ENG-SPIRE

Our Values

Compassion: Moving Beyond Empathy

Posted by Steve Weinbeer

Categories

Imagine an engineer.

You might picture someone with a keen analytical mind and an exacting eye for detail. The person in your mind’s eye is very good at math.

Are they good at listening? Do they have high emotional intelligence?

Probably not.

We’d like to change that.

Engineering is a team sport. An engineer’s success depends on their ability to connect with clients, with colleagues, with other buildings professionals, and ultimately with the broader community. Making those connections is hard if you can’t put yourself in their shoes.

This is why compassion is one Eng-Spire’s three most important values . In fact, it’s actually the most important, in the sense that it creates conditions for others to flourish.

What does Compassion mean to Eng-Spire?

Compassion crowns the emotional virtues. It moves us past empathy, which is imagining another’s feelings, and past sympathy, which is sharing those feelings. Compassion brings us to understanding another’s problems and working to solve them.

We believe that compassion is our biggest competitive advantage. We believe that careers without compassion would not be worth it.

Over the course of our careers so far—and the course of our lives—we’ve learned that compassion is the key to the selfless behaviour that drives peak performance. We’ve seen compassionate teams do incredible things. It’s what drives us to go the extra mile for our clients and our communities. It’s what we look for in business partners and in team members. It’s what we try to foster in the students we mentor.

Building a Community Rink

We continually seek out opportunities to act on the virtue of compassion. Volunteering in our community is a great way to do just that. Our goal is to commit to a larger volunteering event each year; recently it was helping build a community ice rink. The group of excited neighborhood children watching the rink being built turbo charged the feeling of compassion and reinforced the importance of bringing success and happiness to others.

Why it Matters

Compassion guides every decision we make, because it fuels the connections that matter. Compassionate people are hungry to collaborate, which is why we seek out Integrated Project Delivery work wherever we can. Compassionate people volunteer and lead by example. Compassionate people make a difference.

We’re two compassionate people, and we’re building a compassionate, high-performing company.

We hope you’ll join us.