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Pavneet Saund on Practical Empathy

| Podcast with Pavneet Singh Saund Follow 0 Followers by Shane Hastie Follow 17 Followers on Oct 16, 2017 |

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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
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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 

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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 New York is at its 12th Edition and will take place Mar 5-9, 2018. 100+ expert practitioner speakers, 1300+ attendees and 18 tracks will cover topics driving the evolution of software development today. Visit qconnewyork.com to get more details.

More about our podcasts

You can keep up to date with the podcasts via our RSS Feed, and they are available via SoundCloud and iTunes.  From this page you also have access to our recorded show notes.  They all have clickable links that will take you directly to that part of the audio.

Previous podcasts

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Troy Magennis on Using Data to Support Decision Making

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