A Tale from Sydney
Back in 2007, I had what I thought was the perfect internship — a semester spent in Campbelltown, Sydney, Australia, working for an Education Service Provider company that, at the time, was barely finding its feet. Its managing director was a sharp, fearless woman whose laughter could fill a room and whose business instincts could fill a book.
One afternoon over coffee at Krispy Kreme, she told me something that made me laugh, too, though partly out of confusion.
“You know,” she said, “one of the reasons I started my own company was the Tall Poppy Syndrome.”
I raised an eyebrow.
“Tall what?” I asked.
She smiled, explaining that in Australia, the “tall poppy” is the person who stands out — perhaps too much for comfort.
“It’s when people cut you down just because you’re shining,” she said.
She’d felt it herself: as a woman succeeding in a male-dominated industry, her colleagues began to undermine her, gossip about her, and subtly freeze her out of key meetings. That’s when she decided to build something of her own.
I was struck by how familiar it sounded. I thought the Filipino “crab mentality” was unique to us, but there it was — alive and kicking halfway across the world, only this time, it had a poetic name.
The metaphor, I later learned, dates back to an ancient Roman story about King Tarquinius Superbus, who beheaded the tallest poppies in his garden to show his son how to “cut down” prominent citizens.
Two thousand years later, the same story plays out in offices, classrooms, and boardrooms. Whether you’re in Sydney or Manila, success can sometimes be the fastest way to make yourself a target.
The Roots of Tall Poppy Syndrome
In Australia and New Zealand, Tall Poppy Syndrome (TPS) became a household term by the 1980s, describing the cultural habit of resenting or criticizing people who excel.
According to Bert Peeters (2004), this attitude was born from a deep-seated form of egalitarianism—the belief that no one should think they’re better than anyone else. It was meant to preserve fairness but ended up policing ambition. Peeters observed that tall poppies were often the very people whose talents and achievements could inspire others, yet they were mocked or maligned instead.
In the workplace, Anne Mancl and Barbara Penington (2003) found that women often face this more acutely. In their study of organizational communication, they discovered that successful women frequently become targets of negative communication — gossip, exclusion, and subtle sabotage — from peers who perceive them as “too good.”
The irony, of course, is that these are often the very women who could mentor others and lift their organizations higher.
Similarly, Douglas Garland (2018) noted that even in high-stakes professions like medicine, tall poppy dynamics thrive. Surgeons and physicians who achieve success or visibility are often subject to envy cloaked in “constructive criticism.”
What starts as professional rivalry can quickly mutate into personal resentment. The pattern repeats: excellence is met not with applause, but with suspicion. (To be continued)/PN
