Sabotage Your Corporate Culture: Are You at Risk?

An Expert on How to Sabotage Your Corporate Culture
One of the most unlikely authorities on organizational sabotage is William “Wild Bill” Donovan, head of the Office of Strategic Services (OSS) during World War II. In 1944, the OSS produced a now-famous 32-page field manual detailing how to deliberately undermine enemy organizations. The guidance was blunt and unsettlingly practical. It outlined two primary paths to crippling productivity: physical disruption — damaging equipment, facilities, or transportation — and what we would now recognize as human interference with managerial and organizational processes. Either approach, the manual noted, could quietly but decisively erode an organization’s ability to function.

What makes the document enduringly relevant is not the wartime context, but how familiar many of its “human obstruction” tactics feel inside modern organizations. The same behaviors that once served as intentional acts of sabotage can, when tolerated or encouraged, quietly dismantle culture, alignment, and performance from the inside out.

The Role of Corporate Culture
We define corporate culture as how things really get done in an organization. It includes the way employees think, behave and act. Whether implicit or explicit, every company and every leadership team have self-sustaining patterns of behaviors and thinking that represent how work gets done.  As a leader, do not underestimate how much your actions — both big and small — affect and are interpreted by others.

• We know from a Harvard Business School report that culture can account for up to half of the difference in performance between organizations in the same industry.
• Our own organizational alignment research found that culture accounts for 40% of the differential between high and low performing companies in terms of revenue growth, profitability, strategy execution, customer loyalty, leadership effectiveness, and employee engagement.

Three Recent Client Examples of How to Sabotage Your Corporate Culture

Cultural threats can be unrecognized and unintentional; but they still can pack a powerful and debilitating punch. The less obvious and less visible dangers to change and performance can be triggered by poor leadership, faulty decision making processes, a lack of employee engagement, unclear strategies, political infighting, and fuzzy roles and responsibilities.

These kinds of weaknesses in an organization’s fabric can have a negative impact on its culture and effectively slow down a company’s output. Here are some recent client examples of both purposeful and unplanned cultural sabotage that derailed three major change initiatives:

• Sabotage Your Corporate Culture by a Centralized Decision Making Culture
  The company’s growth demanded that individuals on the front lines be empowered to make fast, informed decisions. Yet, instead of removing outdated structures, leadership clung to a misaligned corporate decision-making committee and process. Most decisions still had to be approved by top executives at headquarters or undergo additional scrutiny by large, politically charged, and often dysfunctional committees. The result was a culture where speed, agility, and accountability were stifled, undermining operational expansion and employee initiative.

  The critical question for any organization is this: does your decision-making culture actually accelerate progress — or quietly hold it back?

• Sabotage Your Corporate Culture by Weak Communications and Poor Information Sharing
  Communication and information, when mismanaged, can quietly erode even the strongest corporate culture. A recent client undergoing a major transformation uncovered a striking pattern: leaders publicly championing enterprise-wide goals while privately prioritizing their own teams, an internal communications team polishing messages so much they lost all meaning, project teams hoarding information to protect turf, and a constant stream of back-channel discussions between departments resisting change. The result was confusion, mistrust, and stalled progress at every level.

  The essential question for any organization is this: are your communications honest, transparent, timely, and relevant enough to actually move people — and strategy — forward?

• Sabotage Your Corporate Culture by Inconsistent Behaviors
  Inconsistent behaviors from leaders can quietly undermine even the most carefully designed culture. One professional services client, fearful of losing a major revenue producer, failed to hold that individual accountable for misaligned behavior and overlooked repeated violations of newly agreed-upon team norms. The message was clear: results mattered more than alignment, directly contradicting the intended cultural focus on how work should be done for optimal outcomes.

  A high-tech client faced a similar challenge with its remote work policy, designed to attract and retain top talent in a fiercely competitive industry. Despite the policy, key senior leaders continued to work from the office and schedule critical in-person meetings. Their behavior quickly cascaded through the organization, leaving remote employees feeling excluded and marginalized. The result was a culture that actively undermined the very strategy meant to support growth and engagement.

  The takeaway: when leaders act inconsistently, culture suffers — and even the best-intentioned initiatives can backfire.

The Tendency to Look Outside
When performance starts to slip, many organizations instinctively blame external forces — new competitors, market shifts, or economic trends. It’s a comfortable narrative, and it deflects scrutiny from potentially harmful internal practices. Rarely do leadership teams pause to examine themselves first. Yet more often than not, the real challenges — and the greatest opportunities — reside within.

Human factors, from leadership behaviors to team dynamics, can be either a company’s most powerful asset or its most fragile vulnerability. Ignoring them risks missing the true drivers of success or failure..

A Leader’s Job is to Create Alignment
Every leadership action, no matter how small, sends a signal. At its core, a leader’s responsibility is to shape the environment—your corporate culture—so that people can perform at their best in ways that advance both business objectives and people strategies. Achieving this requires more than good intentions.  A leader must:

1. Clearly understand the current culture.
2. Define the needed culture to best execute the strategy.
3. Identify the critical few cultural shifts that will have the greatest impact.
4. Equip managers and employees to adopt those shifts effectively.

Strategy-culture alignment isn’t accidental — it is deliberately designed and continuously reinforced.

The Bottom Line
Shifting workplace culture isn’t just about changing what people do — it’s about influencing the beliefs, mindsets, and emotions that drive those behaviors. As a leader, are you actively safeguarding your organization from the subtle forms of cultural sabotage that can erode performance and derail change? The hard work of strengthening and aligning culture is part of being a leader.

To learn more about how to get protect and align your corporate culture, download The 3 Research-Backed Levels of Corporate Culture that You Must Get Right to Thrive

by Tristam Brown: CEO

Tristam Brown is an executive business consultant and organizational development expert with more than three decades of experience helping organizations accelerate performance, build high-impact teams, and turn strategy into execution. As CEO of LSA Global, he works with leaders to get and stay aligned™ through research-backed strategy, culture, and talent solutions that produce measurable, business-critical results. See full bio.