During World War II, the OSS, the predecessor of the CIA, published a manual teaching ordinary people behind German lines how to sabotage organizations from within.
I found this thing when I was at CIA, and the instructions are pretty remarkable.
Refer all decisions upward. Call unnecessary meetings. Reopen settled questions. Insist on rigid procedures, the ABCs of the book. And avoid responsibility whenever possible.
Now, how does that sound to you? Doesn't that sound great?
Read that list again and you will notice something uncomfortable. It is not a description of enemy sabotage. It is a description of an ordinary week in a great many organizations.
What I Found in Our Lowest Performing Units
Years later, at the agency, I encountered some of these exact behaviors in our lowest performing units, based on surveys we had taken.
Our employees weren't saboteurs. My gosh, they sit on polygraphs and go through a rigorous process on honesty. These were people who had been vetted more thoroughly than almost anyone in the workforce.
What had happened is that managers had accidentally created those same behaviors.
That word matters. Accidentally. Nobody sat down and designed a system to slow decisions and bury bad news. It emerged, one reasonable-seeming choice at a time.
Because when people learn that their initiative could create trouble, or that bad news gets punished, or that every decision they make requires permission from above, protecting themselves becomes perfectly rational.
That is the part leaders miss. The self-protective employee is not being difficult. They are responding intelligently to what the environment has taught them.
Diagnose the Environment Before You Diagnose the People
Leaders ask me dozens of questions about their people, CEOs especially.
Why don't they take ownership. Why don't they speak up. Why do they resist change. Why aren't they more engaged.
Underneath all of those, there is usually a variation of one question. Why aren't people behaving the way we need them to.
My advice is to stop judging the behavior for a moment and just take it as a symptom. Treat it as evidence:
Silence can mean speaking up feels dangerous.
Weak ownership can mean that authority is unclear and expectations are unclear.
Resistance is often because people don't trust what will happen next.
Disengagement could mean the work isn't providing a challenge, or even a sense of purpose.
So before blaming employees for disengagement, I would ask a different question. What is our management environment teaching them to do?
Is it safe to speak here? Are the leaders trustworthy? Are expectations clear?
Those three questions will tell you more about your culture than any engagement score will.
Leadership Lives in the Employee's Mind
Here is the takeaway, and it is pretty simple.
Leadership is in the employee's mind. It is their perception. It is not the leader's intention.
A system may look quite logical from the top while it is teaching self-protection to everybody below.
That gap between intention and interpretation is where most leadership fails, and it fails quietly. The executive believes he has built a careful, well-governed operation. The employee experiences a place where initiative carries risk and honesty carries cost. Both readings are internally consistent. Only one of them determines behavior.
Your intention doesn't control the result. It is the employee's interpretation that does.
What Actually Changes It
The correction is smaller than most leaders expect, and that is precisely why so few of them make it.
Managers rarely get stuck because they don't know enough about leadership. They get stuck on Monday morning after their one week leadership class.
They attended the class. They know they should listen, coach, recognize people, and delegate better. By the way, those are all trust building measures, and they are all correct.
Then the inbox fills up. A deadline slips. Their boss calls. An employee brings up bad news. Pressure increases, and old habits return.
What they learned in that class was a whole bunch of new habits at once, and we know from the literature on habits that it is very, very difficult to change more than one habit at a time.
So the managers who break through don't attempt to change ten behaviors simultaneously. They install one small repeatable process.
My favorite is a five minute casual one on one conversation, a weekly check-in, where you ask four questions.
What's going on
What's getting in your way
What are you proud of
What one thing can I help you with
That routine is what I call a behavioral process, because it puts out a lot of good specific leadership behaviors at once. Listening. Coaching. Recognition. You are doing them all together inside the process rather than trying to remember each one separately.
I have worked with both public and private sector clients where six weeks of these little check-ins normalized all of those behaviors.
Leadership improvement doesn't come from collecting more advice, or this step or that step. It comes from converting one useful idea into a repeated behavior, getting it ingrained, and then moving on.
Intentions often aren't met, because we all fall back to our habits under pressure. So design the habit first. Let the habit come before. Don't let the intentions rule.
The Question Worth Sitting With
If you handed that OSS manual to a stranger and asked them to observe your organization for a week, how many of those instructions would they find already in place?
Not because anyone is sabotaging you. Because the environment has quietly taught people that self-protection is the smart play.
That is not a people problem. It is a management environment problem, and it is fixable by changing what leaders do rather than what employees are told.
If you are looking at your own organization and recognizing some of those behaviors, reach out and let's talk it through. I have spent a long time on this and would genuinely enjoy sharing what I have seen work.
I've gathered this thinking into the fully updated second edition of my book, Certainty: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation. It turns the science of human behavior into practical tools for building trust with your team, including the new 13 Human Nature Levers. Paperback and Kindle are available here.
Until next time,
Mike