Corporate Saboteur vs Black Hat Hackers — Who The Heck is a Corporate Saboteur?
A group of hackers can take your website hostage and make your infrastructure impossible to function and at the end, these bad guys are asking for a ransom, and hell knows if they restore the business.
This can happen to anyone, rarely, but can happen. It depends on your business.
However, probably you already got a few Corporate Saboteurs in your company, and they are as harmful as a gang of hackers.
There are people who realize the weak points of a big corporate, and using the internal political wars to their benefit.
But a Corporate Saboteur (Shortly: C.S.) professionally closes all lines, cannot find a catch on him or her, knows and even creates the corporate processes, and uses those for own benefits.
The characteristics of a C.S. might show a great length of works history, or just joined the enterprise lately in hard times.
Hardly provides results, but always find the best excuses and reasoning for the harmful inactivity. Even more this colleague looks like he or she is a victim of the processes, and the willingness of working is blocked by the company’s bad processes.
This harmful inactivity costs nerves, resources, revenue, and such colleague destroys the team spirit, damages the moral, making others giving up the cooperation and leave.
No need to say, the higher the rank of such person, the bigger the damage can be caused.
On certain functionality the C.S. has options to play the cards so well, that only radical countermeasures and harsh decisions can make him or her move from the position.
Subordinates are glad once the C.S. is gone.
Once the colleagues detect a C.S. they struggle with this person, they fight and then they quit, running away from this nightmare.
Supervisors of a Corporate Saboteur might be also involved in a big net of Corporate Saboteur network, or this person just does so bloody well the undermining job, that it takes lot of hard time to collect strong evidences to escalate and move the Saboteur.
This person either does mildly the political game or puts full effort making oneself invincible, still does damage for the company.
Example:
Our example C.S. takes a mid level role, with special operative tasks and responsibilities in charge of a certain domain in a company’s ecommerce activity, lets say the CMS.
The Corporate Saboteur needs to implement some changes, which ends up in a couple of hours of manual work, changing some description on category pages.
The Saboteur first refers to someone whose approval for the required changes is necessary, and once this person informs the requestor of the changes that he has no authority in this matter, the Saboteur still comes up with imaginary blocks a couple of times, and plays administrative ping pong with the requestor of changes.
At the end the Saboteur asks for unnecessary trainings and tools to get the job done, postponing the deadline of the implementation of the changes.
Once everything is sorted, the changes get denied due to lack of time and other higher priority tasks, which are not shared with the requestor of changes.
Escalating this person results in an administrative disaster, as he or she is feeling offended that some manual job needs to be done, and defines this situation as an unnecessary job with low impact on the business and denies that such work is in his or her scope of work.
Or at the end just comes up mentioning Trade Union and scares the requestor of changes and the supervisor of the Corporate Saboteur away.
Solution:
The company has to gain total certainty that it is facing a Corporate Saboteur and has to make immediate actions, or find out if this is a lone case or a network of Saboteurs.
Before you ask, these people mainly are working for themselves, and not doing criminal things on purpose.
You can fight this behaviour off with clear and sharp processes.
If soft countermeasures still not make the magic, you have to involve the HR department.
Their motivation is to harvest the corporate benefits to the utmost possibility, or to remain in the position as long as possible and scaring away everyone who delegates possible danger.
In most of the cases the motivation is money and pride.
