High Performance Teams practice empathy!

At Qnit we deal with digitalization projects every day. We found, there are two crucial success factors to high quality in digital product and service development: High Perfomance Teams and automation.

Taking a look at one basic condition for High Perfomance Teams at a time: Empathy.

My wife gets really upset with our neighbours who "steal" her parking spot, she says. The truth is, they are public parking spots and some neighbours park there although they have designated parking space in front of their houses. Anyway - she complaints to me about this and starts to get even more upset because i don't get upset together with her and don't seem to understand the recklessness of our neighbours. "You need to be more empathic!", she says.

Empathy doesn't mean to get in the same emotional state as others. That is called compassion. Empathy means something else. There are 3 levels of empathy:

1. I hear what you say and i understand it.
2. I understand how you feel about it.
3. I understand your problem and how you feel about it and am putting myself in your shoes in order to help you.

And what does it take to get to level 3? Mainly time and attention. It is about understanding somebody's perspective. We need time to listen. We need focus and attention to get their (subjective) point. And we need competence and experience to understand (and be able to solve) their causal problem. And now we can really help beyond expressing mere sympathy or compassion.

We need empathy to solve problems!

A Team's performance largely depends on their capacity to solve problems fast. The faster and better they understand a problem the more likely they will come up with a solution quickly. When a team is well connected they also start to look at problems of teammates. That way problems become transparent earlier and collaboration is fostered.

So High Performance Teams practice empathy by solving problems together and solve problems by practicing empathy.

(Maybe the current hype of this social skill is warranted after all. But you can see it is more about attention and practice than about social skill.)