People who try to gain an advantage by doing, saying or having “better things” than someone else practice the destructive behavior of one-upmanship.
How to defend?
Be non-defensive, refuse to participate, don’t engage in a power struggle where you resort to the same tactics, let the person suck all the oxygen out of the room.
Dealing with one-upmanship at work requires the ability to let everyone know that you are reinterpreting the attack on you as an attack on the problem making certain the other person knows you want to solve the problem and will establish some new ground rules.
In all of this, let the offender be aggressive while the solution is always non-aggressive.
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