Reflect on the following prompts:
- What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
- How does empathy help you build better software?
- Why is empathy important for working on a team?
- Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
- When do you find it most difficult to be empathetic in professional settings?
- How can you improve your skills when faced with these scenarios?
Empathy has been crucial in my career as a teacher and in my marriage. "Meeting them where they are" is a mantra in mondern teaching, but it is a (somewhat suprisingly) essential component of a happy marriage. At some point (and it usually doesn't take that long) you figure out that a desire to make your partner happy usually involves doing things you wouldn't normally do. These can be as small as picking up after yourself and as large as learning the art of listening. In teaching, empathy is what allows you to successfuly differentiate tasks and assignment to develop student skills while affording them the ability to use these skills to meet assessment benchmarks.
It seems to me that software designed via empathy gets out of the way and allows users to quickly and intuitively get what they are looking for. A good example, I think, would be the heuristics that Google uses in its search engine. Results have gotten so good an answering question-formatted queries that people don't talk about the search engine anymore. They just use it.
Empathy is also important for working on a team because the team is made of human beings (!). A whole host of interractions run more smoothly when empathy is involved. Knowing your the perspective, talents, and concerns of your teammates means the "puzzle pieces" needed to complete projects can be put together. It also results in genuinely listening to each other, and we feel much more positive and motivated when we feel listened to - its an essential part of our well-being.
I have to admit, I often find empathy a challenge. Having an education in philosophy and a naturally logical mind I tend to think of ideas detached from the people offering them, and then apply a cold/calculating (brutal) critique as to the validity of those ideas. I value logic quite a bit and think it is underused and underappreciated. But it has little to do with human needs and desires, being merely a tool for answering questions. It can never provide a drive or reason for something else. In my personal life I usually arrive at a balance by a process of meeting halfway with others - they come to expect my logical robo-mind and view it as just me being me, and in getting to know them I naturally see things from their perspective. In a professional setting it's harder for me. I often don't know if I want my professional acquantainces in my personal life and therefore don't know how much I want to invest in them. I suppose the greatest challenge is in having empathy for others who have power over me but seem incompetent or disingenuous. I hope to simply avoid this problem and work with/for people I respect (even if I don't agree with them all the time).