WTF #7: Empathy
Given all the recent chit-chat about the humanities and “soft” skills, coupled with the fact that I’ll soon be moving into management myself, I thought it’d be a good time to discuss one very important specific soft skill in the workplace: Empathy. Do you care? Do you care about your fellow colleagues? Your boss? Your subordinates? A seasoned software manager writes in his blog, Stevey’s Blog Rants, that his number one tip for managers is empathy. Seems like a perfectly reasonable, perfectly human ability to possess, even for stereotypical introverted, socially-awkward engineers. According to a white paper by the Center for Creative Leadership, empathy has a direct correlation on job performance, although the strength of this correlation is culture dependent. North America and most European countries have a medium correlation between empathy and job performance while South American countries have a low correlation. Countries and locales in the Sinosphere —…