Empathy and having an empathetic viewpoint is one of those abilities that, once you learn, becomes indispensable. It helps with personal, social, and work relationships. It can contribute to the successful navigation of interpersonal conflict, can contribute to the accurate understanding of others and can enhance your communication skills among other things. I grew up with two psychologists for parents, so maybe I had a bit of help with learning empathy through the way the raised me but I think it is hard to say that for certain. At any rate, I think it has been an ability that has most assuredly been developed over the years. It helps me with communication and conflict resolution, which are both important skills for every day life at work and home.
Mathieu Turpault's article, while more about design, absolutely sums this up. Empathy can help a software developer get into the client or customer or intended user's head and design the software based around their needs. It can reveal design flaws and opportunies for unique improvements to be made. It can help widen a product's user base by tweaking it to work for different populations. Empathy can help you improve an idea of what your company "thinks" should be their next product line because it works for reason 1, 2, and 3 to a better product after consulting with clients and their needs.
Empathy helps with giving and taking feedback, which is all-important while working on a team. It helps promote pure effectiveness, and when everyone on the team can practice active listening, will improve communication as well. With any workplace, especially where you regularly closely with a team, conflict will arise. Without empathic skills it could well bring productivity levels down, an outcome everyone should want to avoid.
I worked in a Kindergarten in Munich, Germany up until a month ago as of the writing of this assignment. As you can imagine, having to watch over a group of 25 three to six year olds can be stressful even with three teachers in the room. It can be especially stressful when one or two of those fellow teachers are sick or on vacation or when you have unhappy parents to deal with. When conflict arose, I would always do my best to understand that the other teacher was just as stressed as me, or the parent was coming from a place where they wanted the best for their child and actively listening and imparting that understanding was always the easiest way to come to a solution to whatever problem there was.
When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings? How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
Heightened emotional states are always the most difficult to be empathetic in. Being empathetic actually fires "mirror neurons" in your brain so you actually get a sort of echo of whatever the person you are interacting with is feeling. When you are in a heightened state of emotion your brain fires neurons in neural pathways that hijack your attention, limiting what you can pay attention to outside of whatever the emotions have to do with. Learning to compartmentalize your own stress is difficult, but achievable. Practicing mindfulness about your "stressed-out modes" while you are not in them can help train yourself to be mindful while you are in them and compartmentalize your emotions to deal with the situation at hand.