Soft Skills for the Professional Services Industry

CHAPTER 4Leverage Strengths

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 ...