Cultivating Empathy

Here’s the next principle from my list for biotech data teams:

The key to successful collaboration is deliberate empathy for team members with different perspectives, priorities and responsibilities.

Empathy is a core part of being human, but we sometimes limit our abilities to feel it by how we frame a situation. For example, if you believe the wet lab team is too stubborn and disorganized to format their plate maps consistently, you’re much less likely to feel empathy than if you believe their experiments are highly heterogeneous, they’re already stretched thin with other priorities and they don’t have experience with how to do it properly.

Every person and team has their own priorities, their own problems, and their own experiences that shape how they approach their work and what they can or can’t do. When you forget or ignore this, you’ll find the ways that they work and interact can seem like unnecessary resistance.

Approaching collaboration with deliberate empathy means reminding yourself that everyone is facing a different set of constraints and their own list of priorities. It means asking the questions to figure out what those constraints and priorities are and incorporating them into your own planning. You’ll often discover that the issue you find so frustrating is just a symptom of something else. And if you can figure out what that something else is, you can address it.