I agree with Anne, that understanding your team-mates is a critical element of working successfully as a team. Of the three empathy building excercises she recommends, I think active listening is the most important. Self awareness and the ability to take feedback are both excellent tools to understand how you view and interact with others, but active listening is the best way to understand what another person is saying or feeling. We have a tendency to wait for our turn to talk, especially during problem solving activities. This can lead to missed opportunities, misunderstandings, and cause frustration among team members. By engaging in active listening we can learn a lot about the subject, and our team.
This article had many simliar suggestions to the first, however it did have a surprising insight that I liked a lot. There is a concept in sociology called Dunbar's number which describes the number of people any one person can have personal feelings and social relationships with. On one side of the argument, the believers of Dunbar's number argue that we can only truly empathize with a small circle of people. The other side argues that empathy is like memory; the more it is used the more effective it is. This article discussed becoming curious about strangers. I feel like this is an extremely effective way to argue against the Dunbar number concept. Anyone can spend time getting to know and relate to strangers, and in doing so, exercise their ability to empathize with others.
I have worked in collaborative environments for the last several years and empathy has been an important part of making the teams work. Process improvement initiatives deal primarily with the people whos jobs the improvements are effecting, and many times the improvements are not universally accepted. It was important to me to be empathetic with the employees whos job I was changing, and listen to how the changes effected them.
Empathy can help build better software in a couple ways. First, understanding the needs of the end users of a program. By listening and truly understanding what the purpose of the program is for the user a programmer can better fit the code to their needs. Second, working as a group on a multifaceted problem is much easier if the team understands each other's skills and can communicate effectively. This is why empathy is so important for working as a team. A team is only as strong as its connection and only as effective as its communication.
During my first process improvement project I was tasked with re-designing the workflow of a particular class of employees. I worked with a team to develop what we thought was a perfect workflow, but when we moved to implement we got a lot of resistance from the employees. I had one of the employees take me on a gemba walk, to show me how they went about doing their job, and after listening to them I was better able to understand why they disliked the workflow we had developed. We included several of the people being affected on the team, and had them help redesign the process, and saw much more success when we implemented. Being able to empathize with those employees saved the project.
I have a hard time empathizing with a defeatist attitude. When someone says "why bother" or "we should give up" I can get extremely stubborn and controversial, even if they have a valid point. I am trying to work on hearing where they are coming from, and working with them to identify why they feel the way they do.