of my suggestion that we go for a walk. Not forcefully, but as a simple reference to our earlier conversation. His response was brief. Sullen. Almost aggrieved. As if I had touched something I should have kept my hands off. During the meeting, I saw for the first time what his defensiveness looked like when others were present. His contributions were hardly about the items on the agenda. Everything returned to the same thing. The work was no good. The systems did not work. The development made no sense. The future of the team was uncertain. The organisation did not understand what was really going on. At first I let it pass. Everyone did.
It was nothing new for him to grumble. Nothing new for him to sigh. Nothing new for him to drain the energy from a conversation by repeatedly pointing to what could not be done, what did not add up, or what was not fair. But that day, my attention kept returning to him. There was something in his posture that was larger than the meeting. Something that could not be captured in an agenda item. At a certain point, I addressed him about it. I said I had the impression that he was feeling quite a bit of resistance and asked him what was really going on underneath. The reaction came at once: fierce and aggressive. Not as an answer to a question, but as resistance to the fact that the question was being asked at all. The atmosphere in the room changed. You notice it in small things. People who stop moving. Glances that dart away. Someone who sits up just a little straighter in his chair. The air that suddenly seems to move through a room less naturally. A little later, a colleague asked him the question again: “What, then, is going on?” That was when it visibly became too much for him. I ended the meeting. He stood up and walked toward the exit, ranting and raving. On the way, he called in sick. Later I heard that he had told colleagues I was the reason. That I had made him ill.
From that moment on, his sick leave was no longer just his sick leave. It became a story. A story that was picked up by colleagues who had known him for years. Colleagues who knew his pain, knew his history, and knew his struggle with the organization. Colleagues who perhaps were themselves afraid that the change would take something away from them. In that story, he did not become someone who had got stuck in a meeting. He became the proof that my presence was dangerous.
When his turn came during the session, he once again cast the first stone. He said he had fallen ill because I had improperly pressured him to take a mandatory training course. He said that during that final meeting I had shared personal matters of his with the team. He spoke of harm. Of a lack of integrity. Of a collaboration he could scarcely still imagine. I listened. He received support. At the same time, he could not make concrete which personal matters I supposedly had shared. Colleagues who had been present at that meeting could not remember it either. But that no longer mattered. By then, the story had acquired weight. And stories with weight no longer need facts to remain suspended in the air.
What stayed with me above all was his language. He did not use my name. Nor the name of my manager. He spoke of “the team leader” and “the behavioral coach.” As if we were not people, but functions. Figures. Roles in a story he had carefully assembled so that only one conclusion would still be possible. There he sat. The man who months earlier had left a meeting ranting and raving. The man who had called in sick. The man around whom others had gathered. The man who knew how to survive in an organization by turning his vulnerability into a weapon.