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.