I’ve spent some time with Ryan Taylor, my personal fitness trainer at my gym, who is probably the most natural coach and mentor that I’ve ever come across. Why is he different? Well firstly he listens to what I want to achieve, is flexible when I want to add more goals and encourages my strengths and accepts my weaknesses whilst improving technique to overcomes them. Most importantly, he makes the whole process fun, varied and interesting.

He’s not soft
The workouts are always hard, he’s not soft on me, far from it! He encourages and compliments me when I do well and isn’t critical when I’ve tried my best but not succeeded. I’m just asked and motivated to have another go to get it right. I can’t remember not wanting to!
What is most surprising is that he’s only in his early twenties and I don’t think he realises how good a coach and mentor he is!

What could business learn?
Over the past few months I’ve began to think that business managers could learn a great deal from Ryan’s technique. Creating systems to catch people out, identifying weaknesses and spending time training poor performers and achievers may not be the most productive use of management time. Instead it would be more productive to develop people’s strengths.

SWOT analysis
We’ve all looked at a SWOT analysis at work. Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats are identified and discussed but too often the emphasis focusses on the weaknesses rather than developing the strengths. That can and I’ve often been asked to sort out the resulting paralysis.

In going to the gym I want to enjoy it. Doing the exercises and playing the ball games I enjoy improves my fitness. People working in business are not very different. If Ryan can ensure that as well as enabling me to feel good about my fitness regime but that I don’t neglect the areas I’m also weak at. Then business managers should be able to do the same.

There is a lesson here!