In my life, I have mostly viewed empathy as being able to put yourself in someone else's shoes. This was reinforced as I had opportunities to travel around Eastern Europe and Japan through choir tours, which exposed me to quite different ways of life than my own early in life. My most recent job required empathy. I was in charge of scheduling our 200+ employees, so it often fell to me to understand what was going on in employees lives to help them be successful in their scheduling as well as determine who should continue to be scheduled. While its a big responsibility, this kind of empathy helps me maintain the organizational success of my company as well as help the employees who make effort succeed.
Reading these articles, I found it interesting that empathy is such an in demand skill for coders, however, it does make sense. Coders, afterall, are generally trying to improve a user experience. Empathy also helps raise awareness about all the types of people that may be utilizing a particular product or service. In today's world, the best products will appeal to the greatest amounts of people and their use will be intuative to everyone. A strong sense of empathy will help a developer create something that is the most useful for peoples lives.
Coders need to function within a close team, so understanding your co-workers increases efficiancy. My understanding is that the work for big development projects is often divided among members of a team, so it is useful to understand how the members of your team operate. This can help keep everyone happy as well as help assign tasks that team members can be successful with. It will inevitably become important to understand some of the things going on in life outside of work to have empathy for for those things they may be bringing to the job inadvetently, like when hardship is effecting performance. Knowing these things and feeling for your coworkers can help you overcome obsticles together.
I feel like the ability to empathize with coworkers helped me a lot in my past job. First, I often needed to consider employees life circumstances to schedule them effectively. I kept rough track of what was going on in people's lives to offer them work in locations they could get to, schedule them with employees they could cooperate with, and at times of day (or night) that work for their life. A recent example among my office team, empathizing with my office manager Tracy helped us work together to get everything done when she recently had her wisdom teth removed... this was kind of later in life for her than most and she had lingering pain. We communicated about this a bit, and I ended up taking on more of the phone-communications for the week while she took on more administration than she normally does.
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 difficult to empathize with someone when they dominate the conversation with their needs. I tend to be a bit more reserved and often don't bring my personal issues to the forefront, however I worked closely with several who are very extroverted and talk all about what is going on in their lives. Good Mason knows that they are probably just speaking freely, and want to be involved with everyone's lives around them, but Bad Mason can't help but think 'What do they want from me? Why are they telling me this?' I think I could improve my skill of empathy around this by remembering that sometimes people just want to share what is going on, and not everything that is shared is about me even when they are saying it to me. I can also improve by not assuming they want something, and instead frame my thinking around what I can reasonably to to accomidate if necessary and if it will improve the working environment. I guess I tend to think these people are being selfish which shuts me off when they are probably just being social. I'm working on recognizing this. I wouldn't want to make myself out to be emotionless and not understanding, I think that tendancy is partially triggered because of my former workplace- I had to listen to many employees reasons/excuses for why they weren't at work as well as many employees life circumstances that were totally unique...and make them more deserving of work than other employees. We'll say that sometimes the reasons were more sound than other times.