Coach People's Strengths or Weaknesses?

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Coach People's Strengths or Weaknesses?

Coaching people's strengths I find is much more effective than coaching their weaknesses. Working on a strong usually preferred area is more motivating than concentrating on something that perhaps they are avoiding, quite often for good reason, they're not good at it.
I encourage my clients to work with people who have different skills than themselves and compliment each other, and to develop their own strong skills.
The area of professional sport always has great examples: Beckham's coach wouldn't encourage him to develop his goal-keeping skills but to highly refine his passing, play-making and dead ball skills and to play(work) with someone else who is a good goalkeeper!

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		4 Sonny Vicente, Philippines
	Coaching People's Strength or Weaknesses? In co-active coaching, the coach addresses the issues that the coachee wishes to bring up. What is brought up initially may not be the real issues but by asking the proper questions, the real issues may surface. It's really the coachee's call where they would like to go.

		1 Holguin HR Consultant, Mexico
	Strengths Must Be Up Skilled; Weaknesses Must Be Managed It´s true that a chain could brake by the weaker link, so as a coach you have to help your coachee to scope his strengths to cover that weakness. But it's easier to find a weakness than a strength. You cannot lead all coaching sessions only to work on weaknesses, because ultimately the strengths which haven't been up skilled will become weaknesses too. It´s important to make a plan to increase strengths and complement or support weakness. An example: a kid studying only maths is bound to fail, also in science, even with an A+ grade.

		1 kenechukwu Accountant
	Coaching Must Be Balanced in Order to Achieve the Objective As a coach, one must be able to balance the coaching process/exercise. You don't coach only their strengths, you coach also their weaknesses because in evaluating and analyzing their weaknesses, you are better positioned to look introspectively if there are any occurrences/traces of such with you (the coach). As a unique leader / coach, it is expected of you to always strike a point of balance (equilibrium) even when others or your fellows don't see that. It goes a long way to distinguish you from others.

		2 Haresh K Patel Coach, India
	Or Maybe Coach Only for Weaknesses? While in theory it's right to focus on strengths, the example of Beckham may not be the most appropriate as we are not asking the client to change his area of expertise. Instead we need to work on all skills needed to perform excellent. Beckham can stay as a mid-fielder and continue working on his strengths like endurance, free kicks etc. But imagine a coach helping him to work on his weakness like pace and hot-headed temperament! He would be performing n-times more. I believe, people are anyways motivated to work/enhance their strengths. A small pointer (like a reading list, examples or day's training) is good for them to improve on their strengths. We all somehow want to run-away from our weaknesses and her the coach - as a trusted partner - can really help the client to work on his/her weaknesses over period of time. As a coach we must be aware that working on weaknesses could be challenging (for the coach as well) and working on strength could be a lot easier to show some good progress and earn quick brownies.

		2 Tito Rafael Hidalgo Barcia Strategy Consultant, Ecuador
	Getting the Result That is right @Sonny Vicente, it is the coachee's call. We only guide and model the how to get there, get to the possible solution. Perhaps the coachee might insist on working on weaknesses, the coach might consider to work on the strengths. Either way, we must lead them to find what works best for them and get the results they expect.