Fish Can't Climb
Posted on July 12, 2013 by David Taylor-Klaus MCC CPCC, One of Thousands of Entrepreneurship Coaches on Noomii.
Measure performance by your capacity. Using unreasonable standards is demoralizing, destructive AND it's poor leadership - at home and at work.
“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.”
— Albert Einstein
A 7th grade teacher once said to my ADHD child, “If you would just focus more, you’d understand this better.” The teacher may as well have asked my daughter to be taller. Bex is, and always has been a beautifully dynamic and creative soul. She lives in the moment and from her heart so effortlessly.
Judging her by her ability to focus rather than her ability to learn dismissed her strengths, her individuality and her genius. And it demeaned her.
I see the same thing in organizations all too often. Many leaders hold their employees to standards outside of their capabilities.
And it is a sign of poor leadership.
I believe that you hire for character and train for skills. If your employee has the character, if they are a cultural match for the organization, find the right job for them inside your company. Create the environment for success – for them, for the team, for your company.
When you hold yourself to an impossible standard, you diminish the capacity of the company to succeed. The most common “impossible standard” I see is the entrepreneur’s belief that they can do it all themselves.
I’ve been there. It stunted the growth of the company. It burned me out, it made me miserable.
As a leader, you owe it to yourself to restrict your activity to that which only you are best suited to do. In other words, the goal it to ALWAYS be in the “highest and best use” of your time.
With the right people on the bus, you can delegate what you should NOT be doing (for me, it was running the books!) to the person best suited for it and focus your energy on what is most in service of your company (for me: developing & nurturing the strategic relationships that fill our pipeline and bringing in new business).
Judging myself on my ability to manage the books was tantamount to judging my by my ability to fly.
How much longer will you judge yourself? How much longer will you demand things of yourself that are beyond your capacity?
You are a genius. (If Einstein said it, it must be true!)
