Sabotaging Strategy

Why we do it and what do to about it.

As humans we are prone to self-sabotage.

• Rigidly following that 16-week training plan we hunted down for the Cherry Blossom 10-miler, only to get caught up in the excitement of race day and feel our PR swept away with a hasty decision.
• Setting aside time for ourselves and our partners to make some of the heavy decisions ahead, and instead getting distracted by the immediacy of right now.
• Getting a strategic initiative to 98% complete, just to stop short of doing what it takes for successful implementation.

If we look closely at those examples, we can see that many times sabotage is rooted in preservation and employed to avoid discomfort and change.

Sabotage is a mechanism we use to keep pain at bay.

In the examples above, we might see that pain avoidance as a short walk in a tough mile 9, or the swiping of a screen instead of impassioned conversation, or the dodging of the change anchor that fuels organizational behavior and performance.

Sabotage is not always intentional. Although it can be.

Perhaps what’s more concerning is when sabotage becomes common practice, when we develop a familiarity with a habit of debilitating impacts.

Thanks to a principle known as the Hebbian learning rule, we know that when interconnected neurons become active during a particular event, their connection strengthens and a memory of this event is formed. The saying goes, “neurons wired together fire together.”

The more we run those neural circuits, the stronger those connections become and it's one of the reasons it’s so difficult for humans to find their way through new and different challenges. We have those familiar practices on lock, and we crave comfort.

Just as many organizations do.

Are our organizations snuggled up on the proverbial sofa lounging in their favorite comfy pants? If we are constantly seeking safety in a time when safety doesn’t equal sustainability, what does this mean for our credit unions?

There are many change management practices designed to support organizations and their teams through those cycles, and over the years, I’ve found a few ways to help my colleagues embrace new connections within them.

• Tagging in Executive Sponsors. Understandably, project teams are immersed in detail and ensuring interdependencies are tightened and accounted for. As an executive sponsor, show up, take a high-level perspective, identify what’s not being said, recall the strategic imperative, keep coming back to it, and demonstrate your passion for results.
• Naming for Results. It’s a small step and an easy one. The language we use when referencing an initiative frames why the change is important. Maybe you’re launching Project Freedom, a new loan consolidation product. Maybe it’s Investing in You, a workforce succession planning initiative. Or, maybe it’s Comfort Kills, a creativity boosting series for your marketing team. Don’t just name a project, use it every time at every reference to send those neurons into a change intersection.
• Through the Finish Line. Too many times we stop at go-live. Maybe we have a few clean-up tasks. Yet at the conclusion of what we typically note as the end, we are essentially at the very beginning. We must still operationalize the change, root it into our everyday practices, and assign ownership to see strategic shifts. When we report to the organization the impact of that work in the first two weeks, six weeks, three months, six months, and at one year, not only have we earned an opportunity to celebrate, but we’ve also established that results are important to us, and they are the way we do business.
• How Work Gets Done. What we value at work comes to life through vision, mission, purpose statements and articulated value sets. And, in most organizations, there are also intangible and unarticulated ways organizations get work done. I have found it to be critical to be clear with my teams, to the individuals I support, about those sets of expectations. By observing leaders within our organizations, we can see these unsaid standards lived into and even elevated by high performers. It’s my experience, when those unsaids find their way into our lexicon, we help our next level navigate through them. We see organizational and individual performance strengthened and trust grow. I’m an even bigger fan of getting these into organizational doctrine.
• Understanding Tradeoffs. When we want our teams to focus on the most important work, we must balance being both opportunistic and strategically diligent. As George Miller, an American psychologist, discovered the short-term memory of humans is limited to holding seven pieces of information, plus or minus two. This finding signals that we must expect more of executive leaders. We need their support in identifying both base hits and home runs, and the right combination of both. If we intend to say yes to something new, we must, rather quickly, sort through any complexity to find simplicity, and drive understanding at an organizational level. Otherwise, the distraction limits success rather than bolstering it.
• Push to Pace. Just like those long training runs, initiating a steady drumbeat of change in today’s environment is an organizational imperative. If you want to get off that comfy couch, having daily and weekly targets creates a nice 180 steps per minute pace that propels us into forward motion. As executive leaders, when we set those milestones for ourselves at that brisk and steady rhythm, we’re demonstrating the promise of the strategy to work in today’s environment and preparing us to leapfrog into tomorrow.

An organization’s ability to execute on its strategy is heavily dependent on the leaders’ ability to navigate and nurture change within their organization. Self-sabotage doesn’t have to sneak up on us. It can be a condition we prepare to recognize in ourselves and others, and actively work to break. We can build healthier and more balanced organizations readied to reach that PR.