Greg Hoy of Happy Cog has written an awesome blog post about being a great user experience designer: “Good work isn’t enough”.  Greg is right: creating the most amazing designs (and research) isn’t sufficient for you to advance in your career.  You also have to be a good person to work with.  You have to be a good team member.  Greg lists several points of what makes a great designer, including being respectful, being patient, and put in extra effort with no strings attached.

Greg says that this applies to people who ” work in an agency or web department within an organization”, but I think that it’s a lot wider than that.  I think it definitely applies to anyone in user experience, and quite possibly anyone in software engineering at all.