Frustrated With Coworkers? The Clue You Don’t Want To Hear…
Filed Under Human Factors, Personal Improvement
Being frustrated with your coworkers from time-to-time is not unique to any single occupation or person. Everyone has days where they want to severely hurt the person in the next cube. The question that begs to be answered: What drives us to these feelings?
The obvious answer that everyone would like to shout at the top of their lungs is – The Other Person Is Being An Idiot!!!. Although this maybe the case, why does it bother you so much? Why not chuckle at the poor fool and move along with your day? It is my belief that there are 3 core reasons why, but the last one you might not be ready to hear…
They Have A Passionate Personality
A lot of people I know are insanely passionate about what they do to a fault (this includes myself). As a common result, communication with insanely passionate folks tend take on a feeling of almost arguing. As the saying goes:
…this is good, now that we are arguing we are finally talking…
Unfortunately, both passionate and lesser passionate coworkers will always perceive the other person as being blunt, stubborn, or even a verbal bully. Your understanding of this personality type might ease the pain when having to deal with them as you can concentrate more on what they are attempting to say rather than how they are saying it.
Everyone Takes Personal Pride
Even including the most apathetic people that did sloppy work, I have never found someone that did not take some amount of personal pride in their work. This is especially true for our occupation since developers have a sense of “creation” in their work.
Where pride comes into play is not so much “who” you are talking with but more “what” the topic is about. If you are discussing a found bug, is there friction in the conversation because it occurred in your code? Is the other person being defensive because it happened in their code? Are you both being combative because you disagree on the solution?
You do not need to be a developer to have personal or professional pride in your work; however, this rub point occurs a lot in our occupation considering every conversation we have deals with the intellectual creation of another.
You Don’t Get Along With Yourself
Here is the one you are not ready to hear. You can’t stand yourself. Trust me, it’s true.
If you hate a person, you hate something in him that is part of yourself. What isn’t part of ourselves doesn’t disturb us. – Hermann Hesse
Like personal types tend not to work well together. Believe it or not, you do need a good balance of personality types and ideas. However, this is a tough pill to swallow because we all suffer from the same delusion that a bunch of clones of yourself would work faster and more efficient than any other group of people.
Being in a frustrating situation with coworkers is only natural; however, how frustrated you get is directly related to how well you understand the situation. If you keep your cool and give yourself some time to really analyze the situation, I bet you will find a very predictable human reaction behind it.
7 Responses to “Frustrated With Coworkers? The Clue You Don’t Want To Hear…”
[…] Leído en: Codesqueeze […]
as always: perfectly said.
it’s the managers responsibility to resolve conflicts and find good ways of releasing tension between people (esp. our work as Developers).
it’s not wrong to think pride about your work, but many times it’s a matter of choice rather then the most suitable solution for some case at certain time.
here comes in mind agility as one good way to make the work more as an environment; keeping in mind other useful points using Agile for managing a software project building.
[…] Frustrated with Coworkers? The Clue You Don’t Want to Hear… (Max Pool) […]
… while there is truth in all this, there is one option left out completely:
The one you cannot stand is a real bozo and nobody in the team can stand him because he cannot accomplish anything and is completely careless in what he does, and he shows no passion, pride or anything like that at all …
“it’s the managers responsibility to resolve conflicts and find good ways of releasing tension between people (esp. our work as Developers).”
@Osama: Whoa! Lets put the brakes on there for a second. You just passed the buck for getting along to the manager. I am a developer, and sometimes I don’t get along with everyone, but I never pass responsibility for me to get along with someone off to the manager. We just usually find a common ground and build on that. If that is not possible, we notify the manager that we have an issue we cannot resolve (or the team lead). If we have a real personality conflict that could result in fisticuffs, that is when the manager should get involved. BUT that still doesn’t put the responsibility squarely on the manager.
@Max: You never cease to amaze with your posts that are up front, in your face, here’s the truth, like it or not! Once again, another home run here!
@Alex – Simple. Fire those people.
I would totally ignore him if I didn’t have to clean up the messes he makes.