Read: management & leadership 6: Empowerment through Core Qualities

Each individual has positive qualities. Searching for these positive traits and strengthening them is called empowerment. Ofman's theory on core quadrants presents a method for identifying and strengthening each individual's positive characteristics.

Each core quadrant comprises four concepts: core qualities, pitfalls, challenges and allergies.

Core Quality Pitfall   Allergy Challenge

Core Qualities

A core quality is an individual's specific strength, something he/she is good at, or for which he/she is often praised by others. To the person him- or herself it is a matter of course: anyone can do it. It is an inherent quality that can either be suppressed or developed.

Examples:

Decisiveness, considerateness, carefulness, courage, orderliness, flexibility

Pitfalls

A pitfall is a transformation of a core quality; not the opposite, but 'too much of a good thing'. The positive aspect goes too far, turning a strength into a weakness.

Examples:

Helpful becomes meddling.
Careful becomes fussy.
Flexible becomes capricious.

Yet there is a positive quality behind every transformation. The underlying core quality can be found using a negative label (pitfall).

Examples:

Someone who acts inflexibly, may have decisiveness as a core quality.
Someone with an unyielding attitude may be a go-getter at the core.
N.B.: this concerns behaviour: an individual is not really inflexible, but he or she behaves inflexibly.

Challenge

A challenge is the positive opposite of a pitfall. Having identified the negative, transformed behaviour, one can start looking for the challenge.

Examples:

In a nagging person, the positive opposite is patience (and the core quality decisiveness).
And: in a capricious person, the challenge is orderly behaviour (and the core quality flexibility).

The core quality and the challenge are complementary qualities. The objective is to strike a balance between the two. If the challenge is underdeveloped, the core quality must be improved to find the balance.

Example:

It is not necessary to become less decisive, but to develop more patience, resulting in a patient decisiveness without nagging.
Or: find a balance between flexibility and orderliness.

Allergy

The core qualities can also be used to identify potential conflicts with the environment. People tend to be allergic to too much of their own challenge in other persons. The allergy is 'too much of a good thing' of the challenge, as well as the negative opposite of the core quality.

Example:

The negative opposite of the core quality decisiveness is passiveness. Too much patience may also degenerate into passiveness.

The more people are confronted with their own allergy, the greater the risk they run of ending up in their own pitfall.

Example:

The decisive individual starts nagging in response to too much passiveness in another individual.

Example of two core quadrants:

straightforward aloof   obsequious empathizing

decisive nagging   passive patient

Learning from encounters using the core quadrant

• What happens when two similar people, e.g. two decisive individuals, meet? They often respect each other. In certain circumstances, they can turn out to be two nagging people. They can identify each other's pitfalls.
• What happens when two opposites meet? Often this results in contempt, characteristic of a situation in which an individual is confronted with his or her allergy. That confrontation makes the individual vulnerable, tending to end up in his or her own pitfall. This awareness may help the individual to identify his/her own pitfall.
• People are usually allergic to the 'too much of a good thing' they themselves need most (their own challenge). In other words, they can learn from people they have a hard time getting along with.
• When an individual encounters someone whose behaviour he or she is allergic to, that individual may also consider such behaviour as the 'too much of a good thing' of the other's core quality, his or her pitfall. Looking at it from this perspective may serve as an instrument for an individual to help the other person find the core quality behind that pitfall. If this is successful, that core quality may represent a perfect basis of cooperation with one's own core quality.