"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)
What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy helps me in every aspect of interacting with other people. In professional settings, empathy helps me understand what coworkers and customers need from me so that I can tailor the way I interact with them. This helps when collaborating with others, providing a service for others, or asking for help myself. The value of empathy can be easy to overlook or dismiss but it is crucial in communication with both conveying ideas in a way that will get you heard and with listening in an effective manner. Empathy has helped me work well with others as well as understand where other people are coming from when things do not go so smoothly.
How does empathy help you build better software?
Empathy can help build better software because it is a very collaborative field amongst developers and with clients. Developers must work together and understand each other's communication and working styles. Furthermore, developers need to be able to communicate with clients about their needs. Also, empathy helps developers understand how people of all different backgrounds will use their product. Finally, when building software, there is an ongoing flow of giving and receiving feedback which can go much smoother when people are using empathy.
Why is empathy important for working on a team?
When working on a team you need to be able to give and receive feedback. Empathy can help you give feedback in a compasionate way as well as take feedback gracefully which helps progress keep moving smoothly. Furthermore, teammates have different needs for communication. A lot of people are a bit more reserved and need some coaxing to speak up with their ideas. And in order to sell your own ideas to the rest of the team, you need to understand what their motivtions are so that you can cater your pitch specifically to them.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
I had a supervisor that could be quite abrasive and intense, any minor error was treated like a huge mistake and it was his mission to assign blame. While I did not condone his approach, I had to figure out the best way to interact with him through empathy. I did this by focusing on what he really needed from me which was to minimize mistakes and tell him immediately if I made a mistake so that it could addressed right away. Some of my coworkers would try to hide their mistakes which usually just made things worse. Furthermore, empathy helped me to not take it personally when this supervisor was abrasive because I understood that his anger was more about his stress than my mistake.
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 find it most difficult to empathize in a professional setting when I'm dealing with someone who is really crossing the line and becoming abusive. After years of working in customer service, I've had a few interactions with customers who are overly rude. In these situations, empathy helped remind me that I don't know the customer may have going on in their life that may be the root cause of their overreaction which helps me not take it personally. I've also found that a lot of times when people are upset they just want to rant a little bit and sometimes it helps to just be quiet and listen. Another trick is to change the communiation medium either from phone to email or vice versa. This gives everyone a little bit of time to cool off and some people will change this attitude dramatically when you do this. But it's still always a challenging and super uncomfortable situation.