EVER wonder why fishermen can just leave a load of crabs sitting in a bucket without a lid? Put a crab in by itself and it can easily climb out. Put a bunch of them in together however and it is rare that even one of them will escape.
You’ll see a crab climb its way out of the pack to the near the top, then one of those below will reach up and drag it back down into the melee again. It doesn’t benefit either crab and yet the pattern will repeat and repeat.
A new crab will be near the summit and get clawed back down again. It’s a phenomenon known as ‘crab mentality’.
But it’s not just these crustaceans who exhibit this behaviour. You might have seen it on a sports team, with some players reluctant to pass the ball to a player who could outshine them, get more praise or perhaps a move to a bigger team. You might see diligent trainers who want to push themselves onward be ridiculed or unable to train constructively because others discourage their efforts or actively disrupt the session by messing around.
It’s by no means a sports phenomenon either. We all sit in buckets of some variety. Trying to lose weight and people sneer at you eating health and starting to take exercise? Going back to college and getting more qualifications to push yourself on and people suggest you’d be better off taking a handy job, and just watching TV in the evenings? Crab mentality.
Have you ever been in a workplace where the prevailing attitude is: ‘if I can’t have something, then neither can you’. The person attempting to bring new ideas or act responsibly is ridiculed or ostracised because they don’t fit a (poor) group mentality. The person who’s stopped from working hard and pushing up numbers because others want to slack.
Whatever the situation, the process of actively holding people back from achieving more, simply to reinforce the low bar status quo can be incredibly toxic and destructive. It can also be very difficult to overcome.
For the sports coach, or work manager, the first and most important tool to counter this is to be aware of the phenomena in the first place and be able to spot it happening. That way you can then take steps to address.
First look at your culture. Ask yourself if you promote the right behaviours, attitudes and ethics? Do you see your company as high performing, and have you ensured that this is ingrained in your staff?
Do you recruit people with positive traits that contribute to that type of culture; and when you bring them onboard, reinforce this from day one and throughout their career: socialising the principles accordingly.
Do you bake this into your performance management system? Do you put responsibility on staff to act the right way? Do you challenge them if they are not.
Ask if your senior team, directors, managers and team leaders all walk the walk accordingly. If not, fix this immediately - it needs to be driven from the top. Do staff feel able to call colleagues out for poor behaviour (with manners, obviously)? If they don’t, figure out why not and empower them to do so.
Celebrate wins and successes as a team. While there may be a figurehead, or one person who contributed most, make sure the people who played a supporting role are also recognised. That way you start to create a ‘one wins, everybody wins’ mentality, where everyone in the team can feel they have been able to contribute positively to success, regardless of who is seen as the outward facing ‘achiever’.
Encourage collaboration and mixing of teams. The more exposure to the right attitudes; the less emboldened your toxic people will feel. If needs be, split the team who are causing problems and embed those people with the issues into teams that are strong enough not to tolerate their behaviour.
Unless we strive for better, we will never advance, grow and succeed. Crabs don’t know that. We should.
:: Barry Shannon is head of HR at STATSports
