{"id":5486,"date":"2026-02-13T15:16:11","date_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:16:11","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/everybody-is-a-genius-but-if-you-judge-a-fish-by-its-ability-to-climb-a-tree-it-will-live-its-whole-life-believing-that-it-is-stupid\/"},"modified":"2026-02-13T15:16:11","modified_gmt":"2026-02-13T15:16:11","slug":"everybody-is-a-genius-but-if-you-judge-a-fish-by-its-ability-to-climb-a-tree-it-will-live-its-whole-life-believing-that-it-is-stupid","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/uncategorized\/everybody-is-a-genius-but-if-you-judge-a-fish-by-its-ability-to-climb-a-tree-it-will-live-its-whole-life-believing-that-it-is-stupid\/","title":{"rendered":"“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.\u201d<\/a>"},"content":{"rendered":"

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.\u201d <\/p>\n

This may be a cliche, but it describes one of the core skills of leadership:
\nMatching people to work that is aligned with their skills and instincts<\/p>\n

If you have somebody that loves following process and working through checklists, give them a process and checklist rather than expect them to “use common sense” and “just figure it out”.<\/p>\n

If you have somebody that is great at improvisation and winging it, put them in innovation focused roles where no process exists yet.<\/p>\n

The mistake many leaders make is they manage others the way they want to be managed, and assume other people have the skills and instincts they do. <\/p>\n

I certainly did this – I craved autonomy and didn’t like being micromanaged as a worker, so when I first became a manager, I gave my team tasks and expected them to figure it out. But the people on my team were fresh college grads who had no idea what they were doing – they needed more structure and concrete examples to get started. Once I started “micromanaging” them, things worked much better. <\/p>\n

So when you’re working with somebody, whether it’s a peer, a direct report or even your manager, figure out how they work best, and then set things up so they can work in that way. Don’t make a fish climb a tree, and then be surprised or disappointed that they don’t do it well.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

“Everybody is a genius. But if you judge a fish by its ability to climb a tree, it will live its whole life believing that it is stupid.\u201d This may be a cliche, but it describes one of the core skills of leadership: Matching people to work that is aligned with their skills and instincts…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5486","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5486","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=5486"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5486\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=5486"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=5486"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/nehrlich.com\/linkedin\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=5486"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}