What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
- Empathy has played a huge role in my life. Before coming to Turing, I was a high school teacher and soccer coach and those jobs require immense amounts of empathy. It has helped me become a more patient and more understanding person. If I can put myself in the position of others and view things from their perspective, then I can successfully create a bond with them and we can cooperate in order to achieve a goal.
How does empathy help you build better software?
- Empathy helps me build better software because I can better understand how the software will affect different communities. By doing that, I can then adjust/modify the software to more accurately reflect the population using it. This also allows for more innovation. For example, if I develope a language software that allows the user to learn any language, it would be helpful to be empathetic to different types of learning. Some people are visual, auditory, intrapersonal, and/or kineasthetic learners and the more understand I am to that, the better the program can be in order to teach language.
Why is empathy important for working on a team?
- I think empathy is tremendously important when working with a team because no matter what, clashes are going to happen. The best way to resolve the conflicts is through empathetic thinking. Not everyone on a team will agree with eachother and everyone has different backgrounds so being empathetic will allow teammembers to cooperate more effectively. The more teammembers can relate/understand each other, the better. Everyone has strengths and weaknesses in the team and it is best if people recognize them. This allows the group to have a stronger connection and solve more problems.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
- When I was teaching high school, I had to display empathy everytime I wrote a lesson, cooperated with the 10/11th grade teams, and/or dealt with a situation with a student. One time I had to de-escalate a sitaution between a student and another teacher. The student came into my classroom crying during my off period because of what another teacher had said to her. I had to use my ability to empathize with her in order for her to calm down and feel better. I let her vent/explain the situation, told her I understand where she's coming from, and helped her take a step back from the situation. After about 45 minutes of letting her vent and release her frustrations in a safe space, she calmed down, thanked me, and went to her next class. Through this I was able to gain a better understanding of her and her perspective. Later that day the other teacher involved in the incident came to talk to me about what happened. I let this teacher do the same thing the student did and I was able to get both sides of the story without causing any more trouble. I think it was important for me to hear both sides without displaying judgement or supporting one over the other because it gave the problem a resolution instead of adding more fuel to the fire. This was helpful, not only just for me, but for both my student and my coworker.
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 be empathetic in a professional setting when a "professional" decides to not do their work and complain and look for easy answers that don't solve anything. I have experienced this many times before and my reactions have matured through the years. One of the ways I can improve my empathy skills when faced with a situation like this is to look at the person's personality and actions on other days. By reminding myself that the behavior isn't daily, I can then feel more empathy and perhaps feel like my co-worker is just having a bad day and let them get it out. However, if it is a daily occurance, I can use my empathy to try and persuade my co-worker to think in a more solution-oriented mindstate. If that still doesn't work, then I just let it go and do my job in a cordial manner and not let it get to me because I want to do my job well.