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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