By Gini Martinez
Practicing empathy can reframe your viewpoint and lead to better team outcomes.
Have you ever felt anxious being part of a team that never sends out an agenda prior to a meeting? Have you ever found it difficult to contribute your ideas to a project because of a colleague who dominates every single conversation? As a technical communicator, you likely find yourself working in collaboration with others involved in content or product development. The process of coming together to achieve a common goal or objective can be a fulfilling aspect of your work, but it’s not without its challenges. Whether you’re part of a formal team or an ad hoc version, it’s sure to be composed of varying personalities and approaches to achieving a project’s goals. The upside to being surrounded by diverse individuals is that they bring an array of ideas, which can be a boon to strategizing and problem solving. The downside is butting against opposing styles of communication and team engagement, which can create conflict and become a roadblock to achieving team goals. How you navigate these conflicts impacts your success as a team as well as your mental health. One important interpersonal skill that can help you manage both is empathy.
When Individual Differences Become Barriers to Collaboration
Successful collaboration involves sharing ideas, information, and resources while working in a coordinated and mutually supportive way towards a shared objective. Collaborating cross-functionally with experts in varied domains can boost creativity and innovation, and improve decision making. It can also help to build stronger relationships between individuals and groups, and promote a sense of shared ownership and responsibility for project outcomes. But what happens when the best minds for a project have conflicting approaches to work?
Have you ever struggled to complete your project tasks because they depend on a research report a teammate has been procrastinating? If you are organized and always on top of your work, this situation can elicit frustration. Have you ever experienced a colleague who obsessed over every little detail of an upcoming informal meeting? If you tend to strive for good enough instead of perfection, you might find that exhausting. You might have a hard time relating to these teammates and find their contrasting behaviors aggravating. It can help to realize they are really just different expressions of the same personality trait characterized as conscientiousness.
Successful collaboration involves sharing ideas, information, and resources while working in a coordinated and mutually supportive way towards a shared objective.
Personality Influences Work Behaviors
Personality is defined as “a bias towards particular traits (characteristics) that in turn affect behavior” (Oseland 2012, 2). Because our personality, among other things, influences our behavior, individual differences in the workplace can often be attributed to these traits. Extensive research conducted on personality over the past several decades has deepened psychologists’ understanding of how they can impact teams. Becoming familiar with the different personality characteristics and how you might see them play out within your collaborative environment is the first step to becoming better at interacting with them.
The Big Five Personality traits is a five-factor model of characteristics that includes (Goldberg 1992):
- Openness
- Conscientiousness
- Extraversion
- Agreeableness
- Emotional Stability.
The five factors are typically assessed in the following ways3, (Cannon-Bowers and Bowers 2011; Sackett and Walmsley 2014):
- Openness—the degree to which a person is curious, broad-minded, open to new ideas and new experiences.
- Conscientiousness—the extent to which a person exhibits impulse control, organization, procrastination, perseverance.
- Extraversion—the extent to which a person is sociable, warm, energized by social situations, sensation-seeking, assertive, talkative.
- Agreeableness—the extent to which a person is respectful, trustworthy, empathetic, generous with resources, cooperative, flexible, tolerant.
- Emotional Stability—the extent to which a person responds to stressors with negative emotions, how much they tend toward anxiety, and their tolerance for adverse stimuli.
Each trait exists on a continuum, so a person can be high, low, or somewhere in the middle and express these traits accordingly. For example, someone scoring higher in emotional stability might exhibit self-confidence under stress, while someone scoring lower might respond to stress by ruminating or worrying. Most people tend to fall somewhere around the middle of the scale for each trait. Research has found personality traits to be stable over short periods of time5, but a person’s score can change throughout the course of their life due to normal development. It’s important to note that these traits in their extremes are not evaluated as being good or bad. There are potential positives and negatives to scoring higher or lower on any of them.
The Big Five personality test is sometimes confused with the Myers-Briggs Type Indicator (MBTI) or Enneagram of Personality typing tools, so you may be wondering what’s the difference between the three assessments. Unlike MBTI and Enneagram, the Big Five was developed by researchers, is data-driven, and assess traits on a continuum instead of sorting people into distinct personality boxes. The most important difference, however, is that the Big Five allows for people’s traits to change over their lifespan, which is important if you score lower on openness and need to learn new interpersonal skills, like empathy (Soto and Jackson 2013).
It’s helpful to recognize extreme expressions of the Big Five within the context of the workplace, so I’ve included examples of each trait below.
Openness
High—Moves the weekly meeting from a conference room to a local cafe
Low—Rejects all ideas that don’t align with their perspective
Conscientiousness
High—Sticks to the plan no matter what the cost
Low—Keeps their options open until the very last second
Extraversion
High—Proposes all team events be in person
Low—Can’t bring themselves to submit their work for an industry award
Agreeableness
High—Leaves their Calendly wide open to accommodate everyone else’s schedule
Low—Never answers emails outside 9:00–5:00
Emotional Stability
High—Reframes project setbacks
Low—Catastrophizes when the project veers slightly off course
Understanding that behavioral differences are likely rooted in longstanding traits such as personality can help you to appreciate others’ differing needs so you can engage in more constructive behaviors. This is where empathy comes in.
Using Empathy to Reframe Your View
Empathy is considered by psychologists to be composed of two dimensions: cognitive (thoughts) and affective (feelings) (Healey and Grossman 2018). Empathy is often described as being able to take the perspective of another person or to imagine yourself in their shoes. It involves asking yourself what might the other person be thinking or feeling. Perspective taking provides a non-judgemental lens through which you can view others’ behavior. It facilitates positive social behaviors, like resource and idea sharing or coordinating efforts toward a common goal, all of which are part of successful collaboration. When we understand where a team member is coming from, or understand why their style of engagement is in direct conflict with ours, it helps to dampen our emotional reaction so we can respond productively instead. Practicing empathy makes you a better teammate, and while relationships involve multiple people, sometimes it only takes one person to shift the dynamic of a collaborative experience.
Empathy is often described as being able to take the perspective of another person or to imagine yourself in their shoes.
What Practicing Empathy Can Look Like
Maybe you score higher in extraversion and you’re frustrated because it feels like you’re the only person doing all the problem solving during meetings. What if it just so happens the rest of the team scores lower in extraversion? If you tend to jump right in and offer up thoughts or suggestions, try taking the perspective of a person who is less comfortable asserting their ideas that way in a group setting. Next time you feel the need to contribute, wait thirty seconds to see if someone else speaks up first. Practicing empathy in this circumstance can help you change your behavior to better serve the group and project outcomes.
It could be you score lower in conscientiousness and tend to procrastinate as part of your creative process (yes, that’s a thing) and you’re annoyed by your colleague who keeps badgering you to complete your task early (Shin and Grant 2016). What if it’s just that your colleague scores higher in conscientiousness? Try taking the perspective of someone who is constantly striving to achieve. While it may feel like they’re judging you for not completing work within their preferred time frame, they’re likely more stressed by the exceedingly high goals they set for themselves and their response to that stress is being expressed in your direction. Practicing empathy in this circumstance can help you reframe the situation and maintain your sanity.
Putting Empathy into Action for Better Team Outcomes
Keep in mind that while personality traits tend to be stable over short periods of time, people can learn how to adapt their behavior in certain situations, such as collaborating at work. Learning to connect workplace behaviors with personality traits and becoming aware of your own tendencies, empowers you to modify your approach as necessary. In this way, learning how to handle conflicting workplace behaviors can not only make for a smoother experience and facilitate project outcomes, but it also will make you a more desirable teammate.
If you’re aware of your own personality traits and recognize what you need to collaborate effectively, you can articulate those needs to your team. By letting them know that you prefer an agenda prior to meetings to organize your thoughts, you’ll be valued as a good communicator. If you recognize conflicting approaches as individual differences (instead of personal attacks against you or the group), and express an openness to finding mutually beneficial solutions, you’ll be valued as someone who can work through challenges and obstacles and is open to new ideas. Most importantly, seeing teammates through the nonjudgmental lens of empathy helps forge mutual trust and respect, which are fundamental to any collaboration.
But how can you know how your colleagues are biased toward the Big Five personality traits? Google “Big Five” and you’ll find a plethora of free online assessments. Taking the test and sharing your results can be a fun team icebreaker. But really, practicing empathy doesn’t require knowing how all your colleagues score on a personality assessment. If you find yourself locking horns with a teammate, it doesn’t really matter if you’re certain it’s because you both lie on the opposite ends of openness. You can still try to see the situation from their perspective.
Empathy is not a cure-all for dysfunctional teams. Sometimes you will find yourself working with openly hostile individuals who challenge every new idea or being led by someone who is unsure of themselves and allows more assertive team members to steamroll right over them. You may have to consult a third party to find a mutually beneficial resolution or simply fortify your personal boundaries. Practice empathy when you can and give yourself some grace when you just aren’t up to it. At the very least, you’ll learn not to take it personally when others behave differently from you.
References
Cannon-Bowers, Janis A., and Clint Bowers. 2011. “Team Development and Functioning.” In APA Handbook of Industrial and Organizational Psychology, Vol. 1 Building and Developing the Organization. Vol. 1. American Psychological Association.
Fayard, Jennifer V. 2019. “Five Big Reasons to Embrace the Big Five Personality Traits” (blog). Psychology Today. October 17, 2019. https://www.psychologytoday.com/us/blog/people-are-strange/201910/five-big-reasons-embrace-the-big- five-personality-traits.
Goldberg, Lewis R. 1992. “The Development of Markers for the Big-Five Factor Structure.” Psychological Assessment 4 (1): 26–42. https://doi.org/10.1037/1040-3590.4.1.26.
Healey, Meghan L., and Murray Grossman. 2018. “Cognitive and Affective Perspective-Taking: Evidence for Shared and Dissociable Anatomical Substrates.” Frontiers in Neurology 9 (June): 491. https://doi.org/10.3389/fneur.2018.00491.
Oseland, Nigel. 2012. “The Psychology of Collaboration Space.” Workplace Unlimited 1 (4): 1-23.
Sackett, Paul R., and Philip T. Walmsley. 2014. “Which Personality Attributes Are Most Important in the Workplace?” Perspectives on Psychological Science 9 (5): 538–51.
Shin, Jihae, and Adam M. Grant. 2021. “When Putting Work Off Pays Off: The Curvilinear Relationship between Procrastination and Creativity.” Academy of Management Journal 4 (3): 772–98. https://doi.org/10.5465/amj.2018.1471.
Soto, Christopher J., and Joshua J. Jackson. 2013. “Five-Factor Model of Personality.” In Psychology, by Christopher J. Soto and Joshua J. Jackson. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/obo/9780199828340-0120.
Gini Martinez is an empathetic and curious mixed-methods UX researcher with 20 years of client collaboration and workshop facilitation. She holds an MA in Applied Cognitive Psychology for UX Research and is currently the lab manager and a lead UX researcher in the Games and Interactive Technology Lab at Claremont Graduate University.
