Pavneet Saund on Practical Empathy

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

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• 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 

Mentioned:

• QCon New York
• Komplett
• Brené Brown

About QCon

QCon is a practitioner-driven conference designed for technical team leads, architects, and project managers who influence software innovation in their teams. QCon takes place 7 times per year in London, New York, San Francisco, Sao Paolo, Beijing & Shanghai. QCon San Francisco is at its 12th Edition and will take place Nov 5-9, 2018. 140+ expert practitioner speakers, 1300+ attendees and 18 tracks will cover topics driving the evolution of software development today. Visit to qconsf.com get more details.

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