Here's how you can cultivate empathy as an IT professional to understand your colleagues and clients better.

Actively listening to your team members, co-workers and other stakeholders is fundamental to cultivating empathy. Consider the following strategies to enhance your approach. 1. Be present - Whilst listening to conversations per se is great, however in addition give the person(s) you are having a conversation with the feeling that you are listening. Put away your phone, remove other distractions, nod and be engaged. The first step in showing empathy is to give your conversation partner the feeling that they are being heard and listened to. 2. Ask open ended questions - These truly encourage a deeper dialogue and can open up the conversation greatly. One example: "Can you walk me through the challenges you are currently facing with xyz."

One key strategy to cultivating empathy is to ask thoughtful questions in conversations. Oftentimes, individuals feel pressured to ask questions, simply to convey they are listening or interested, however the questions asked are typically very dull or on a high level. Instead, consider asking open ended questions, that cannot be answered with a simple yes or no and open the dialogue for a deeper conversation. Furthermore, aim to encourage descriptions of experiences or different perspectives. Understanding the experience from a different point of view helps grasp the full context of a challenge an individual may be facing and could reveal details you may have missed before.

Apart from listening to an individuals experiences and understanding their point of view, building rapport by sharing your own experiences, can be incredibly beneficial in levelling the conversation. Oftentimes, when individuals talk to their superiors, they feel smaller and as if the conversation is occurring on varying levels, with you as a manager sitting higher. The moment, you can share your own experiences of a particular event that is related or even only indirectly related to the topic at hand, the level of empathy an individual receives through the common ground established is highly beneficial. Not only do individuals feel heard, they also feel understood in these situations.