Learn to Listen and Respond with Empathy

Contributed by Charles Humble

Difficulty level: Intermediate

In an excellent talk at QCon New York in 2019, executive coach Paul Tevis described empathy as a keystone habit. He stated that, “Developing the habit of empathy can make you a keystone contributor in your organization. It could enable you to have an outsized impact on the environment around you.”

From a professional standpoint, empathy is closely associated with ideas around emotional intelligence in leadership—the practice of recognizing, understanding, and managing emotions in oneself and others to effectively lead and collaborate.

Being empathetic can help build trust within a team; it’s helpful when influencing other people and invaluable when trying to resolve conflict. It is also incredibly useful when designing a product since it enables you to see things from the point of the view of a customer or user.

While some people are naturally more empathetic than others, research (from Christine Ma-Kellams from the University of La Verne, and Jennifer Lerner at Harvard University) suggests that it’s a skill most of us can learn.

In this Shortcut we’ll look at practical ways you can improve your own empathy with techniques that I’ve used effectively in my working life.

What Is Empathy?

Empathy is generally defined as the ability to take on another’s perspective—to understand, feel, and possibly respond to their experience. We should note that it remains an active area of ...