- What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
- Working in a lot of sales and customer service positions has really opened my mind as to how important empathy is in assisting those in need of help. I prefer not to "sell" to someone, but rather discover a solution whether its a win for just them or a "win" for me as well. In which knowing that they leave fully satisfied is enough of a "win" for me.
- How does empathy help you build better software?
- Building better software, to me that means the software will serve the user better than they could have imagined themselves. Empathy can be a strong tool to put you in the shoes of the user, to relate to them and imagine what better would mean to them.
- Why is empathy important for working on a team?
- With empathy in mind, teams can put in their best efforts to resolve conflict and come to a better understanding of one another in a constructive and beneficial way.
- Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
- I had a colleague at our repair shop who was flustered all day about her situation with her SO. After noticing how frazzled she was we began to conversate about what was wrong. And I asked her to try and take the perspective of her SO, in which after talking it out there was some miscommunication of emotion between the two of them. My colleague was very relieved to get it out into the open and off her chest and to have someone not push blame on either of them and to help her find a plan of action to patch their communication.
- When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
- For me personally it's difficult to empathize and see the view of others when they pose as ignorant or stand-offish. So I need to work on looking past that emotional hurdle and to see if we can come to an understanding or common ground upon which we can stand and have constructive and meaningful discussion.