Dealing With 10 Coworker Personality Conflicts The Economic Times Business News

In an ideal world, you get to work in a palatial, heavenly setting while you pursue your professional dreams of being CFO, controller, investment banking managing director, or private equity partner. Saint Peter (better known as human resources) lets you pass through the pearly gates with ease during interviews and you can treasure your professional lifestyle living in the clouds. You are constantly fed fresh grapes and berries as you sit on your golden rocking chair contemplating whether to give the green light on multimillion dollar projects.

In reality, your workplace is one place where people can be nasty, difficult, dysfunctional and downright brutish – and you still have to deal with them in a calm and professional manner. If this sounds like something you are dealing with – and quitting isn’t an option – we’ll help you get through these 10 common coworker dysfunctions to help you bring a little bit of heaven back down to earth.

1. Arrogance
Arrogance is the byproduct of unhealthy levels of pride and ego. In technical fields such as finance and accounting, it is imperative that professionals continuously learn new things and increase their knowledge base. Finance professionals also need to get along with a wide audience within the company, because they collect data and reports from a diverse set of groups.

Warning signs of arrogance include:
The tendency to waste people’s time by pontificatingLooking for criteria other than business performance as a measuring device with peers (such as tenure, academic pedigree and prestige of career titles)Habitually putting people down in order to artificially prop oneself upBlatant disregard for the feelings of others, showing lack of maturity and emotional intelligenceFoul language, short sightedness and lack of tactIf you are arrogant, this puts a mental and psychological block on your mind that prevents you from learning important new data. After all, you already think so highly of yourself, why should you need to improve? How do you know that you have too much ego? Your level of confidence should be in proportion to the amount of preparation that you have put in.

Dealing with arrogant people takes a lot of patience and a great deal of self-control. Learning to identify the people who have this trait and avoiding them as much as possible will protect your own reputation, whereas confronting the arrogant person may only make you look worse.