The superpower of understanding what it’s like on the other side of the table

Accidental Empathy

I sat down, especially aware of the creak of the chair, sat up taller than I usually would, and smiled gently, looking across the table.

Job interviews. I felt nervous and excited, worried how I would come across, sensing potential opportunity in the room. 

I held eye contact across the long boardroom table. They didn’t know this was not just any job interview for me - this was my first interview sitting on this side of the table. 

It’s an odd feeling, suddenly noticing that time has passed in your career and you are now giving interviews rather than taking them. 

Who let me do this?? I wondered, struggling to assess someone for “skills and fit” while wondering if I had the skills to be in this seat. 

Painfully aware that I should be starting the conversation, I scrambled to find the right words. I thought about the times I had been in the candidate seat - anxious, more dressed up than normal, wondering what gaps and glaring flaws must exist in my resumé and if I could possibly “measure up.” 

In that moment, I saw myself in the candidate across the table, and my words arrived.

“Your resumé looks great, thanks so much for coming in.” I wanted to reassure them, to convey that they were here for a good reason and that I was not a gatekeeper of opportunity to lord over them. That if they could join the team and help us in the way I was hoping, I would be grateful.

After this mental shift, I was suddenly experiencing the world differently, like I was witnessing the matrix code. I could see what I wanted and what they wanted, feeling both sides of the table simultaneously.

I saw that I was not really looking for a skillset, and I wasn’t there to measure specific knowledge and decide whether this person had “it.” All I really wanted to know was “Is this person the best person to help us?” 

That is a complex question. Is this someone you can sit across the table from for a beer at happy hour? What about at 10PM when a project has suddenly hit problems in the final stretch and stress is peaking? Can they help? Can they learn? For that matter, can they teach? Would you trust this person with your house keys?

I could see warnings and red flags the potential candidates were giving off, whether or not they were aware of it. I cringed internally at the memories of times I’d made the same mistakes - confidently misusing vernacular, stretching an experience to fit what I thought was being asked, trying to say the right thing a little more than the honest thing, aiming for confidence but coming across as arrogant, showing minimal curiosity, etc. I could feel moments when they didn’t know the answer to a question and could alleviate their stress so they wouldn’t derail. 

What I was looking for might not be universal, but I could see more of what I valued in my own life and work while searching for it in various candidates. I could see what I would want to ask in their shoes, and how sitting across the table is not about judging the candidate and poking for gaps; it’s about looking for help and hoping you can find it. In the traditional sense, I held the “power” as the interviewer, but until I sat on the other side of the table, I didn’t realize how mutual the search is, how often the reason for declining a candidate is truly not personal, and how easy it is to be guided by internal biases. I don’t often like working with brash, loud personalities that feel compelled to answer every question, for example, and suddenly that mattered more than the 5 years of prerequisite job experience.

Time Provides Empathetic Opportunities

As we grow, we begin to experience many “other side of the table” situations. We go from mentee to mentor, child to parent, contributor to leader, etc. Each is an opportunity to use our past experiences to guide how we interact with others. We can prevent frustrations we experienced and grow our understanding of what to do in either situation.

After giving multiple job interviews, I approached my next job interviews entirely differently. I felt more relaxed, understanding what I wanted people to get about me and what I wanted to learn about them. 

The more we understand the experience of others, the better we can connect and create change we want to see. 

But You Don’t Have to Wait For Time

Any situation that we have been through, like being the candidate in a job interview, allows us to directly connect to the experience of others in a similar place, but we don’t have to have the experience personally to find that empathy. 

Borrowing from similar contexts in our lives and letting curiosity lead us, we can practice putting ourselves in the shoes of others any time. If we pay close attention, we effect larger change with this practice. We notice the person who seems aloof may just be nervous rather than not liking us, understand the layers of fear behind someone’s angry outburst, point out what a potential customer will want even before they have articulated it to themselves, and build buy-in for complex changes in an organization by understanding how it will help them. 

As we become more practiced, seeing the experiences of others becomes like the superpower of seeing the code in the matrix. We see the motivations of others and potentially predict what they will do next, we change how we engage to avoid negative outcomes, and we more effectively communicate the change we want to create without losing the engagement of others.

To complete the metaphor in the cheesiest way possible - we can know emotional kung fu.