What Not to Do at Work

How would trained saboteurs, successfully planted on your team by ruthless competitors, proceed to undermine your productivity? If they followed a previously classified World War II field guide used by the predecessor of today’s CIA, they would follow eight rules to sap your momentum.

Robert Galford; an adjunct professor at the University of Maryland’s Robert H. Smith School of Business, co-author of Simple Sabotage, facilitator of an open-enrollment course from the Office of Executive Programs; says many people with good intentions do the same things.

“They don’t mean to, but they end up sabotaging the productivity and energy in their offices,” Galford says. “By sticking to outmoded protocols, endlessly revisiting management decisions, and meeting, meeting, meeting, they kill innovation, enthusiasm and progress.” /DJ/

HOW TO SABOTAGE YOUR NEXT MEETING

The key is to focus on process more than action, while doing your best to look prudent and analytical. Here’s eight tactics from the field guide:

1. Insist on doing everything through proper channels.

2. Make long speeches and talk as frequently as possible.

3. Refer all matters to committees for further study.

4. Bring up irrelevant issues.

5. Haggle over the precise wording of communications.

6. Rehash matters already decided upon.

7. Warn against hasty decisions that might result in embarrassment.

8. Raise concerns about the propriety of any decision.