ABOVE AVERAGE PROFESSIONALS HAVE special talents. At the beginning, I define talent and aptitude as innate potential and distinguish them from the things we can learn. We can learn specialist knowledge in the same way as we can learn soft skills. Our talents, on the other hand, are innate. That's why it's so important that we know exactly what our own talents are. We will return to the basic knowledge presented here when we look more closely at employee development in Part Two. After all, if we don't know our own talents, how can we identify the talents of our employees? Self‐awareness is a prerequisite for successful personnel development.

The principle of “using strengths” is about using our own strengths in a targeted way for our job in order to achieve good, or better yet, very or exceptionally good results. The principle of “using strengths” aims at using already existing strengths and talents. Unfortunately, many managers are weakness oriented. They point out employees' weaknesses and continuously pointed out. It should be obvious that motivation falls by the wayside. Why are so many people weakness‐oriented?

They have taken their schooling into their professional lives. Our school systems are mostly aimed at identifying the mistakes of students. Ergo, the biggest goal of a student is to avoid mistakes. The same is often true in child‐rearing. Parents punish their children when they “misbehave.” Thus, children avoid “mistakes.” The principle of “reward and punishment” also works with animals. Dogs are rewarded for certain behavior with a treat. This Pavlovian conditioning may lead to the desired behavior under certain circumstances, but it fails to recognize that behind some supposed misbehavior of a human being there is a hidden strength in a completely different area. Instead of promoting this strength, however, it is neglected and not developed.

Incidentally, error avoidance is often a reason many people do not take action or are not action oriented. If you don't act, you don't make mistakes. It is as simple as that. Let's analyze the geniuses of the last epochs: What do Goethe, Mozart, Picasso, and other successful people in world history have in common? They all focused on their strengths. They became experts in one field. They made the most of their strengths. Success does not lie in versatility, but in concentrating on strengths. But how do you recognize your strengths? Our school systems are designed to grade students on their verbal intelligence and logical‐mathematical intelligence. However, Howard Gardner found that there are a total of eight different basic intelligences. For many professions, the combination of different intelligences is necessary to perform them with above‐average success. According to Alexander Christiani and Frank Scheelen, talent is the combination of ten basic intelligences and possibly other personality traits that enable people to excel in a particular field of activity. In their book “Stärken stärken – Talente entdecken, entwickeln und einsetzen” (Strengths – Discovering, Developing and Using Talents), they deal extensively on the topic of using strengths. Referring to Howard Gardner's eight basic intelligences, Christiani and Scheelen summarize a total of ten intelligences in a table. In doing so, they give examples of the central characteristics, typical occupational groups, and prominent representatives. Table 4.1 is based on Christiani and Scheelen and gives an overview of ten different basic intelligences of people.

Even though Gardner acknowledged the spiritual intelligence, or existential intelligence, he only added the natural history skills to his original seven intelligences later on. The associative‐creative intelligence does not originate from Gardner.

Professionals indisputably have their talents in the linguistic intelligences and the mathematical‐logical intelligences.

In the past, it was important for professionals and their employees to have both linguistic and mathematical‐logical intelligence. In the age of digitalization and disruption, I believe this is only a necessary condition, but in itself not a sufficient one if we want our professional practices to continue to flourish in the future. Associative‐creative intelligence plays a key role in successfully mastering the complexity of a changing environment. Until now, associative‐creative intelligence has been rather frowned upon in an auditor's working environment that is highly structured on the basis of checklists. An employee of an auditing practice could not make a career if they were a creative lateral thinker. As a rule, well adapted employees who act in line with their firm are successful. In a daily work routine dominated by checklists and structured workflows, associative thinking is not a top priority. Most professionals are also not assumed to be creative people. They don't like to leave familiar thought patterns and have a challenging time with change. However, in an environment that is changing ever faster, resilience is an important quality. Often, resilient people are associative‐creative people.

According to Christiani and Scheelen, associative‐creative intelligence comprises three elements:

• The ability to associate freely and make new connections without reference to causality, order, or meaning.
• The ability to associate and connect and to produce novel compositions in diverse ways and by different means.
• The ability to block out concepts, labels, and conclusions in order to enter the world of direct perception.

Our educational system has not yet recognized that associative‐creative intelligence is likely the most important intelligence for mastering the challenges of the future and of digitalization. This would be an important starting point for comprehensive educational reform in our school system. What is not demanded and promoted in schools must be replaced by companies. Think tanks and other institutions aim their focus precisely on empowering employees to be associative and creative.

In an age of digitalization, where information is becoming less of a bottleneck, the ability to innovatively link data into meaningful content is increasingly becoming a critical success factor. Data analytics, artificial intelligence, and machine learning are becoming key factors in future economic success. Added to this is the ability to think outside of existing rules. This is particularly difficult for professionals, as they are used to thinking and acting on the basis of (legal) rules.

The principle of leveraging strengths has major consequences for us and our employees. This applies to training, employee selection, job creation, staffing, performance appraisal, and potential analysis. The starting point is a comprehensive analysis of talents, or our various intelligences. There are now a number of different test procedures that make it possible to identify our own strengths and those of our employees. It makes sense to use test procedures that can identify the aforementioned forms of intelligence.

Does the principle of strength utilization mean that professionals should ignore their own weaknesses, or those of their employees? The answer is clearly no! You must know both your own weaknesses and those of your employees in order to be sure that you, or your employees do not predominantly perform activities in which it would be disastrous if this weakness were to dominate their workplace. The goal must always be to ensure that people are deployed where they can contribute their strengths. Weaknesses should be managed in such a way that they do not become an impediment.

Malik speaks decidedly against people changing their personalities in his new edition “Managing Performing Living”. His reasoning is convincing: By their thirties, when many people are in leadership positions, their personality structures are solidified in such a way that changes very rarely take place anymore.

In psychology, the term personality is not defined uniformly. It is often defined as the sum of all behavioral characteristics of a person. Science distinguishes between largely unchangeable (traits) and changeable personality characteristics (also known as states). The traits of a person have a stable quality. Among these are genetic predispositions, largely unchangeable basic structures, such as a person's anxiety. States are environmentally determined and changeable traits that are influenced by socialization, culture, and situational conditions. These are transient states, such as being afraid.

Thomas Staller and Cornelia Kirschke write in “The ID 37 Personality Analysis: Importance and Effect of Life Motives for Efficient Self‐Direction” that we remain true to ourselves even when we change. They claim that people only change within their personality. People who believe that they have changed fundamentally in their personality and claim that they are a completely different person today than they were in the past are usually mistaken. Christian E. Elger writes in his book “Neuroleadership” on the stability and changeability of personality that genetic traits influence a person's character by 30‐60%. The rest is socially acquired and can therefore be changed again.

That is why the environment in which one stays in predominantly both professionally and privately is especially important. This applies to every phase of life. Due to the social environment in childhood and adolescence, many personality traits are already highly developed by the age of about 20, so that a change is only possible with a correspondingly great will of one's own. This does not mean that people beyond the age of 20 can no longer change their behavior. Behavioral changes relate to personality traits that can be changed. Personality traits are closely related to certain behavior patterns of a person. Behavior patterns, in turn, are strongly influenced by a person's motives, which we will deal with more in depth in Chapter 6, Action Orientation.

Behavioral changes will only take place when a person decides for themselves that they want to change something in their life. In essence, this is about one's own personality development. To use the words of Nikolaus B. Enkelmann again, “Nothing changes unless I change.” Consequently, these behavioral changes will only occur if you yourself want them to. Certainly, this change can come from an external impulse. Events, or people can influence you. Anyone who once wanted to lose weight, or stop smoking knows that they will only succeed at all if the person really wants it. Extrinsic motivation alone will never lead to success. Only intrinsic motivation will.

Malik says that changing people is not the task of management: “The task of management is to take people as they are, to find out their strengths and, by designing their tasks accordingly, give them the opportunity to work where they can perform and achieve results with their strengths.”

Accordingly, Malik does not see it primarily as the task of companies that they should further develop their employees in terms of their personalities, but rather that employees should be deployed in alignment with their strengths. I share this principle in essence. However, the growth principle is already inherent in nature. Think of trees which, if they are healthy, grow year after year. This growth affects both the branches and roots in the earth, which are not visible. Similarly, people should develop in personality year after year. A conditio sine qua non for this is, however, that the professional wants this personality growth equally for themselves. Incidentally, this book aims precisely at the aspect of personal development. In it, the soft skills that are valuable for professionals are presented in combination with their own individual management and the management of employees. If these were unchangeable personality traits, there would be little point in presenting these soft skills. They are all soft skills that are more, or less easy to learn or train for. In the end, success is also a question of character, or personality.

The master plan for a strength‐centered life is to first know your own strengths in detail. You can either have these determined via various test procedures, or also discover them relatively easily via self‐analysis. Analyze what comes easily to you. Often, these are the things that you are particularly good at and that belong to your strengths. However, it is often the case that what comes easily to you does not stand out to you, precisely because it comes easily to you.

The principle of results orientation and the use of strengths are closely related. If you want to achieve exceptionally satisfactory results, you have to make the best possible use of your strengths. In doing so, you must also accept weaknesses. Weaknesses cannot be eliminated on a regular basis, but they must be managed, or compensated for. Wanting to develop one's personality from year to year should be part of every person's lifelong learning process. The starting point is always an intrinsic motivation and never an extrinsic motivation.