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InfoQ Homepage Podcasts Pavneet Saund on Practical Empathy

Pavneet Saund on Practical Empathy

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This is the Engineering Culture Podcast, from the people behind InfoQ.com and the QCon conferences.

In this podcast Shane Hastie, Lead Editor for Culture & Methods, Pavneet Saund about his ideas on making empathy a superpower and effective team leadership

Key Takeaways

  • Showing and receiving empathy is truly life-changing
  • The need to assume good intent when communicating using chat and written words
  • Leadership is a different set of skills from technology and these need to be learned
  • 0:25 Introductions
  • 0:55 Pavneet’s journey to discovering that empathy helps overcoming hard times and finding solutions which are not obvious
  • 1:35 Showing and receiving empathy is truly life-changing
  • 1:54 Defining empathy as a way to see the world as others see it and connect on a deeper level
  • 2:54 The importance and value of empathy in teamwork, especially in a distributed team
  • 3:40 The way collocated teams coalesce compared to distributed teams
  • 3:55 The need to assume good intent when communicating using chat and written words
  • 4:40 The way written communications lose context and intent
  • 5:20 There will be conflict in any team, having empathy reduces the disruption in that conflict
  • 6:05 Things that make a good team lead – empathy, clarity of vision, ability to share that vision and context, being OK not to be the smartest person in the room, humility
  • 7:35 The impact of taking the best technical person and putting them into a leadership role without adequate support and training
  • 7:55 Leadership is a different set of skills from technology and these need to be learned
  • 8:23 Not everyone wants to move into a team leadership role and that should be OK
  • 8:40 The value of existing team leads sharing experiences and knowledge with new leaders
  • 9:20 The need to accept that in a leadership role you cannot solve all the problems yourself – that’s why you have a team
  • 9:50 As a team lead you have to be available to others and your time is no longer your own – you will be interrupted frequently and that is the role
  • 10:20 Effective delegation is a key leadership skill and its hard
  • 11:10 Reflecting on his own experiences and the importance of thinking about how work is done as well as the end product
  • 12:10 Characteristics needed to create a safe workplace
  • 12:30 Things a team lead can do to create a safe culture
  • 13:05 The importance of being able to communicate effectively upwards in the organisation
  • 13:35 Ways to encourage craftsmanship and quality in the work.  Lots of pair programming and code reviews
  • 15:05 The value of formal and informal mentorship
  • 16:50 Describing a real example of how and why empathy made a difference for a team – bringing the QA process into the development activities.  Pairing development and QA resulted in better understanding of each other’s work and better product
  • 19:00 Empathy has great value in removing “us and them” barriers and improving team outcomes 

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