Robert Harris

What happens when a self-taught programmer with a background in anthropology finds himself leading engineering teams? In this candid, humorous, and emotionally resonant talk, Robert Harris shares his journey from BASIC on a Commodore 64 to building psychologically safe, high-performing cultures in modern software organizations.

Blending fieldwork with frameworks, Robert explores the human side of engineering leadership—imposter syndrome, accidental management, and the painful lessons that shaped his philosophy. Drawing on his training in anthropology, he offers a practical guide to shaping team culture through shared language, rituals, experiences, and artifacts—from flaming pull request beacons to rubber duck onboarding kits.

Attendees will leave with:
•A fresh perspective on leadership rooted in emotional intelligence and cultural design
•Actionable strategies for building trust, accountability, and psychological safety
•A toolkit of metaphors, rituals, and artifacts to transform team dynamics

Whether you’re a reluctant manager, a seasoned leader, or just someone who’s ever stepped on a rake in production, this talk will help you turn dysfunction into culture—and culture into your team’s greatest asset.

In moments of uncertainty, teams don’t listen more closely to their leaders.

They watch them.

Across years of leading software organizations - and hundreds of documented leadership
moments - one truth becomes unavoidable: engineers take their emotional cues from
leadership behavior, especially under pressure. Stress, urgency, and fear propagate
through teams not by announcement, but by example.

This talk explores how leaders unintentionally amplify chaos through tone, timing, and
reaction - even when they believe they’re being clear or decisive. Drawing from psychology,
anthropology, and long-term observation of engineering teams, this session focuses on
principles, not tactics: stable leadership rules that hold when incidents, deadlines, or
change collide.

Attendees will learn:

• How leadership behavior becomes a system input
• Why urgency often masquerades as clarity - and how teams experience the
difference
• How trust is like a bank, being deposited or withdrawn during moments of pressure
• Practical ways leaders can become a stabilizing force without suppressing reality

This is not a talk about staying calm for appearances’ sake. It’s about understanding how
human systems react to stress, and how leaders can intentionally reduce noise instead
of becoming part of it.

Leaders will leave better equipped to guide teams through chaos - not by controlling
outcomes, but by shaping the environment in which decisions are made.

Engineering culture is not created by values statements or team rituals. It emerges from
thousands of small signals - who speaks, who hesitates, what gets reinforced, and what
quietly disappears.

Across years of observing software engineering organizations, one pattern appears
consistently: when teams go remote or hybrid, culture doesn’t disappear - informal signal
flow does. The hallways where trust, learning, and psychological safety once formed are
removed, and nothing intentionally replaces them.

In this session, a software engineering leader with formal training in psychology and
anthropology examines why remote teams so often struggle with silence, disengagement, and false alignment - and why most culture initiatives fail to address the real problem.

Using cross-cultural comparison, this talk contrasts engineering organizations with digital communities that have thrived online for decades, surfacing what those cultures get right about feedback, trust, and informal learning.

The core insight is simple but uncomfortable: distance is not the enemy of culture,
poorly designed environments are.

Rather than focusing on tools, mandates, or performative connection, this session
reframes culture as an environment shaped by observable behavior, especially
leadership behavior. Attendees will explore how meetings, async communication, and
everyday leadership moments become the new hallways - for better or worse - and how
teams silently adapt when those spaces fail them.

Participants will leave with:

• A practical lens for diagnosing signal loss in distributed teams
• Clear indicators that silence is masking risk, not agreement
• Design principles for creating “digital hallways” that allow trust, community, and
psychological safety to emerge naturally
• A deeper understanding of how leadership behavior trains culture - whether
intentionally or not

This session is grounded in real-world leadership experience, systems thinking, and
comparative cultural analysis, and is designed for engineering leaders who want to build resilient, high-trust teams in remote and hybrid environments without sacrificing
performance.

Most software engineering leaders struggle for a reason no one talks about.
They were promoted for being great at writing code - and then handed responsibility for humans.

Meetings.
Conflict.
Silence.
Motivation.
Trust.

We quietly expect the same instincts that worked for technical systems to work for people.

They don’t.

In this session, we’ll explore leadership through a systems lens - not as a set of personality traits or management hacks, but as an adaptive human ecosystem that responds to risk, safety, and meaning.

You’ll learn:

• Why silence in meetings is rarely agreement
• How everyday leadership behaviors quietly train teams to wait, escalate, or
disengage
• What makes leaders accidentally become bottlenecks
• Why “helpful” interventions often have unintended consequences
• How human systems learn - even when you’re not teaching

This is not a talk about tools, frameworks, or performance management templates.
It’s about seeing what’s actually happening in your team - and realizing how your own
behavior shapes the system you’re leading.

Drawing on real-world stories from 20+ years in software engineering leadership (and a
background in anthropology), this session gives leaders a language for the invisible
dynamics they’ve felt but never been able to name.

Attendees will leave with:

• A new mental model for leadership
• A sharper lens for reading group behavior
• And a deeper understanding of how to create environments where people actually
think, speak, and decide

No blame.
No buzzwords.
Just a clearer view of the human system you’re already inside.