Rebooting Work: Transform How You Work in the Age of Entrepreneurship

Chapter 6

Frame 3: The Disenchanted Employee

I remember receiving some early coaching advice from an MIT professor. He told his seminar class a story about taking his daughter crabbing in the Boston Bay. She was very worried about there being no lid on the pail. The professor told his daughter that no lid was needed—anytime one of the crabs started working its way to the top, another would reach up and pull it down. The moral of the story was that chronically negative people (crabs) would bring the whole team down and never allow any one of them or the team to reach new heights.

I often ask managers how many of their team they would rehire if they were starting over. In my entire career, there is only one time that a manager told me that he would ...