Do crabs follow a vision?

Keep crabs in an open vessel, where the walls are tall enough to breach with some effort. Every time a crab starts climbing we will find that a few others will pull it down to the floor of the vessel.

All of us are aware of this. We have read about it in many places, especially from our management and psychology gurus. We have even glorified it with a term.?

The Crab Mentality!

The main foundation of the term is based on an “if I can’t have it, neither can you” kind of thought, which gets people into a group trying to put roadblocks and ruin the achievements of a peer. We do not need a psychology expert to infer that this comes from feelings of envy, jealousy, or rivalry, and results in a toxic culture in office. But the biggest cause of such a mentality is a lack of self-esteem or insecurity.

It may be prudent to delve into analyzing why a person (or a group) who has joined an organisation with due qualification and often with rich experience, develops such a lack of self-esteem or insecurity.?

Unfortunately, I will again need to bring up the failed philosophy of teamwork, collaboration, etc. Individuals do work in a certain way and do them well. That’s the reason we recruit them. However, the moment these individuals come on board we put them in an uncomfortable and alien environment, either asking them to change as per the team or guiding the team to change.

In the days when the term ‘job security’ holds no meaning what does that mean? Let’s consider two scenarios:

1) A member is a performer in the organisation, expecting a return for all the hard work put in. Now comes in a glorified champ, who has jumped all to become the blue-eyed boy (or girl) of the executive.

2) A new member is put in a team of performers and expected to perform at their level. All that the person knew before this happened was a couple of interviewers and the HR rep.?

In any of the shoes, what would you have done?

And all this is because some managers on top did not want to put in the hours and break a task into smaller work packages that could be dealt with by individuals. Work packages that would be like a black box, with clear inputs and outputs defined. What happens in the black box is totally up to the individual member. They do not need to know what happens after they have delivered the package, but instead, get rewarded for giving the output just as it was asked for.

Always keep in mind that the crab mentality is only observed when the crabs are in a foreign environment, like a vessel etc. In a favourable habitat, crabs do come out of their burrows without anyone pulling them back.

The fact is that the comfort of working in a secure environment can do wonders.

Let me end this by sharing the story of hermit crabs. As they have soft abdomens, these crabs live in discarded shells of other ocean creatures. But when they outgrow the shell where they have been temporary tenants, they would move out to check out a bigger shell. If the new shell is too big, they come back to their old and wait, while other hermit crabs follow the same process. Slowly there is a chain of hermit crabs, lined up as per size, checking new shells to move into. The bigger one gets one, leaving the next in line to move into its old, which in turn gets occupied by the next in line, and so on.

Can we have a bigger example of the collaboration of crabs??

After this should we blame the crabs or the environment for such a mentality????