Personality Conflicts

Last semester professor Wiley had all the producers go through a similar project as production one to better prepare us for the current semester. And while that whole project was a success overall there were a few bumps along the way, the most noticeable for me is how I was almost undermined as Product Owner by one of the other team members due to a personality conflict.

See, I have a pretty introverted personality, I don’t like causing problems, I don’t like negative conflict, and I don’t like being assertive due to the fact that I do not have a firm understanding of the line between assertive and productive and being a jerk. Now, this is something that I have been working on, but I tend to lean on an indirect form of leadership. Which became a problem as another teammate had a much more direct form of leadership and was extraverted so he could get his voice out and overpower mine. So, while this was not an upfront and in your face conflict, it was still present. In meetings, he would constantly talk over me or cut me off in the middle of a thought and being a bit of a wet blanket back then I did not have the spine to talk back. So, this lead to me keeping more quiet and letting certain things slide, some of which were important to the games overall success. However, this conflict ended possibly as I eventually gained enough courage to tell this team member how his behavior was affecting me.

Thankfully he was mature enough to listen and even concede that I had a point and apologized. However, this came during our Postmortem, so it was a little to late to do anything to affect the project, but as I said the project as a whole was a success. If I could go back in time I would try and bring this up earlier in development, so it was out there and fixed in time to improve the overall team dynamic and the quality of work done as a whole. Yet overall this could have gone much worse and I am happy I was able to reach any kind of conclusion with this team member, even if it was after the project was over. In the end, we both learned something about ourselves and how we can improve over all, so that’s a win in my book.