What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
- Empathy plays a very large role in my life. Whether personal relationships or professional relationships, taking the time to look at things from another person's side gives you insight not only into how they may be feeling, but also why they feel that way. Empathy has helped me see how my own actions can be troublesome for others, even something as simple as not cleaning the dishes in the sink. This has helped me to not only understand others better, but to understand myself and how I can become a better person.
How does empathy help you build better software?
- Empathy helps you build software by identifying problems and proposing solutions. Software should have a purpose, so we have to know what that purpose is. The best way I feel to find this purpose and solve a problem is by talking to the people who will be or are currently using the software. By walking through the application in their shoes, you can see where they may have struggles, or where they have found shortcuts that can be exploited. Users are not stupid, and their ideas are worth looking at and exploring since they have to live with what we create. By empathyzing with their hardships, we can build better software.
Why is empathy important for working on a team?
- Despite being a team of developers, we are still a team of people. People have emotions, wants, needs, desires, and goals. By paying attention and being empathetic to your team members, you will not only endear them to the project by showing they have an investment in the project, but endear them to you. If something goes wrong and everyone has to work late, previously invested empathy can make it so that everyone sees the situation as all in it together as a team, rather than putting down the person/people who may have been responsible for the problem. We all make mistakes, but how we treat our own mistakes and others' mistakes can make a world of difference.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
- When working in IT Support, I would daily be on calls with people who describe themselves as non-technical who are dealing with technical issues. I was working for a Dialysis company, so many of my users were nurses and medical staff. Often I would need to talk them off a metaphorical ledge and reassure them I'm here to help. We would then start talking through their issue and figure out what is going on. These are compassionate care givers who have people's lives in their hands, so I knew I needed to treat them with similar compassion. Many times they would apologize to me and say something like, "I'm just not good with computers and technology," and my response was usually, "That's ok, I couldn't start an IV to save my life. We all have our own strengths, so let's see what we can do." This generally had a good response, as it reframed our relationship to something I think they could really latch onto.
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 think I sometimes have problems being empathetic when someone is truly ignorant regarding what they are talking about, when they are in a position that they should understand. This has generally happened when I've had a manager/director (either my own or from another department) who should be knowledgable about concepts or processes in their own department, but have a complete lack of understanding. This tends to make me frustrated as you would think that being at a director or higher level people who have the skills required of that position. I think I can improve this by just being patient with people like this, and get as much information from them as I can and make a decision based on what they provide. An example is when I was trying to explain a simple database design (primary/foreign key relationships) to my director who should have understood basic database structures, but she was not able to grasp any concepts I was talking about. This led her to having unrealisted and impractical standards for part of a project, which lead to a heated discussion. Eventually she understood, but it took a lot of hand holding, diagrams, and frustration to get there.