Our mission is to unlock human potential by training a diverse, inclusive student body to succeed in high-fulfillment technical careers.
- Interpersonal skills (including empathy) have a direct, significant impact on your professional success.
- Empathy is a foundational interpersonal skill. Other skills, such as collaboration, communication, compromise all hinge on your ability to demonstrate empathy.
- Interpersonal skills, including empathy, can be developed and improved.
- Turing's mission (cited above) demands that we support students' development of technical and interpersonal skills.
Read two of the following articles/videos (we recommend all of them!) and reflect on these questions: why are we talking about empathy at a software development school? how can you develop the "skill" of empathy? and why should you care?
- "Why is Empathy Important for Design"
- "The Surprising (Nontechnical) Skill You Need to Succeed in Tech", The Muse
- "Why Aren't We More Compassionate?", TED Talk (Daniel Goleman)
- "Can you teach people to have empathy?", BBC (Jun 29, 2015)
- "Three Kinds of Empathy", Daniel Goleman
- "The Importance of Empathy in Our Services-Centric, People-Oriented Economy", Wall Street Journal Blog (Oct 9, 2015)
After reading the articles above, create a gist on Github and reflect (4-6 sentences) on the following prompts.
- What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy is where I draw energy. Practicing empathy amongst other people who are practicing empathy helps me build a world as it should be, even as we navigate the world as it is. I am a very idealistic and optimistic person, I enjoy bringing newcomers into the fold and relating to people in concrete and personal ways. I was a community organizer for the last decade of my life - making sure we talk about something deeper and more intentional then weather and sports was my job! And best of all, I had the privilege of engaging and developing Womxn of Color. When I started at my organization, we had roughly 200 WOC that our organization engaged with, and high turn over of womxn of color on staff. By the time I left, I had grown our base to 3,000+ WOC, with 300 womxn of color that engaged with us in person regularly, and our entire organizing team that was hired were WOC leaders I had developed through my program, and even the new Executive Director was a woman of color. Empathy was the key that allowed me to make all the connections that I made, and create a reliable sense of comradery and morale that pulled us through some difficult transitions as a team.
- How does empathy help you build better software?
When we create software, we have to often think about how someone else will feel when they interact with the code that we contribute. Whether that is fellow coders that we are engaging with working towards a project or a client/customer that is experiencing our software. The better you can engage with another person's experience, the better you can anticipate code needs. Empathy is how our brains are naturally wired to interact with one another, and so the more we can engage that part for ourselves, the more capable we are to invest that energy into our code, our team culture, and our end product. It's funny, I'm often reminded about a time I cooked something in the kitchen that didn't come out "good." My mother asked me in Spanish, "Lo cocinaste con mala gana?" In other words, did you cook it resentfully? In my Puerto Rican house, we honestly believe that if you cook food with resentment in your heart, your food comes out bad. But if you cook the food with love in your heart, the food is delicious! I think there is coding that is created with love and coding that is created with resentment. And empathy is the only consistent method to ensure that we are producing better code.
- Why is empathy important for working on a team?
Creativity is such a key component of productive team-work dynamics. However, without empathy, creativity is just a superficial exercise. If you ask a room filled with people who haven't practiced empathy with one another and you ask them something as common as, "What do we want our customers to experience?" How can we expect them to connect with our customers if they cannot connect to each other? This is why I think that regular, and intentional exercises that encourage looking at your coworkers in the eyes, acknowledging their presence, requiring every voice to be present in the room, there are all kinds of specific activities that invite intentional acts of empathy to be experienced by the team members so that they can practice connecting with each other, and in the end connect with our customer.
- Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
Once, I had a co-worker who was also a mom standing outside of our All-Staff Annual Training. She had been outside for about 30 minutes. She was alone, she was visibly upset, and I remembered from past conversations that she had sent her son to be with his father for the summer. Remembering how it impacted me to be separated from my son, I left the training and went to assist her. In about 10 minutes, I was able to resolve her situation, calm her down, and bring her back into the All-Staff Training. When confronted by my supervisor over why I chose to leave my spot during training to go reach out to my co-worker, I responded that no one else had gone to go check on her. I explained that I knew what it felt like to miss your child (to be homesick in your own home) and that in the end, the All-Staff training was incomplete without the whole staff present. My main question was why didn't others feel the need to go and support her?
- When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
I believe I find myself in situations where I am unable to manage how a lack of empathy is impacting me and the person I am connected with. Expressing my concerns in a "professional way" can feel very restricting and limiting, or even forbidden. I have improved my skills when faced with these scenarios by introducing facilitation techniques I have adopted over time. I have solution-oriented methods that not only resolve a concern but also develop better modes of communication.