When you are dealing with other people in life, you need to treat them how you expect to be treated. Projecting a positive attitude will most of the time reflect it back at you. However, the world can present you challenges, and you have to handle them graciously, especially if you’re a team leader (Carpenter, Bauer, & Erdogan, 2010).

As a software engineer, you build the roadmap for other software developers to follow when constructing a software product. While a balanced combination of all five personality traits: Openness, Conscientiousness, Extraversion, Agreeableness, and Neuroticism is essential (2MinutePsychology, 2013), it is smart to adjust the dimension to suit based on the situation.

An essential personality trait as a software engineer would be openness. Being open with your team covers most of the spectrum. When you are engineering software, most of the time, you don’t have the complete picture instantly. On the one hand, this situation would require you to be open to receiving ideas, criticism, and suggestions. On the other hand, you will need to be transparent with your team about problems, evaluation, and cost (Iqbal, Aldaihani, Shah, 2019). Any software that does not establish this two-way route in openness will face many hurdles when dealing with his developers. While a software engineer might see the bigger picture, the developer sees the details and is the first in the line of offense (Iqbal, Aldaihani, Shah, 2019). Therefore, feedback from and to your developers is critical.

Openness can also streamline motivation, innovation, and trust. When you are honest, the team of developers wants to help you achieve the final goal because the benefits are clear on the table to everyone. Openness can also be a pillar for innovation, which is at the center of programming. The power of openness to achieve imagination and interest for your team can catalyze to produce the best product (Carpenter, Bauer, & Erdogan, 2010).

A smart team leader generally or a software engineer specifically can be at the center of innovation for their firm (Iqbal, Aldaihani, Shah, 2019). Through a routine practice of openness, the daily tasks at hand can make the workplace an enjoyable and pleasant bond based on trust and mutual respect.

Reference

Carpenter, M., Bauer, T., & Erdogan, B. (2010). Management Principles, v. 1.1. https://2012books.lardbucket.org/books/management-principles-v1.1/index.html.

2MinutePsychology. (2013, September 16). The big five personality model [Video]. YouTube.

Waude, A. (2017, May 8). Five-Factor Model Of Personality. Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://www.psychologistworld.com/personality/five-factor-model-big-five-personality#references

Iqbal, A., Aldaihani, A., Shah, A. (2019, October 12) International Journal of Innovative Technology and Exploring Engineering ISSN: 2278-3075, Volume-8 Issue-(IJITEE) Retrieved April 19, 2020, from https://www.ijitee.org/wp-content/uploads/papers/v8i12/J97550881019.pdf