Some people will be hard hard to work with and I find that they have a big ego, an inflated sense of self. These egophiles will need to get the spotlight on themselves and what they’ve contributed. You’re never right, you just don’t have the understanding/experience/corporate-pedigree that they have. Egophiles make sure people know how important they are and how much everyone should respect them. They usually get some choice nicknames and many gripes, but what’s surprising is when other folks gripe about them too and validate or expand your opinion. I enjoy this moment of shared realization and comradireyy (at this egophile’s expense) as complaining can be useful to blow off steam and validate an opinion. But then what? You can’t simply avoid people for forever.

Without poetics, I’ve found the best solution is to let this egophile inflate themselves past their worth. Trying to shut them down publicly or privately or cutting their time so they don’t force the spotlight on themselves or any other type of strangling their self-importance will backfire on you. Instead let them soak in the spotlight and let them overpromise, overshare, over-focus the changes on themselves…and write it down and share publicly. Egophiles need to say their going to accomplish big goals once they’ve accomplished something - they need others to know that what they’ve just done isn’t the end of their enormous contributions. So write them down and share them in a public form - notes, slack updates, etc… Seems small and takes time but ensures they are held accountable.

Now if you are managing this person - tell them to stop or fire them. This type of behavior is cancer to a team.

I didn’t use AI for this, but did plug it into a word counter/spell checker. I thought ego-phial was a made up word but then google told me that’s how uneducated people spell it