Gear Up
Reflect
What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you? From 2016 to 2018, I taught entrepreneurship at an entrepreneurship-focused charter high school in Colorado Springs. The five key skills that I taught my students in the curriculum I designed were creativity, experimentation, play, reflection, and empathy. Every activity, every project was designed to help students master at least one of these five skills, because it is impossible to be a successful entrepreneur without them. In my personal life, I believe that empathy is the glue that binds us together. By having empathy for another human being, I am able to see the world, and all its attendant trials and triumphs, from a different perspective. I am able to find connection with someone who may not have much in common with me.
How does empathy help you build better software? Empathy is the key that unlocks great design, for software and any other type of product. Every great product is either useful or fun (preferably both), and the useful ones are useful because they solve problems. Many software designers begin building software that either doesn't solve the problem users face very well, or (more commonly) the software solves the wrong problem in the first place, because designers didn't take time to empathize with users and identify the real problem at a deep, emotional level. Empathy is what enables you to build the right solution to the right problem for the right people. Dr. Ian Malcolm, Jeff Goldblum's character in the movie Jurassic Park, has it right when he says, "Your scientists were so preoccupied with whether or not they could, they didn't stop to think if they should." Empathy answers the "should" part of the equation.
Why is empathy important for working on a team? I believe that people bond together when they feel something together - laughter, joy, awe, fear, or any other kind of emotion. Empathy is the experience of feeling something that another human is feeling, and the experience of empathy creates trust, kinship and bonding at a deep, emotional level. Study after study has shown that working with a team that trusts each other, that feels a sense of kinship or brotherhood with one another, is a more powerful motivator than money, or career success, or even patriotism. It is said that in combat situations, soldiers under the stress of war are motivated not by abstract concepts of right and wrong, or patriotic duty, but by the absolute and unshakeable bond they have with their fellow soldiers, forged by weeks and months of marching, drilling, and other exercises designed to create a sense of one-ness among them.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful. In my role this past year working as a curriculum specialist for a school district, my team was divided into two camps: the curriculum specialists like me, and the curriculum coordinators, our supervisors. It was a weird structure - there were 5 specialists and 4 coordinators, with unclear chains of command - and a lot of tension grew between the specialists and the coordinators. I was able to empathize with both the specialists (because I was one) and, through frequent conversations and observations, with the coordinators. I was often able to serve as a bridge between the two groups, keeping the peace and helping us to work together even when it seemed likely that tensions would boil over.
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 have found it most difficult to empathize with incompetent, authoritarian people who end up in leadership positions over me. I was faced with this situation a few years ago, and it made the entire school year miserable for me. The approach that I eventually settled on to get through the school year was to just focus on what I had control of - my classroom - and to let everything else go. I had tried hard to come to some kind of truce with the leader in question, and when it became clear that wasn't going to happen, I resolved to just work on making my own classroom the very best it could be, and provide the students with the best experience I could, and not worry about anything else. It got me through the school year. If faced with a similar situation in the future, I would try to come to some sense of forgiveness and understanding earlier, before things reach a point beyond repair, and take the approach of only worrying about that which is in my control much sooner than I did.