10X Your Product Management Capability With Stronger Human Skills (Part 2— Empathy)
Following on from my previous post about the important skill of communication, next up is empathy. Empathy is another one of those human skills which can 10x your capability as a product manager.
But if you ask a product manager how good they think they are at empathising with other people, they are highly likely to either under or over rate themselves. Their peers and leaders will do the same.
So how might you objectively assess your capability of being empathetic?
Using a scale of 1–5 where 1 is never and 5 is always, here are some questions to consider:
💡How often do you interrupt people when they are speaking?
💡How often do you observe body language and other types of non-verbal communication when people are speaking to you?
💡How often do you try to understand other people’s points of view even when you don’t agree with them?
💡How often do you make statements before asking questions, when trying to understand what people are speaking to you about?
💡How often are you thinking about how to respond while people are still speaking to you?
💡How often do you avoid distractions (e.g. noisy areas, reading emails, checking your phone or watch) when talking with people?
💡How often have you caught yourself making judgments based on age, gender, race, or other visible factors when talking to people?
💡How often do you change your hypothesis or decision based on new insights from other people?
And one final question…
💡You see a child throwing a tantrum in the supermarket with their parent (or guardian) standing nearby ignoring them. What is your first thought?
These questions are designed to not only assess how often someone does something but also how well they do it too. What do you think? And are there others we should consider?
This is the second in a series of posts I’ll be writing about the concept of more objective capability assessments, and how our company NLPC aims to use it to help measurably lift the capability of product managers globally.
