This post originally appeared on the Corporate Rebels blog by Joost Minnaar. It is reposted with permission and lightly edited.
During WWII, the CIA published “The Simple Sabotage Field Manual” – a how-to guide for sabotaging an organization’s productivity. It was distributed to sympathetic citizens in Axis countries who wanted to weaken their own country in its war efforts.
The manual was declassified in 2008. Some of the instructions are outdated. But others seem oddly familiar … if not downright hilarious. The last section, about sabotaging day-to-day business operations is spot on – and timeless.
This section includes timeless suggestions for poor management. Check for yourself if colleagues or bosses are draining productivity in your workplace:
• Talk as frequently as possible and at great length.
• Bring up irrelevant issues as frequently as possible.
• Haggle over precise wordings of communications, minutes, resolutions.
• Refer back to matters decided upon.
• Be worried about the propriety of any decision.
Now let’s move to instructions targeted at managers and supervisors. They also sound familiar:
• Misunderstand orders. Ask endless questions or engage in long correspondence about such orders.
• In making work assignments, always sign out the unimportant jobs first.
• Insist on perfect work in relatively unimportant products.
• Hold conferences when there is more critical work to be done.
• Multiply the procedure and clearances involved in issuing instructions.
The sabotage instructions for employees are even more elaborate and spot-on! Here are the top 5 we recognized:
• Tell important callers the boss is busy or talking on another telephone.
• Work slowly. Think out ways to increase the number of movements necessary on your job.
• Contrive as many interruptions to your work as you can. When you go to the lavatory, spend longer time there than is necessary.
• Do your work poorly and blame it on bad tools, machinery, or equipment.
We’ve all have seen these behaviors in the workplace. You probably have too—maybe even this week?
How can a 1944 sabotage manual, written by the secret service, be so accurate about behaviors many of us see on a daily basis at work?
Such behaviors are never a good sign for workplace management. We should open our eyes. We should call them out. And we should remember that inefficient ways of working aren’t just annoying: they can literally (hopefully unintentionally!) sabotage your organization.
