I spent years at the CIA watching highly talented managers fail in ways that had little to do with intelligence, effort, experience, or technical competence. Their teams resisted change, stopped volunteering ideas, and deferred decisions upward. Some employees complied with requests while quietly conserving their judgment and energy for elsewhere.

Other managers, working in the same institution under the same rules, displayed unusual candor, initiative, and commitment. I kept looking for something to explain the difference.

The answer came from an unlikely place. While digging through the CIA’s archives, I found a declassified World War II publication by the Office of Strategic Services (OSS), the wartime predecessor of today’s CIA. Its title was the Simple Sabotage Field Manual.

The manual instructed ordinary citizens in occupied territory on how to disrupt an organization without attracting attention. It advised them to defer decisions upward, call unnecessary meetings, reopen settled questions, insist on procedures when common sense suggested otherwise, and avoid responsibility whenever possible.

Those instructions looked uncomfortably familiar. I had been reading remarkably similar complaints in employee surveys from some of CIA’s lowest-ranked units. Our employees were not saboteurs. They were describing what discouragement and disengagement look like after months or years in an unhealthy local environment. The OSS taught people to deliberately produce those behaviors. Managers had been producing them unintentionally.

That discovery points to four lessons every executive should consider:

1. Management machinery can unintentionally reward the same behaviors that the OSS taught saboteurs to create.
2. Employees respond to how a system feels in practice, not merely to what its designers intended.
3. More pressure can produce more self-protection rather than improved performance.
4. Enterprise culture is built locally through the small environments that managers create every day.

Each of these ideas deserves its own examination. Taken together, they explain why well-designed management systems can still produce poorly functioning teams. Managers must design culture and incentives around human nature so people contribute fully rather than spend their energy protecting themselves from the system.

1. Management Machinery Can Create Sabotage

Most management systems rely on visible mechanisms: goals, metrics, incentives, reporting requirements, structure, policies, training, and formal communication. These mechanisms are necessary, but trouble begins when leaders assume they are sufficient.

A dashboard can tell an employee what management is measuring, but it cannot tell that person whether it is safe to report bad news. A performance system can assign responsibility, but it cannot make the process feel fair. A town hall can explain the strategy, but it cannot make an employee feel seen, trusted, useful, or connected to something meaningful.

When those human needs go unmet, predictable behaviors follow. Employees become cautious. Decisions move upward. Meetings multiply because no one wants to own the risk. People follow procedures long after they stop making sense. Problems remain hidden until they are large enough to be undeniable.

From the executive suite, that behavior may appear as laziness, resistance, or weak accountability. From the employee’s perspective, it may be a rational response to the evidence the organization has provided.

The sabotage test tells you which behaviors are showing up. It doesn’t tell you why. That answer lives in something harder to measure than any process map: the employee’s experience of the system.

2. Employee Experience is the Missing Link

Human beings arrive at work with a psychological reality that management theory cannot override. We are survival-oriented social animals. We unconsciously conserve energy, watch for threats and rewards, seek patterns, and rely heavily on emotion, habit, and automatic judgment.

At work, people want to feel safe, seen, trusted, useful, able to grow, fairly treated, and part of something meaningful. Leaders can translate those needs into four practical conditions:

1. Safety: I can speak up, ask questions, try, and admit a problem without being humiliated or unfairly punished.
2. Trust: I have sufficient evidence of past behavior to believe leaders will treat me consistently and honor their commitments.
3. Clarity: I understand what matters, what success looks like, and how my work contributes to it.
4. Challenge: I am trusted with work that leverages my strengths, stretches my abilities, and gives me room to grow.

A management model can be logical, elegant, and internally consistent. But if employees perceive it as threatening, arbitrary, confusing, or deadening, human behavior will reveal the mismatch.

Remember: Leadership is shaped by employees’ perceptions, not by leaders’ intentions.

The conditions above don’t operate in isolation. Leadership affects performance through a five-link chain:

1. Leader action and system design: What leaders say, do, reward, measure, and require.
2. Employee experience: Whether those actions feel safe or threatening, fair or arbitrary, clear or confusing, and inclusive or dismissive.
3. Psychological state: Whether employees have energy available for the work or redirect it toward self-protection.
4. Human response: Whether employees respond by protecting themselves, which produces silence, compliance, concealment, and risk avoidance, or by contributing, which produces candor, ownership, collaboration, initiative, and creativity.
5. Performance: What downstream results are produced that leaders care about, including execution, innovation, retention, change adoption, risk, and productivity.

Diagnosis is difficult, which is why, under pressure, many leaders may reach for more machinery instead.

3. More Pressure Can Produce Less Performance

When accountability is weak, leaders introduce metrics. When communication is poor, they send more messages. When innovation stalls, they launch an innovation initiative. When change meets resistance, they tighten the implementation plan or reorganize.

Each response adds visible machinery. None necessarily changes employees’ beliefs about what will happen if they challenge an assumption, surface a mistake, offer an unfinished idea, or take responsibility for a risky decision. The organization becomes busier without becoming better.

Consider a missed target. A leader who publicly pressures the responsible manager may intend to create accountability. Employees observing the encounter may interpret it as evidence that surfacing problems is dangerous. The next problem stays hidden longer. Optics improve temporarily, but operational risk grows.

A different leader can uphold the same high standard while responding to an early warning with, “Thank you for telling me. What is getting in the way, and what do you need from me?” The standard remains unchanged. The psychological environment has shifted. Candor becomes safer, help arrives sooner, and accountability becomes more real.

This is the central leadership choice: whether to force the behavior you want or create the conditions in which that behavior becomes a natural response.

That choice, to force the behavior or create the conditions for it, is made hundreds of times each day by every manager in the building.

4. Culture is Built One Manager at a Time

The direct manager is the crucial link. Every day, that manager creates a small psychological environment in which employees decide how candid to be, how much initiative to take, whether an idea is worth the risk, and how much of themselves to invest.

This microculture is where employees experience the organization. A frontline manager who keeps small promises, notices good work, shares ownership, and responds constructively to bad news creates one kind of workplace. A manager who surprises people, hoards decisions, ignores effort, and punishes dissent creates another—even when both managers operate under the same corporate policies.

Enterprise culture is the cumulative effect of those local environments. Leaders often treat culture as broad and intangible because the visible machinery of management demands their attention. That bias toward tangibility pulls them toward dashboards, reorganizations, and programs, while the daily psychological environment goes largely unmanaged.

Turning that observation into practice requires a simple diagnostic. Call it a human-conditions audit, and start with three questions:

• What are people protecting themselves from? Embarrassment, inconsistent treatment, loss of status, unclear expectations, pointless work, or the risk of speaking honestly?
• Which condition is missing? Safety, trust, clarity, or challenge?
• What evidence can a leader provide this week? Respond constructively to bad news, clarify decision rights, keep a small promise, ask a genuine question, recognize a contribution, or grant someone meaningful ownership.

Then watch the leading indicators. Are problems surfacing earlier? Are employees asking better questions? Are decisions moving closer to the work? Are people volunteering ideas before being asked? Those behaviors appear before engagement scores, retention figures, or productivity measures change. They reveal whether the environment is changing.

Design the Environment First

The answer is not to abandon goals, metrics, performance reviews, operating plans, or financial discipline. Keep the useful machinery. Then examine the assumptions it makes about the people expected to operate it.

If your management model assumes people will speak despite fear, trust despite inconsistency, take ownership without authority, or innovate without the psychological safety to fail, the outcomes will not match your intentions.

A leader’s primary job is to create the psychological environment in which people naturally thrive. That responsibility is not separate from performance; it is upstream of performance. When leaders design for safety, trust, clarity, and challenge, strong performance becomes more natural and less forced.

The OSS manual remains useful because it shows how quietly an organization can be weakened. Sabotage does not always arrive with an enemy agent. Sometimes it arrives through ordinary management practices that teach good people to protect themselves.

Meet the Author

Mike Mears is a Catalant consultant and leadership theoretician focused on advanced leadership and management approaches for government and private sector organizations. He founded and led the CIA Leadership Academy and retired as the CIA’s Chief of HR. His book CERTAINTY: How Great Bosses Can Change Minds and Drive Innovation leverages neuroscience, psychology, and Mike’s CIA experience to offer practical leadership advice. He holds a Master of Business Administration from Harvard Business School and a Bachelor of Science from the United States Military Academy at West Point.