Don’t Sabotage Your Own Organization
I came across this excerpt from a three-letter acronym organization’s historical sabotage manual. It clearly demonstrates that some of our behaviors could be sabotaging our own organizations.
If you’ve been in the business for a while, chances are high you’ve heard things like communication flowing through “the right channels”, or you were forced to work with unnecessarily large committees to design horses that ended up producing camels after long and costly series of meetings.
Where I am going with this? Last week I came across the following document on twitter:
This is from the OSS’s Simple Sabotage Field Manual. The Office of Strategic Services (OSS) was a US intelligence agency during World War 2, and a predecessor to the Central Intelligence Agency (CIA).
You could laugh at these things while watching The Office, but given enough experience, we’ve all met people who could be acting as OSS agents sabotaging their own organizations. Typically, this smells like large corporations. But it doesn’t even have to be. Even startups have their shares of these dysfunctional behaviors.
Every behavior that checks one of the points above is sabotaging your organization, by killing innovation, delaying actions, demotivating people and killing employee engagement. Recognize those behaviors when they happen. Correct them immediately with timely feedback, and don’t create a culture that encourages any of it.
📚 Three books popped to my mind when I was writing this blog:
- The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick Lencioni
- Radical Candor: Be a Kick-Ass Boss Without Losing Your Humanity by Kim Scott
- Crucial Conversations by Patterson, Grenny, McMillan & Switzler
Thank you for reading.
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