The mindset shift that grows a great gym team
John-Paul Rahme, Co-Founder of XODA · 3 min read
Most gym owners are perfectionists — it's part of why they succeed, and part of what holds their teams back. John-Paul Rahme calls this the hardest leadership lesson he's had to learn.
“It's hard to be a good leader and a perfectionist at the same time. You have to accept and be okay with people making mistakes. The tendency is to jump in and fix problems — that's me — but you've got to give people enough rope. You have to take an investment view on people: like buying a share today, it takes three, four, five years to mature. Give people enough time to grow into an asset that can really impact your business — and understand it's very rare that you employ someone and it clicks straight away.”
If you jump in every time a staff member is on the wrong path, they never learn to find the right one — and you become the bottleneck for your own business. The fix isn't lowering your standards; it's lengthening your timeline. Give people room (enough that they can't do serious damage, enough that they can genuinely grow), and treat their development as a multi-year return, not a this-week test.
Make it practical
- Give clear expectations, then step back — let people own outcomes and occasionally get them wrong.
- Judge development over quarters and years, not days.
- Free your own time from firefighting by systemising the operational detail, so letting go doesn't mean things fall over.
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