Empathy is a Superpower in the Engineering Industry
I value this skill a LOT more than pure technical skills in my teams!
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Let’s get back to this week’s thought.
Intro
No matter if you are an engineer or a manager, empathy is and will be one of the key skills in the engineering industry.
“But empathy has nothing to do with tech skills?” you may ask. Well, we will break down how important empathy is in this article. Make sure to read on!
Why is empathy such a superpower in the engineering industry?
There are many reasons for that and they all boil down to these 3 points:
Engineering is one of the most collaborative fields out there.
You can have technically amazing engineers in the team, but if they don’t collaborate effectively, it won’t mean much.
Engineers with great empathy will be able to build good relationships with their colleagues and collaborate effectively with each other.
We are always building something for someone to use.
Everything that we build is and will be used by someone. With empathy, we are putting ourselves in the shoes of our users and making sure that we are building the right things for them.
Without empathy, the focus is too much on technologies and not on solving problems and building the RIGHT things for our users.
Writing code, documentation, tasks, tests, messages, emails, etc.
We write not just for ourselves but for others. The goal is to write in a way that others can quickly understand it. If you can do that → then your empathy is on a good level.
Let’s get into more details specifically for engineers.
Empathic engineers are the real 10x engineers to me
Empathy is one of those skills that often gets overlooked among engineers. It’s not so tangible and it’s hard to measure it.
It’s easy to focus on how many programming languages you know or how many years of experience you have. But let me tell you that empathy provides immense value to the team and the overall organization (a lot more than just pure tech skills).
Being empathic as an engineer means, that you can:
Write code in a way that others with zero context would be able to easily understand it.
Focus on building the RIGHT things by putting yourself in the shoes of the users.
Turn disagreements into interesting conversations, where both sides work together to find the best solution.
Engineers that can do that, are the actual 10x engineers to me.
Empathic manager is a great manager
Of course, many things make a manager truly great, but empathy is very high on the list.
Here is what empathic managers are doing:
They can understand their report's struggles a LOT better.
They put themselves in their shoes and look at things from their perspective. This ensures that they completely understand the situation and they don’t judge or blame.
They can find the right work and career paths for their reports.
They can relate to their reports and map their specific skill sets to tasks and different career paths. Everyone is different → it’s important to find and suggest + offer a way for the report to try it out!
They make decisions the right way.
It’s not always possible, but whenever it is, they don’t just blindly make them because their manager has asked them to do something, but they are transparent and involve their team as soon as possible and make them part of the decision.
You can read more about what great managers are doing here: Good managers are hard to find and once you have them, they should be appreciated.