How to Sabotage Your Board

Ever sat through a board meeting and wondered whether other directors or trustees are not conscious of the time or are consciously sabotaging the meeting? Do some members seem hell-bent on turning decision-making into a no-win game? You’re not alone. The line between accidental and intentional sabotage can often be as thin as your treasurer’s patience after the third hour of budget discussions.

We’ve all seen this behavior. Often, directors don’t realize that they are obstructing the purpose of the meeting. But sometimes they engage in deliberate acts of sabotage that prevent the board from being effective or making decisions. They may do this to block a particular process, create space for their own agenda, or perhaps because they don’t believe they can pursue their own goals openly and collaboratively.

While much has been written about effective board practices — good communication, independence, diverse viewpoints and identities, among many — we believe that making progress on them requires managing board sabotage. That requires being able to identify it, though. Below, we’ll describe some of the best ways to sabotage a board so you can spot them and work to stop them. You may even realize that your own behaviors aren’t helping the board work most effectively.

Here are 14 tried-and-true ways to make a board meeting less productive:

1. Take up airtime. Keep interrupting others, saying, “I have a point that will only take a minute,” and then tell a story about when you were in Europe, or Asia, or at the hospital.

2. Divert the discussion. Change the topic to your pet projects or abstract issues such as governance.

3. Focus on irrelevant issues. Question which project management software the team has used. Go down semantic rabbit holes like “What do you mean when you say that?”

4. Pull a vanishing act. Say that you need time to consider the decision and then disappear. Visit the bathroom and forget to return.

5. Avoid conflict. It’s better to be on good terms with everyone rather than raise salient issues of importance to the organization.

6. Withhold information. Hint strongly that you know more than you can reveal. Allow discussions to proceed without the information you have, and then disclose it just as it will create the greatest disruption.

7. Undermine the speaker. Question your fellow board member’s credibility or experience. Ask how much time they have really spent on “the front line.”

8. Claim exclusive expertise. Suggest you know more than the other members by saying things like “I’m a scientist” or “I’ve actually run a business.”

9. Reinforce hierarchy. Spend time discussing who takes what role on the board, who has the longest tenure, who raises the most money, or whatever. Refer to senior trustees by titles such as Sir, Mr., or Madame Chair, while referring to junior trustees by their first name or a clever nickname you’ve made up.

10. Misrepresent others’ points of view. For example, say, “I’m hearing from you that product and technology do not matter. And that the community doesn’t matter, either.”

11. Create factions. Refer to the meeting you had last weekend with a chosen few from the board. Refer to “we” and “us” in a way that implies you are speaking for a subgroup.

12. Come unprepared. Why look at all the pre-read materials when you are already taking some days away from your busy schedule for this board anyway? You are smart, so you can definitely wing it.

13. Violate group norms. Arrive late, disregard the agenda, and then dismiss anyone who tries to get things back on track as a lame rule-follower.

14. Stay on your screens. Keep your laptop open and check your phone frequently when discussion turns to matters that don’t interest you, like cybersecurity.

Board chairs have even more options at their disposal, such as these five:

1. Overload the agenda. The agenda must be comprehensive — you don’t want to miss the big picture, which of course is composed of the tiniest details.

2. Set up conflicts. Schedule debate on a contentious issue and then sit back and enjoy the fireworks — instead of facilitating a respectful discussion.

3. Use scheduling to control attendance. Set board meetings for times that you know are inconvenient for members you’d like to exclude from making certain decisions.

4. Sideline urgent decisions. If the issue is important, it cannot be addressed too hastily. Form a committee to explore it, and postpone the decision till next quarter.

5. Put the most important decision last on the agenda. If board members are tired and hope to leave on time, they will have less appetite for the hard questions, and you can kick the issue down the road.

How to Get Board Meetings Back on Track

So, what can you do if you’re a board member, chair, or chief executive seeing others engage in behaviors that are rendering the board dysfunctional or making its decisions suboptimal? We suggest three strategies:

Address the sabotage directly. Presume trust and start with the assumption that the sabotage is not deliberate. We all like to focus on what we care about most, and sometimes we talk too much. Even if the sabotage is intentional, just pointing out the behavior can get its perpetrators to stop. Name it when you see it.

Fight fire with fire. Interrupt to bring the conversation back on track. Deliberately disregard hierarchical norms to solicit points of view from junior members. Build a faction yourself of members who want to have more productive meetings. Take care, though, not to corrode trust even more — if you care about positively influencing the organization, you need productive and healthy working relationships.

Collaborate and cooperate. Show leadership from whatever position you’re in to build a level of trust, commitment, and accountability among board members that makes a board effective. Try to understand the issues and concerns that are motivating the saboteurs, and make an ally of the chair.

What if the chair is actively sabotaging the board to maintain control and pursue their own agenda? If you are seeing this, you need the support of most board members to rein in — or change — the board leadership. It will test your skills in collaboration and cooperation. If you try and fail, you might want to leave the board.

To be effective, your board needs to be able to make decisions — good decisions, on time and easily. You’re the one who can help it make those decisions — so watch yourself for any inadvertent sabotage, and model the behavior you’d like to see from other directors.