Software Development – Ego Driven – Part III
In almost all white-collar professions, we have to deal with Ego, Ego is a trait mainly driven by superiority and some inflated feeling of self. Ego is a main driver of one’s growth and without ego there is no improvement. But ego is very complex subject, I’m here try to present my thoughts and how to work with Egoistic environments. Ego is great tool for improvements hence can be used as weapon whenever required. Too much Ego is not okay because that’s main team work killer. As a rule of thumb, too much egoistic person should be an individual contributor like sales, decision making and use the egoistic to beat outside market competition. Here are some more points about egoistic.
Polite or Bully: It is very hard to understand whether a person really bullies or showing bully behavior out of ego. A same person act very polite with “inferior” than one and act very aggressively or bullying with “superior” than one. But the reality is all are equal and everything is illusion that one is above and below. It is very tough to work with those but flexibility and showing some weakness of our own to egoistic person helps and improves team environment. One interesting story is, I know a sales guy who is very egoistic and very successful but always do some mistake in total price or ask some stupid questions like “John, how many zeros for millions”. The secret is he wants to work with others very friendly manner hence some time act like he is also a prone to mistakes and he is not a super human.
Can Do or I can do everything: Can do attitude is really great and positive but we can’t do everything possibly under the sun. We have to depend on others and our success relies on how others also willing to working with us. For example, Software we have initiation, plan, design, code, test, deployment, support phase and each one required some team effect from everybody. Even though we were experienced developers sometime we need a support from a system admin who joined just today, so some level of politeness required to get some help from him/her.
Balancing Ego: Actually we are all ego by birth, but getting mature and interacting with others help us to taming or balancing ego. My best advise to use ego as weapon or we are in team environment and want to balance ego, we have to start using “we” instead of “I” and share credit with others.
But any ways not all are same, we are all having different traits and Ego is not a bad one, as i said it is major factor for improvements and use it as weapon but not always. Actually my tactics would be, when ever i play cricket i would be always with non-tamed-egoistic caption because i always want to be with winning team. Here I’m ending my psychology side of software development series.
Polite or Bully: It is very hard to understand whether a person really bullies or showing bully behavior out of ego. A same person act very polite with “inferior” than one and act very aggressively or bullying with “superior” than one. But the reality is all are equal and everything is illusion that one is above and below. It is very tough to work with those but flexibility and showing some weakness of our own to egoistic person helps and improves team environment. One interesting story is, I know a sales guy who is very egoistic and very successful but always do some mistake in total price or ask some stupid questions like “John, how many zeros for millions”. The secret is he wants to work with others very friendly manner hence some time act like he is also a prone to mistakes and he is not a super human.
Can Do or I can do everything: Can do attitude is really great and positive but we can’t do everything possibly under the sun. We have to depend on others and our success relies on how others also willing to working with us. For example, Software we have initiation, plan, design, code, test, deployment, support phase and each one required some team effect from everybody. Even though we were experienced developers sometime we need a support from a system admin who joined just today, so some level of politeness required to get some help from him/her.
Balancing Ego: Actually we are all ego by birth, but getting mature and interacting with others help us to taming or balancing ego. My best advise to use ego as weapon or we are in team environment and want to balance ego, we have to start using “we” instead of “I” and share credit with others.
But any ways not all are same, we are all having different traits and Ego is not a bad one, as i said it is major factor for improvements and use it as weapon but not always. Actually my tactics would be, when ever i play cricket i would be always with non-tamed-egoistic caption because i always want to be with winning team. Here I’m ending my psychology side of software development series.
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