The toughest problems in engineering leadership have nothing to do with the technology, and everything to do with the humans building it. The technical skills that earn an engineer the promotion can be adapted to produce great leaders, but only with the right translation layer. Without it, leaders default to instincts that work on technical systems but fail on human ones. This workshop installs that translation layer.

What happens when a self-taught programmer with a background in anthropology ends up leading engineering teams? Robert Harris traces his path from BASIC on a Commodore 64, through a decade in archaeology and the social sciences, to running software teams - and the lessons that came with becoming a manager by accident and a leader on purpose. The hardest problems he ran into weren't technical. They were human. So he went back to his training as an anthropologist to solve them.

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.

You were promoted for being good at writing code. Then you were handed responsibility for a team of humans, with no training and no manual. Meetings. Conflict. Silence. Motivation. Trust. The instincts that made you a strong engineer don't transfer directly to people. Computers do what you tell them. People adapt to the environment you create - including the parts you never meant to. Here's the good news: you don't need a new personality or a new skill set to lead well. The skills you've built as an engineer - diagnosis, systems thinking, debugging under pressure, designing for resilience - are the same ones that produce strong leaders. What's usually missing is the translation layer that lets you point them at a human system instead of a technical one. This session builds that translation layer. We'll look at leadership not as personality traits or management hacks, but as a human system - a loop of inputs, outputs, and state that you already shape from the inside. We'll walk that loop in three parts: learning to see the system, understanding the inputs that quietly train it, and reading the signals it sends back to you.

In moments of uncertainty, teams don't listen more closely to their leaders. They watch them. What they're watching is your operating system under load. The skills that earn an engineer a promotion reward a logic-first OS stack: analyze, decide, execute. That stack misfires the moment you lead people, because human hardware runs emotion before logic finishes loading. The tools you mastered for the machine don't work on the team, and most technical leaders inherit that bug the day they step into the role.