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Former Paralympian brings sporting skills to the boardroom

After a successful career as a Paralympic swimmer, Marc Woods is now bringing the skills he developed in the pool into the boardroom.

Aged 17, Marc was diagnosed with bone cancer and was forced to have his leg amputated. Rather than becoming disheartened by his disability, Marc turned it into strength, and made the active decision to see just how good he could be.

“Not knowing how long I had, I wanted to make the most of whatever time that was going to be so I started to look for things I could excel at,” explains Marc. “I’d previously been a lazy county swimmer, so that seemed like the natural thing to do.”

With his fathers support, Marc soon discovered he could swim better with one leg than two, and went on to represent Great Britain at 5 Paralympic Games, winning 12 medals, 4 of which were gold.

Training to become a professional athlete requires remarkable levels of insight, so after retiring as a swimmer, he decided on a second career as a professional motivational speaker. Marc now works closely with business executives to improve their own skills.

“Not everyone is a natural born business leader, and being an athlete is the same,” Marc continues. “While you’re a good sportsman, you might not be leading people or communication with them in the right way, and in the course of my career as an athlete I learnt these things on the job.

“Because people understand sport and the mechanics of it, you can comfortably draw the parallels between the two disciplines, and it can be an incredibly effective mechanism to get people to reconsider how they behave in the office.”

At an event at Deloitte North East in Newcastle, Marc was keen to stress the qualities needed to create a successful business leader and an effective workforce.

“None of us are brilliant at everything, and every leader here today will be good at certain things and less good at other things, and they need to think about playing to their strengths and looking at weaknesses.

“Ultimately business people have got to take personal responsibility – you can’t be a good leader if you aren’t fully delivering yourself. Equally you need to understand who is on your team – the guy who works on reception, the lady who serves the coffee – they all have a role to play.”

By speaking at these events, Marc hopes he will inspire others to reconsider their own behaviours to help them truly deliver.

“These all sound like small things, but added together they can have a massive impact, and if everyone here can be a fraction better and a fraction closer to what can be their optimum performance, that can have a large accumulative effect.”

“I’ve got a desire to be as good as I can be at speaking, and that desire and willingness to push myself all the time is definitely what I learnt from sport, and it makes a huge different to my day-to-day work now.”

This was posted in Bdaily's Members' News section by Ruth Mitchell .