Empathy is the single most important attribute needed to create any effective team. team work makes the dream work!
I believe it starts first with genuinely caring about other people and being understanding of their situation and skill level. This allows the team to learn and grow collectively.
Simple. If you don't care (through emapathy and understading) your team will self destruct in a very rapid way. Nothing will be accompolished.
It has helped me understand that nothing in life is "black and white" there is an infinite amount of "grey". People rarely understand their own emotions or shortfalls and therefore can't really be expected to understand others. This makes empathy and "benefit of the doubt" extremely important to meaningful human interaction allowing us to achieve goals seamingly unatainable through individual thought.
by allowing you to quickly solve problems utliizing empahthy and understanding, by-passing ego flexing and arguments that divide the team. Collaborative code should ideally be written better, faster, and therefore more effectively.
I believe this question is answered thoroughly in the statements above.
Empathy plays a role daily in my marriage and might be the singlemost thing that allows it to function properly. I can not expect perfection from my spouse when I am not perfect my self. Again being congnizant the "Grey", being empathetic and understanding, lead to postive progress.
when dealing with those who do not understand or feel the need to be empathetic themselves. It's very difficult to deal with people who take the "dicatator" approach that "I am right even when I am wrong".
Try to instill empathy through compasion and understanding otherwise, find better teamates! I think it's hard to instill empathy in a person, it's something they must decide on their own.