53. Do You Have a Crab Bucket Culture?

Foreign. Hey, my friend. Welcome back to leadership in a nutshell for home service professionals. I'm your host, Kenny Chapman. We're cracking the code of that driven mind that you and I have and so many driven contractors out there. I just. I'm always honored to get back with you, and today I'm really pumped to. To just kind of hit you quick, hit you, maybe a little direct, with just a little bit of an analogy and challenge your culture. Today's episode I entitled, do you have crab bucket mentality? So I remember that I had a buddy in the army that lived up outside of Seattle in a little town called Everett, Washington. I guess it's not so little of a town anymore, but I remember we took leave and we went home and. Or went to his home, I should say. And we got to go crabbing for my first time. And those of you out there might have been crabbing before, and it's quite a cool little experience. And personally, I love to eat crab too, so there's always that. But today, I'm talking about your culture, and I'm talking about crab bucket mentality and crab bucket culture. So what are you talking about, Kenny? Stop with the analogy. Stop with the metaphors. Let's get some clarity here, and let's talk about how we can drive our home service company forward with a little shift in leadership and challenge culture. So I'm going to lay down four different types of culture I want you to be aware of today. But first, I want to start with this kind of thought around crab bucket culture. So, you know, when you think about crab bucket mentality, just picture, you know, a fisherman that is getting crabs and throwing them into a bucket, and they have this crab bucket. And. And it's a fascinating kind of behavior study when you realize that every time one of the crabs starts crawling up and getting on each other and. And reaching to get out of the bucket, the other crabs will do everything they can to pull them right back down into the bucket. So because of this, you don't need to see people that put lids on their crab buckets. Why? Because they. The crabs inside will take care of any crab that's trying to get out, to try to harm themselves, to try to get out of their safe environment, to get out of their comfort zone of being in this bucket together. Maybe they're not super comfortable because they're in a crab bucket, but you get what I'm saying. What does this mean to you and I as business leaders? What does this mean to our culture? How is your culture embracing Crab bucket mentality. Do you have crab bucket culture embrace in your business? Meaning that somebody has a new idea, somebody has a thought, somebody wants to try something different, somebody wants to implement a new strategy, a new technique, a new technology, a new sales process, a new client acquisition platform, whatever it is. And yet we just kind of grab them and bring them right back down and go, yeah, I care about you and I love you and all and I don't want you to get hurt out there outside of our comfort zone of this quote. Crab bucket. People are crazy, my friends. And I want you to. You know, I say that in a loving way because you are listening to one of the craziest people I know right now. As the host of Leadership in a nutshell. You know this by now, that I'm as crazy as they come. But I want you to think about just your own situation and how you're leading your teams and realizing human behavior and how much and at what length humans go to in order to fit in. And I'm reminded by a study that was done at Stanford many years ago where they brought in 10 people in this study and they had them all in a row, right? So picture 10 chairs lined up and we're in audio today. So I'm talking with my hands as I always do, but you can't see me. So just picture 10 chairs in a row and 10 people sitting individually. In each of those chairs they're facing a whiteboard. And on that whiteboard on the left hand side there are two lines that are drawn vertically up and down and they're the exact same length. On the right hand side of the board there's another line that is drawn and it's definitely not the same length as the other two. And what happened is they took and it was either in seat number seven or number eight. As they went through this study, they had somebody planted in there that would kind of decide if they were going to not know what was going on with the study. So everybody else knew what was going on. I say the person planted is the actual real person in the study. They're going in, going, okay, what's it for? Well, the first seven people are behind the scenes. If you picture Candid Camera, they all know what's going on. And what's going on is we're studying human behavior. And so they would look at the board and go, yeah, it's definitely not the same length as the ones on the left. Person 1. Person 2 Yep, not the same length. Person 3 Yep, not the same length. What's fascinating is in the 90 percentile, people would agree with everybody that came before them. Now, what's really fascinating to me about this study and where the goal lies for us in leadership and, and as we build and structure cultures of top performers and people playing the game at the highest level with us, we've got to realize that this is an innate part of human behavior. Because what blows my mind is clearly these lines are not the same. And then the question is asked, is the line on the right the same length as the lines on the left? And if somebody said yes, it is the same length and the next person said yes and the next person said yes. 90% of the time, the person in the seventh or eighth seat that did not know what was going on agreed with the people that came before them. Think about that for a minute. We do not want to stand out. We don't want to rock the apple cart. We don't want to be the crab that gets out of the bucket. We want to be liked. We want to fit in. We want our peers to like us. And I just think about how powerful that is when you're building culture, when you're creating teams. And I just want you to really think about when, you know, you roll a new concept. And if people are a little uncomfortable or challenged, it's okay. It's human behavior to want to fit in and to do things a certain way. So if you introduce change, and I wrote about this in the six dimensions of change 2.0, you can get that on Audible or on Amazon or at kennychapman.com, wherever you want to get that book, if you haven't read it yet. But I talk about the, the power of change and the challenges that we have in that book. Now, I'm not here to sell you books. I'm here to change your behavior. And so as we think about what that looks like now, I want you to think about. You know, Charles Handy wrote a book called Understanding Organizations in all the way back in 1981. He demonstrated four different types of cultures and structures. And the four types are power, task, role, and person. And so when you think about this, there's a power culture, there's a role based culture, there's a task based culture, and there's a person based culture. And obviously there's as many studies done as there are cultures done. I just want you to think today as we have our limited shot in the arm, as we get together weekly and kind of share a few minutes thinking about home service leadership and, and where I can challenge myself for the next week until we get back together. I just really want you to think about, you know, what is it about my culture and how am I handling these based on Charles Handy studies. So if I'm, if I have a power culture where we're, we're really fast paced, we change a lot, but, you know, it really interests the powerful person, the person seeking power. Nothing wrong with that. There's nothing wrong with any culture, by the way. There's only whether it's serving your vision, your purpose, your company's purpose, your primary purpose as a leader. We've talked about that in earlier episodes of this podcast here. I'm a huge proponent of leaders getting super clear, actually everybody getting super clear on what their purpose is and deciding is a power culture serve me and my team. Then we think about a role culture where it's a little more steady, it's relatively unchanging, it's pretty similar. A lot of banks kind of have, you know, cultures around this and we're talking about home service. I'm just using banks as a, as an example where roles are kind of very, very important there where in home service we're in a people based business and, and you might have a role of a, of a service tech, but you also might be have roles of a salesperson and an installer as well. Right. So we have different roles that we kind of wear or, or different roles that we're executing, I should say, throughout the course of the day. Then we think about the third one here with Charles Handy, which is the task culture. And that's where we're super high pace, where, you know, it's very unique, it's very complex. There's a lot of different things going on. And again, for home service, there's a chance that we're doing a lot of the same things day in, day out, just different clients. You know, when we're training technicians in our professional tech academy over on the blue collar side of things, like, you know, one of the main things that change when you're running service calls is the client and the equipment right there. Everything else pretty much the same. You can build their 12 step ultimate client experience. You can run through some things, you can ask the same questions, you pivot and you go different ways because it's about people. We're in a people centric business. We're in a people based business and our product happens to be plumbing, heating, air, electrical, garage doors, bugs, rugs, whatever it is. Right. But the reality is those tasks that our team does are fairly similar on an ongoing basis. And then the last culture here that I want to remind you of today is the people based culture or a person culture where now we're really talking about the uniqueness of individuals. And so when we kind of tie back to this, the question of this episode, do you have crab bucket mentality or crab bucket culture, if you will, then we kind of go, wait a minute, how is my people based culture showing up? If I have somebody that has a record month as a salesperson, are the rest of the quote unquote crabs trying to pull them back down in the bucket? When they get reporting from your CRMs, when you, you share numbers, are people supporting that? Are they getting excited and supporting and going, hey, I can help you get out of this bucket, or are they pulling each other back in? When you roll a new concept, when you roll a new philosophy, when you introduce new training, what does that look like? And guess what, you, as the top leader, you probably need to get out in your front line a little bit to find out what's really going on. I have the amazing opportunity to work with some very high level companies in this industry, companies that manage and run hundreds of millions of dollars of business. And what's fascinating is the disconnect between the front line and the CEOs and the board of directors and the different people, everything in between. We also have the opportunity to work with some very closely held companies and we're able to see where does crab bucket culture show up in a, in a four truck plumbing service only business? Right? And you think about where does that. It all starts with us as the leader. Am I instrumenting or modeling crab bucket leadership myself by trying to kind of be the person and hold down my team, or I'm embracing innovative thought process? Am I embracing people that are going, we've got a broken system here. We've got to challenge this. We've got to look at some different ways to do things. That's what it's ultimately all about. There's power, there's role, there's task, there's people involved, and there's a lot of crabs that sometimes are trying to hold each other down. We see it in families culture, we see it in business culture. You're a leader, you're a participant in a family. What does it mean to you? I would love to hear from you. I would love to make sure you're subscribed. Give us a like, please give us a rating here and please keep listening. I'm super excited to have you as part of the. The leadership in a nutshell for home service family. Until we talk, my friend, make it a better than fantastic week and get out of that bucket. See you real soon.