What role does empathy play in your life and how has it helped you?
Empathy plays a big role in my life. It helps me to understand people around me and be able to help them. I get less offended and mad in situations because I realize that many people react in a certain way because of their past experiences.Working in a customer service environment taught me that in most cases people are frustrated with the situation but not with me. Some people had their car broken in the morning, some had a conflict with a relative, or students got bad grades. This realization helped me to provide a better service and find a connection with the customers. I was able to cheer people up even though they were not in a mood earlier.
How does empathy help you build better software?
Empathy is an essential part of product design because we are building it for others, not for ourselves. To understand your customers and audience you are making software for, you have to be empathetic. This feeling is what helps us to see the world through the eyes of someone else. Also, it’s what helps us to see the reality of things, as Mathieu Turpault mentioned in his article "Why is Empathy Essential for Design?" that one of the things interviews made him realize was that the reality of the population was quite different from what he’d expected.
Why is empathy important for working on a team?
Empathy is important for working on a team because it helps you, in general, to be more productive and efficient. It helps you to avoid many frustrating situations, conflicts, and misunderstandings. When you are empathetic, you can manage your emotions and attitude because not only you know and understand your weaknesses and strengths, you are also aware of others’skills and personality traits. It creates a healthy environment where people can listen to each other, analyze themselves, accept critique, and reflect on it. Teams that have these qualities can easily find solutions to problems, improve the product, and enhance their work environment.
Describe a situation in which your ability to empathize with a colleague or teammate was helpful.
At one of my previous jobs, my co-worker was not cooperating well with me and others. She made rude comments, she was never in a mood, and as a result, nobody wanted to work on the same shift with her. I and my other co-worker tried to talk to her during lunchtime, and we found out that her family got financial struggles. There was more pressure on her to finish school faster and to find an extra source of income. As a result, she started getting bad grades. We helped her by giving some resources for scholarships, contact info of advisors that help with schedules. It helped her to stay on track at the university and deal with stress.
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 feel like it’s difficult to be empathetic when we are dealing with customers/clients or if we are managing a team. With clients, sometimes, we have very little time to connect, but, at the same time, we need to get as much information as possible to create a good product. There are situations when clients' view of the product is different from ours. The situation is never perfect, and our goal is to do everything to get the best outcome as possible for both sides. In this case, it’s always good to be prepared, do research to understand our clients, their mission, their audience, and prepare the right questions. It is important to put ourselves in their shoes to learn about their needs and goals. When we are managing a team, I think it’s very easy to forget about our team's needs and instead to stay heavily focused on a project’s results. Being a manager makes it harder to accept criticism from the team members because it's difficult to show weaknesses in a position when we have to be the toughest to take care of the problems. Nobody wants to create a panic inside the team, however, not addressing issues and concerns only creates a gap between a manager and team members. To fix it we need to balance things out, find time to listen to your team, hear their concerns and ideas, offer possible solutions, and accept that nobody is perfect. Good criticism only means that we can become even better.