When I failed but learned

I failed to build a relationship with a key contributor which led to a lot of frictions and slowed down my own growth.

I worked in an engineering team. The team had an established senior engineer. My personal take on the engineer is that they were a) strongly opinionated, b) unempathetic in terms of how they deliver feedback, and c) very smart, and source of technical learning for others, including me.

I failed to take easily a) and b) and work on our relationship. I think it was my ego that didn’t let it go. Instead, I took a defensive and sometimes combative approach to our interactions.

As a result, it created constant frictions on projects we worked on together, frustration, a lot of baggage which was harder to carry forward.

Eventually, I left the team for a better opportunity. At the same time, I didn’t want to be in such a situation again. I reflected on what went wrong and what I should do differently.

Now I avoid falling into trap of being offended by someone's personal styles and become curious and focus on what I can learn from them. This mindset helped me to build great relationships with different people, grow and never be frustrated.