Empathy helps me understand that other people may have different feelings and motivations than I do. Trying to find out the differences in experiences and expectations helps me to adjust my own expectations. Building that understanding is key to compassionate communication and cooperation, which means smooth operating.
The global economy is now mostly services-based. The communicative relationship between businesses and customers is more two-way than it has ever been in history. Technology platforms are empowering and ultimately, users don't want bad software. Listening and understanding who will be using the software means that there are more happy people and it can increase monetary value, jobs and even quality of life.
Let's be real here. Work is not all fun and games. Sometimes to hit deadlines and demands, everybody really has to buckle down and work. Work goes a lot more smoothly when everybody can level with each other.
I personally think that everyone has an obligation to consider that everyone else that they are working with are just human beings, not super-human or humanoid (or forbid, "sub-human").
What that means is that everyone is going to have some sort of external/internal matrix of pressures that chip away at their capacity to do work. People get tired! And if someone is just kind of hard to work with, people will get tired of working with them. Maybe they'll just get tired of work and quit if something better comes along.
Empathy is only one part of the "third space" attributes that complement the STEM discipline: (empathy), adaptability, cultural competence, intellectual curiosity and 360 degree thinking. Current modes of business understanding and operation emphasize STEM domains but not third space domains.
What this means is that these skills are necessary now and will be more critical in the future. Future leaders (and teammembers) who are well-versed in both domains will be the good ones to follow and work with.
I was a cook for a long time in restaurants. We are in the "back of the house." Orders come in on tickets and I was lucky to be working in a kitchen where tickets were written down and hung up by a server instead of printed out by a machine.
We don't see the guests, the customers in the "front of house." Mostly, we just know them by their tickets. Our restaurant could maybe be described as a "Yes-steraunt" - we will modify out any menu item for people's dietary needs or restrictions.
For us then, we know about all the common food allergies and diet patterns. Vegan. Dairy-free. Gluten-free. No onions. No garlic. Nightshade allergies. The list goes on... Early on I took a very firm stance with the front of house staff that I was always going to be willing to answer questions about our ingredients.
Once, a server came to me with a very specific question. She had a guest who wanted to know how long our cheese was aged. The guest claimed to only be able to eat cheese that was aged for more than a certain amount of months.
She came to me after another cook dismissed their concerns, saying "that's not a real thing!" I knew it was a real thing though because one of my close friends has a litany of dietary things and the aged cheese thing is totally real.
But whether or not any of us knew if that was an extant allergy, the important thing was just to go look and find the answer. No attitude, no snark, no pushback. There was someone who wanted to pay us to make food for them and they had a question about our ingredients. If their body literally cannot handle something we put in our food, we can leave it out, easy!
Being able to rightfully attend to our guest's needs meant that we could fulfill a transactional relationship with them. But more importantly, I supported my co-worker by not dismissing their needs as well.
When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
Most of my professional setting experience was in restaurants. When I was learning wait-service, the best training recommendation I got was to be "aloof, but not too aloof."
There's definitely a balance to strike between being a detached and engaged in interpersonal relationships. Guests don't really need to know all the details of my personal life, but if they are telling me about their life story, I can still relate. It helped me a lot to know when to be engaged on a personal level with my guests and my tips definitely improved as I became more personable.
I never found it hard to be personable with my co-workers because they were constants in the environment. But sometimes I think I took a harder line in being detached with respect to my personal life with them. One reason was that a lot of us also shared housing situations. I wanted to keep work and life separate. But really I just wanted to stay "professional" and avoid gossip.
It made me come off as stand-offish or cold, especially to new workers. It just takes time for me to "warm up" to other people sometimes before I feel like I can let them get to know me. I understand now that my teammates are also my friends and since I saw them all the time, they were a part of my life too. Mostly, I allowed myself to hang out with my co-workers outside of work, where I felt more comfortable on that personal level.