#183 - Mastering Team Leadership by Embracing Conflicts and Building Resilience - Hari Haralambiev

[00:01:34] Introduction

Henry Suryawirawan: Hello, everyone. Welcome back to another new episode of the Tech Lead Journal podcast. Today, I have with me Hari Haralambiev. I hope I pronounce your name correctly. So I think we got connected through LinkedIn.

Hari is the founder of Soft Skills Pills, right? A website that probably you might have encountered before if you want to look things for like team leadership, right? Or how to create psychological safety and things like that. So, Hari, today we’re going to talk a lot about these topics, right? So happy to have you here. So welcome to the show.

Hari Haralambiev: Thank you, Henry. Your pronunciation of my name is perfect. So great. Great for having me.

[00:02:09] Career Journey

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. Hari, I always love to ask my guests first to maybe tell us a story about yourself. Maybe highlighting any highlights or turning points that we can learn from that.

Hari Haralambiev: Okay. Well, I get used to being asked why did you turn from a software engineer into a team coach? Because nowadays I’m coaching tech teams around the world. So maybe, yeah, I started my career like 20 years ago as a software engineer. Prior to that, I was at school. I was very eager into computer science and programming contests and so on. So when I started working in a software development company, it was, let’s say, I love the technical challenges. It was something that still I love doing and love solving such challenges. But as I was working in, um, software services development company, so we had a lot of different projects for different companies. And the challenge there is that you constantly have to have different teams.

So I was quickly, let’s say, recognized, that’s the positive word, but the other is thrown into a leadership role so basically there was an opportunity and it was my, I think, third or fourth year in my career that I was basically asked to lead a few people for a new project. And that’s how I started dealing with more people issues, team issues, and project issues, not with the technical part. I love to say that it took me two whole years, basically, not to have that big desire to go into the code. Really, I always wanted to help with my coding skills, but at some point, I actually started loving the people challenges. And I still think that they are more complex than the technical ones. And however great we are as a tech people, we have to deal with other people and that’s where the real trouble comes into. So that was the first turning point into my career.

Another point was, within the company, let’s say that I was observing and I saw a lot of people that they weren’t able to catch up with the technology. So we, as a company, took various opportunities that were with some, let’s say, new technologies. And lots of the engineers had to both learn on the fly and apply them in your stuff. And for some it was easy, for some it was very hard. And I was basically complaining to my CEO that the company is not doing a great job into helping people develop faster and more easily. And he basically challenged me and he said that if I want to do this job and help the company actually do this development, then I can take the role.

So that’s where I switched from leading teams and on a more operational level to actually help people develop. So I was focused on the technical part, but I then partnered with my current co-founder of the company, of the Soft Skills Pills company, that she was a soft skills trainer, I was responsible for the tech development and at some point these kind of mixed. And in the next years, long story short, is that we started doing a lot of leadership training, a lot of soft skills training, a lot of team development training within the company. And we saw that this is something that we love doing on one hand. And on the second hand, that we actually had a lot of impact, positive impact through these activities. And that’s why eight years ago, we decided to do it as a separate company and we co-founded the company and we focused on that entirely.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thank you for sharing your story. I think when I heard you tell your story or your own experience, I think that’s quite a lot of managers or leaders, the listeners here actually go through the same journey, right? So maybe you started as an IC, maybe you’re good at the job, at the role. Somebody pointed you to be a leader, and then, yeah, you start dealing with people issues, project issues. And also so many other issues that are not technical, right? So I think that’s always the case.

[00:06:14] What Makes Software Development Team Great

Henry Suryawirawan: So maybe in your case, right? Since you have dealt In both worlds, the technical aspect and also the management, leadership aspect, and in fact, you are a team coach now. So what do you think makes a great software development team?

Hari Haralambiev: Well, most teams, what I’ve observed, yeah, with over the past eight years, I’ve observed within a lot of teams. And a lot of teams are focused on actually delivering results. And I believe a lot of people and teams in the tech world, they’re naturally gifted in solving complex problems. But what I see lacking, and this is where we’re actually focused on a lot, is creating the right environment, creating the collaboration between people, creating this psychological safety environment so that they can actually deliver the results sustainably. Because I’ve seen a lot of teams, they can deliver results, but it’s usually in the expense of people. Or it is short term. And I believe that there is a way that you can have repeated success.

So that’s what I’ve seen is struggling, maybe we’ll go into that in a few minutes, but I’ve seen a lot of teams struggle with handling disagreements, for example. Having proper effective communication, making sure people, especially in a more remote or hybrid setting, how people to feel connected and that they belong to the team. So this is often neglected. And another thing that is often lacking in a lot of teams is how do they quickly adapt to changes or how do they handle uncertainty. But at the same time, being resilient to keeping the good stuff. Because I’ve seen a lot of teams that they’re adaptive, but too adaptive that they lose a lot of things from what they’ve learned in the past.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. I think delivering results is something that many engineers or, you know, the tech people are good at. And especially these days, so many resources, right? You can find online, you can find books. You can also use AI these days to solve a particular problem. So I guess the delivering results probably is not that kind of a big challenge for tech people. But yeah, working together as a team definitely is always a challenge. I haven’t heard any software team that doesn’t have people issue or maybe direction issue, or maybe I don’t know, process issues, right? So I think it’s definitely important to have a sustainable process in the team. And maybe leadership partly plays a big role in making sure that the software team actually works really well, right?

[00:08:40] TReE Team Model

Henry Suryawirawan: So you have this thing called the TReE team model in your website. I saw it in the Soft Skills Pills, right? That’s kind of like the way probably you assess where the team is currently doing, right? Is it healthy or not? Maybe tell us a little bit more about this model and how we use it to actually assess our own team.

Hari Haralambiev: Well, I’ll quickly give you a brief history of the model. So when we started like eight years ago to coach teams, so we initially started doing, let’s say, soft skills training, but this quickly… Soft skills training, we did with the team. This has its own benefits because people experience things together and then they have the common understanding, the shared understanding of how they should collaborate. But at some point, because our process is always, it had like a coaching element within the training. So we always shared our observation with the group and so on. So at some point, our process, the training process became like a coaching process. But we were working together with the whole team. So we started working with the team and we use different models that gave you a different perspective.

So just a quick disclaimer from my perspective, from my side is that I don’t believe that there is one single model or that gives you the silver bullet to all. But they give you a good understanding or a good perspective of team dynamics. And they also give you the language so that people can actually discuss elements of this thing. So basically, it gives you what to talk about under the hood, what’s hidden. So we’ve used a lot of different models. The typical ones, like the five dysfunctions of a team by Pat Lencioni. We’ve used Google’s work on Project Aristotle, which also gave great perspective. We used a lot of the work of Amy Edmondson on psychological safety.

So basically, when we started working with tech teams, software teams, we started observing what they’re doing great and what are their dysfunctions and so that we can share to people. And at some point, we saw that some things keep repeating and others are more, let’s say, super specific to the team. So those that were repeating is we made our job easier. We wanted to have a structured way to observe the team dynamics. And that’s how actually the TReE team model was born, because those were the things that is based on our work with, when it was created, we had worked with more than 200 teams, so we wanted to gather in one place. What are the, let’s say, most crucial aspects teams should focus on so that they have the great foundation to deliver this continuous success.

And to briefly share with people who are listening what the TReE team model is. TReE like the tree in the forest is actually an abbreviation as well from three words. T comes from trust. The second and the third letter ‘Re’ comes from results, because whatever we do, we actually have to deliver results and we are measured a lot by results. And the last E from the word TReE is for evolution. And the trust part, what we call is the hidden foundation. So imagine the roots of a tree. This is the people aspect that is often neglected in a tech context. This is, again, communication, conflicts. So how do we handle disagreements and belonging?

These tree elements, they have different elements within that. I won’t bother everyone with the details, but the roots of the tree, the hidden element of a great team is related to this trust between people and psychological safety as an environment. The results is basically how people organize themselves. How do they challenge each other? It is more related on the, let’s say, typical aspects, like what’s the standard? How do people take responsibility as a team as well, not only personal responsibility. How do they make decisions together? Is there clarity and things like that? What’s the engagement of people? So this is basically the most, how people organize themselves to deliver great results on time, usually for yesterday. And with enough quality.

And the evolution part. So you imagine the crown of a tree. So it is the most exposed part is, basically, we’re looking at how the team acts as a unit. Let’s say, I will use against, as a word, against the external forces. So whenever you have either people or circumstances that pushes the team in an unexpected direction, or when there is lack of clarity, how does the team handle this? So this is what we also look, how the team experiment, how does it, the team adapt and how does it stay resilient? And to give you an example with the resilience, maybe, I think the COVID times were the ones that showed which are the most resilient teams, because we saw a lot of teams breaking because they had to turn from physically working together into a remote setting and it broke a lot of things. So the evolution part that is on the top of the TReE model is basically really how the team stays strong and deliver results, even when there’s things are not certain and they’re constantly changing.

So this is an overview. And to what you mentioned, how, let’s say, managers can assess their teams. Last year, we launched a product that’s called TReE Team Scan that actually gives a way for us as coaches to enter a team development process together with the manager, but for the manager to actually self assess the team using the team’s perspective. So we basically structured a very, let’s say, easy and in-depth analysis that could be used. So there is a tool now, which is, I actually love that. We can now give it to more people to see what their team looks like in-depth.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thank you for explaining the way how the model works, right? And I like the name TReE, right? It’s actually forest tree, right? And I think I also just knew that you have this root, you have maybe the body, right? And you have the crown, you know, the parts where people see the most. So I think definitely makes sense. Trust, results, and evolution, right? So for people who want to probably assess more about how your team is doing, just look at the TReE scan that Hari just mentioned. And I think like what you mentioned in the beginning, right? It’s very, very important, and any model you can use, right? But it’s just to bring some kind of awareness and maybe the language for people to discuss, right? I think the discussion here is the most important part rather than the results.

[00:15:28] Team Conflicts and Disagreements

Henry Suryawirawan: So I think maybe if we can just focus for today is on the root part, right? The trust. And we are talking before this recording that you brought up the points where disagreements and conflicts in a team is probably one of the aspects that are difficult, challenging to get good at, but at the same time also important. So maybe tell us a little bit more from your coaching experience, right? What are some of the, I don’t know, like hidden risks about dealing with conflicts or disagreements?

Hari Haralambiev: Okay. Well, first, I love to say that conflict is a good thing. Conflict can be used as a tool. When people think of conflict, they tend to frown and to be afraid a bit, because conflict has a negative connotation as part of the word. There was some research that, actually, you can use disagreement as a word instead of conflict so that people become more eased with that. But for me, conflict is basically two or more viewpoints on the same aspect, on the same point. And, for me, disagreements is what breaks a lot of teams.

So diverse point of view, basically, makes a lot of teams break. And when they don’t handle the conflicts, they become interpersonal conflicts in some point, which totally worsens the whole psychological safety aspect of the team. At the same time, strong teams, they embrace conflict. They use it and and they have their great way into handling disagreements. So having conflicts, by default, you have them. You have disagreements. You have diverse points of view because we’re different. And then I’ll give you some examples from some teams.

I joke that there is one team we worked with that I call the team with “great team collaboration”, but put great team collaboration in quotation marks, because it was not like that. So what I remember we had, so we do different types of training sessions. So at some point, we started talking about the top problems that they have. And they were sharing that their retrospective meetings totally suck, because they’re quite ineffective. They just complain and nothing works. But they also kept saying that they keep repeating the same phrase during this retro meeting. So whenever someone is asked what was good in the last sprint, for example, and people tend to say “great team collaboration”. So it was something artificial and this was just a signal that people don’t feel safe to express either their different point of view or if there are some tough issues, they just put it under the carpet, hide it away.

And we observed also the manager. So what you mentioned is important. Leadership has a lot of importance in this. It has a great impact in whether you build a strong team or not. When leaders are afraid of tough issues, you go into an artificial harmony. When you go into artificial harmony, people don’t actually discuss their disagreements, although they have them. So this is really, in this particular case, the manager, we were pushing the team to unravel everything outside. So the tough issues, let’s talk about the tough issues. But the manager was very, from my perspective, afraid of this. Because, so this was what some people call toxic positivity.

So the manager wanted everything to be perfect, to be positive. Let’s not talk about issues. And at some point people were just really, let me say it like that, they didn’t bother to bring it up because they knew they will be suffocated by the manager. We even had one point at some session, there was one senior engineer who we’re doing, I do the coaching together with my co-founder, Petya. So this software engineer, just before the session started, he saw us with a smile and he said, Petya and Hari are here. Can we talk about the issue from Friday? To which the manager quickly responded, let’s not bother the group.

But, yeah, that’s an issue here. So there are teams that don’t at all going to discussion mode of differences, so they don’t share them openly. I’ve seen that there are teams that, let’s say, they show… people share their different points of view. So you can hear those differences, but the debate is ignored. So if you say, let me quickly give you an example. A hot topic that will not be, it will be around for the next few years also. So if you say remote work sucks, and if I say, I think remote work is great. So that’s the obvious disagreement. And I’ve seen a lot of teams that people, yeah, share their differences and then nothing. They just share those disagreements, but no debate. So that’s the, let’s say, the second stage of how people handle disagreements. You can hear them, but there’s actually no debate.

Then there are teams that they debate. They debate openly. It’s a real pleasure to observe these debates. I remember we worked in one startup. So they had a product that was pretty good in Europe and they were discussing their strategy on how to enter the US market. And it was really a real pleasure to see them fight or debate, because you can hear like seven different opinions, people passionate about their points of view, at the same time, they were respectful. So these are two aspects that I find crucial for having a great debate, you have the passion, and at the same time, you respect others so there’s no bad conflict. This is the third stage to actually have a passionate debate where a lot of teams, they, let’s say, the energy drops a lot. So they, people feel drained from the discussions they’re having. In this particular case, people were energized from the debate. So that’s a good indicator, whether you have a good conflict in the team.

The bad thing about this team was that at some point they were trying to convince each other who’s right, who’s wrong. So at some point, everyone was pulling towards their own point of view, which is okay. But we interrupted their discussion and asked them, what do you do when you have such discussions that you seem to have different opinions? How do you go forward? And they said, well, we leave this for next week discussion. And we were like, no, no guys, you can’t have this over and over again. How do you make decisions? And whenever we ask these questions to teams, like 99% of teams don’t have a clear way, clear shared agreed way to making decisions, which I think is one of the biggest dysfunction of teams.

Because if you have a clear way, regardless of whether it is, let’s say the leader or the manager decides, or it is democracy or is it whatever, the are like 50 decision methods and there is no, again, there is no silver bullet. But once you have a clear way, and we talked about this with this team and they introduced a way to make decisions, they’re now fast. So whether the decision is right or wrong, that’s not that important in context of conflict. It’s important to actually have a decision, because the worst way, the worst option is to not make any decisions. And we’ve seen lots of teams that have topics that are discussed over and over and over again.

And even I remember one team, they discussed a problem that they were having. It was like the process that they should have been using, I think for the code reviews was their problem. And part of the team said, but we just, we decided this like three months ago. Why are now, why is nobody following the, what we agreed? And then other people said, no, no, we discussed this three months ago. We didn’t decide this. So that’s the issue here. A lot of teams, they don’t have a clear way to resolve conflicts which makes the conflict in itself bad again. And then the highest, if you imagine this, there is a conflict stages pyramid we’ve put on the Soft Skills Pills’ website. You can see this as a visualization. On the highest stage of the pyramid is actually people using conflict as a tool. So actually even mining for conflicts or looking to see the diverse points of view. And this is something that once you see it, it’s beautiful.

Henry Suryawirawan: I think when you mentioned all these scenarios, some people could definitely relate, right? Because this is happening all the time, whether you like it or not, whether it’s visible or not visible, right? The fact that you have multiple people in the team, you will have disagreement, especially if people come from different culture, talk different language or maybe even different age, different gender, and things like that, right? So definitely there will be disagreements. But the way we deal, handle conflicts, right? Whether it’s actually bringing us down or actually we use that to make the team become much more healthy and high performing is maybe the difference, right, between high performing teams and not so performing teams.

I think you mentioned a couple of very unique, interesting phrases just now, right? So I heard about artificial harmony, right? I think that’s kind of like interesting. Also toxic positivity, right? Maybe if the team is always acting positive just like what you said, right? Great team collaboration. But if you talk, if you mention it without any passion, I think it’s like just a phrase, right?

And I think what you mentioned just now, right? The illustration, so from people having conflict, and then how people talk about it, and the others also listen, right? I think listening is very important as well. Because you can have two people just talking but they don’t listen, right? So it’s more like a debate without listening. And also when you debate, right, you should make a decision, right? You cannot just prolong it over the time. And then after the decision, obviously, you kind of like commit, right? Commit and maybe take, give some time. So I think, all these are definitely really, really great illustration, right?

[00:25:39] The Role of Leaders in Conflicts

Henry Suryawirawan: But we mentioned about the role of the leader. So I think the leader always plays the biggest role whenever they see conflict in the team, right? I mean, most teams probably couldn’t just resolve by themselves, I suppose, right? Because you need someone to be the decider or the tiebreaker or something like that, right? So what would you advise leaders to actually act or probably deal with the conflict. So you don’t want a leader who just want to have everything positive. Also you don’t want leader to just leave people fighting, right? How is the balance here?

Hari Haralambiev: Okay. Just a quick note for the terms that I use about artificial harmony and the toxic positivity. I borrow some of these terms from other people. So the Patrick Lencioni, he uses the artificial harmony. And Gustavo Razzetti is the one who talks about toxic positivity as well. So if people don’t know these authors, they can look them up.

Now, for the role of the leader. For me, first, it’s crucial that the leader normalizes that disagreements are expected. So basically, the leader has a crucial Importance in setting the stage. This is something Amy Edmondson talks about, for example, in the book The Fearless Organization, setting the stage is crucial. You basically say, people, it’s super normal that we are going to disagree, and that’s okay. That’s not more than okay. That’s actually wanted. So once you set the stage that disagreement is fine, this is the, let’s say, the first indicator for people, okay, it’s okay that I see things differently.

The other, let’s say, the balancing statement that should also be is what you mentioned committing. So when we make a decision, we should be committed. So we will have disagreements, we are going to look for different perspectives. So it’s perfectly natural that when we discuss, we’ll see things differently. It’s okay to debate. Of course, this is the note, it’s okay to debate respectfully, because there are different ways to debate. And what you mentioned about not listening to others. Well, not listening is not that disrespectful, but yet it’s ineffective. But I’ve seen a lot of bad ways to handle disagreements.

So we’re going to disagree with each other. We are going to debate. But we’ll reach a point where we’re going to make a decision. Now, the leader should make things clear. Again, we can go deeper into how to deal with decision making. It is important for disagreement process. And when the leader says, okay, we are going to make decisions and then commitment is crucial. So this is the way we’re going to decide things. That’s our way of deciding things. Then we will expect everyone to follow through the team decision. There should be no, I told you so, after we’ve chosen a decision together. There should be no one not following the decision. Basically, they should hold each other accountable if they’ve made the decision and someone is not doing the decision. But not in a, let’s say, finger pointing way when you’re not doing that, because sometimes decisions are not that clear, depending on what was discussed. So it’s important for people to remind each other we’ve agreed on that. Let’s do it, so that we can actually achieve what we wanted.

So this is what the leader should do as a setting the stage part. Then during disagreements, I think it’s crucial to, I don’t remember who I first read this about, like it was 15 years ago, to separate discussions from decision making. This is very crucial for me. Because a lot of people start shooting ideas down when they hear them. So if you suggest something, I might say, no, Henry, that’s not going to work because, and I might be perfectly respectful to give you all the points why you’re not right. And it is okay to give you another perspective, but it’s not okay to remove an option for a decision before we’ve reached the decision making part. During the discussion part, it’s okay to have like five or six or seven options to solving a problem.

And the leader should make sure that nobody’s opinion is suffocated by others. So this means that, if this happens and it might happen, the leader could facilitate the discussion and could say, okay, I saw that you disagree, that’s okay. But I want to hear the, this opinion, what’s the idea. And the important here also, aspect is to visualize these points of view. So regardless of whether we’re remote or live. I’ve seen that it’s crucial to visualize what are we arguing about. So what’s our conflict point, by the way? So this is the point that we have differences on. And then visualize, okay, this is one approach. This is a second approach. That’s what Hari suggested, that’s what Henry suggested, that’s what John suggested.

When you put on a whiteboard, the idea of someone, they feel they belong. So you’re sending them their so called belonging cues. So these are signal to people that say you’re important to the team. This is unconsciously perceived by people. But when you’re shooting down my ideas, before we’ve reached the decision making point. And if this happens constantly, at some point, I will ask myself what will happen if I’m not part of the team at all? Because it’s obvious that my opinion doesn’t matter. But if you visualize my opinion, I will feel that I’m heard, that’s important people to feel they’re heard. Because in context of conflicts, there was a research that people don’t want things to happen their way. They want something else more. They want to be heard and their opinion taken into account. If the decision is not using my idea, but if I feel heard, then I’m more willing to commit to the decision. That’s crucial.

So visualizing the conflict point, visualizing the different ideas is something a leader can do, like a facilitator of the discussion. It’s not something that it’s a mandatory for the leader to do, but I’ve seen that more often than not is actually expected from the leader. And at some point, the leader should say, okay, let’s stop discussion. So the example with the startup, once we no longer have different opinions, no longer more different opinions. So we’ve exhausted all the ideas, okay, let’s stop it. Just make a decision. And once we have a clear way of making decisions, decisions are easy. They’re, okay, that’s our approach. These are our options. Decide. And of course, decision making processes can be different for the different type of problems we’re solving.

And yeah, maybe the, the next aspect is crucial. Once the decision is made to make sure it’s clear and to make sure people actually follow through. And something that I’ve seen a lot of leaders misread as a symptom. So if someone is not following through a decision, the initial assumption is people are not committed or people are not engaged that much and so on. My initial assumption is people don’t have a clear understanding of the decision. So the role of the leader is to over communicate. There was one saying that stated the moment you’re sick or tired of repeating a message is the moment people actually start listening. So basically this is crucial for “after decision is made” point.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, I think I find this is a must re-listen for all the leaders, right? Because I can see so many things that you can literally learn from just now what you mentioned, right? I think the most important thing of the role of the leader is to normalize the disagreement. Maybe that’s the first thing, right? Because obviously, there will be a disagreement, whether it’s obvious, visible or not. So normalizing it, making sure that people are comfortable dealing with such disagreements, I think that’s very important. Setting the stage, right?

And also I think you brought up a couple of points, like for example, what is it, the conflict points, right? So people can debate suddenly, right? And they can do so passionately, but in the end, sometimes we digress. We talk about one point, but sometimes that we bring over too many points and we forgot the actual root cause of the debate, right? So I think that’s another thing.

And I think separating discussion and the decision making, I think I read it somewhere as well, right? Sometimes you just want to hear different viewpoints and make sure that you listen and people are heard. And then you kind of like maybe the next day or maybe the next meeting or whatsoever, you convene again to actually make the decision together, right? Sometimes even you could sleep over it. So this is probably also useful to actually normalize the emotion aspect that is probably like a big part when you debate, right? Or when you discuss. So I think sleep over it. Make sure you get well rested, right? And not hungry.

So I think and then make the decision together. And then I think the last point about over communication, right? So I think this is really, really true, right? You cannot just make a decision and assume everyone will just follow onwards, right? But I think over communicating it, making sure it’s clear, repeating over and over until the point where you feel it’s too much. Most of the time, that’s when actually it starts to start picking up, right? So I think thanks for sharing all this. Definitely really, really good insights for all of us.

[00:35:16] Making It Safe to Speak Up

Henry Suryawirawan: I think one aspect, I mean, if you look at the leader, it’s quite clear now. But for the team members, sometimes, I mean, most of the times, especially here in Asia, people don’t like to have conflicts, right? And because of that, they tend not to speak up. You know, keep quiet, or maybe some seniority plays a part, right, where you just follow the leaders. So how do you make sure people or the team members here also can speak up and raise disagreement but respectful at the same time?

Hari Haralambiev: Yeah. So conflict has its cultural aspects as well, how we’re brought up. So engineers, by default, most of them don’t like to speak up. Now, when you mention Asian, so Asian engineers, I would assume it’s even harder. But how to open up people, there are different ways. So first it’s not, let’s say, it’s not a one-off thing. It’s something that should be continuously nurtured by the leader as an environment. But there are different ways. In terms of having reaching people’s opinions in a safe way, what I love to do during coaching sessions. So imagine that we start working with the team. We first put them into, we love to do learning through experience. So we open up. The first time when we meet the people, we put them into a game that they played. It’s a simulation of a problem that engineers love trying to solve this, because it’s initially simple, one from their perspective, then becomes complex, because it involves collaborating with other people.

So we… Imagine that we start working with a team with these three hours a game. And the second session, our goal is to talk about the top three problems that they don’t talk about. So it’s basically, they have to open up not only in front of them, but also in front of some strangers that are coaching them. It’s a challenge. But I think what we do could be applied in a day to day setting. So first, a lot of teams, they don’t have a clear structure of their communication. So it’s basically, let’s meet up, let’s talk. Yeah, there are some rituals that you have some structure. But I talk about other non-structured discussions. They tend to be, especially if you want to open up people, they don’t tend to be ineffective.

So I love the, I don’t know if you know the liberating structures. There is one liberating structure, which is called 1-2-4-All. It is a way to structure discussion. So what we do with teams is that we separate, we do a variation of that. So imagine you have a team of, let’s say, nine people. We’ll structure them into three groups of three and we’ll give them the topic that we want to discuss, but you group them into a smaller groups. When people are in smaller groups, they tend to be more vocal. They tend to be more open, especially they are align, they arrange themselves into the group. So if you say, I want to be in group number one, your friends are the ones who are closer to you, they want to join you. And then you can discuss things.

And once you do that, and then you bring people to talk within the groups, you have their point of view. And then when you ask them to tell their point of view in front of the whole team, what happens is that you don’t know which of the three people actually thinks that you’re speaking on behalf of the group. People become more confident and calm because they’re not saying, I think so. We think so, which is very more safe like that. And we’ve seen a lot of cases where like junior engineers are grouped together and they’re sharing their perspective, then some more senior people share their perspective. The managers or depending on the context, share their perspective. Yeah, you would need facilitation afterwards, but for the opening apart. This is one good way.

Another good ways is, so again, it is not something that like a facilitation trick. Really to create an environment where people actually feel safe to speak up. You should model also vulnerability. So there are four phrases that if you don’t hear them, you should be using them.

So these phrases are…, you are sharing your vulnerability. And the more senior you are when you use them, and I don’t mean manipulatively, I mean in a genuine way. When you use them genuinely, you normalize again that: It is okay to make a mistake. It is okay to be sorry. It’s okay to ask for help. It’s okay to don’t know, because these things are happening. The difference is whether people are speaking about them or not. So the more senior people open up by being vulnerable, the more others will follow.

And another aspect in terms of the whole atmosphere. So there are different practices people can use. So talking about non-work stuff at work. So for example, before we started, we started talking about, a little bit about football, but if we talked about more about Manchester United, Juventus or Tottenham Hotspur, because we basically shared something from our personal lives. If we talked like five minutes more about that, the whole conversation afterwards will be different. So there are practices like emotional check-in, people to share their current emotion before starting the conversation or the weekend report, which is basically telling others, how was your weekend? What did you do? And people will open up in a different way. Most will be, basically, everyone, will share a little bit more than they’re currently comfortable sharing with the group. And bit by bit, when you build up this vulnerability, you will create a more safe environment. So the aspect of bringing some personal stuff, and I don’t mean… when I talk about personal stuff, I don’t mean something that’s happening at home. But personal as a whole person. So for example, I’m quite passionate about work. I would even say that I’m a bit workaholic at points. So I can bring you my personal passions that are work passions into a conversation that’s nothing to do with the current work. And this will make the environment better and we’ll connect more and then I’ll feel safer to speak up. Also a lot of teams, they, basically, we’ve seen a connection between joy and fun at work, and whether you’re a strong team or not.

I’ve not seen a really strong team that doesn’t have joy and fun at work. But I’ve seen a lot of teams that are eliminating joy and fun. I’ve even listened to a manager who basically said to one of the senior people in the team, you can save your own humor or jokes for outside of work, which was the opposite of let’s now people speak of. This is very, very bad approach. So summing up, yeah, joy, fun, personal stuff, and structure the communication in a way people (are) safe could help. But, again, it’s a constant work.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think, I tend to think that so many leaders, right, simply because they were not trained before, right? And they didn’t study also in their uni about leadership and maybe team building aspect. So many of these things, we need to take like more discipline to actually learn about it, right? Things like, for example, structuring communications, facilitation skills, all these soft skills, right? I think it’s something that maybe all leaders should spend more time to actually learn about it. And I think you mentioned, you brought up something about vulnerability, right? I think I can also attest to that. If the leaders never say, sorry, never actually say I don’t know, right? I think that also sets the tone for the team. Maybe those kind of things are not tolerated or maybe people have too much pride and they tend to not speak up because of that.

So I think the more senior leader you are, I think you should probably model this vulnerability. And I thought also you brought up something about personal stuff, right? I think it’s more about authenticity, right? If people can be authentic at work, telling about their personal project or their weekends or things like that. I think people tend to build a good relationship and strong bonding with each other. So I think definitely all these great tips, right? So for people to actually start within your own team, right? Do some of these things so that you can have much, much better team spirit, right?

[00:43:49] Maintaining Engagement During Tough Times

Henry Suryawirawan: So you mentioned something about engagement, joy, fun. And also many, many people actually, I don’t know, like felt a lot of these aspects missing, especially during pandemic and the last few years where you have so many layoffs and things like that, right? And people maybe quiet quitting, right? Those kind of stuff. So when this happens, if you’re a leader, how can you bring up the engagement to the team, right? Knowing that some certain difficult situation happen, right? Maybe the morale of the team, maybe because of the company’s decision, or maybe just the outside external event that is happening outside of anyone’s control. How can you bring back joy, passion, and all this?

Hari Haralambiev: Yeah, well, first, if the situation is bad, just stating that the situation is bad is also something that people appreciate. I remember there was one manager. We were doing… I don’t know if you know the activity anxiety party, we have it on the Soft Skills Pills platform. Anxiety party is a safe way for people to ask for feedback from the rest of the team in front of the whole team, which is not something you would love to do, but this is a very, very powerful, activity. So we had one manager who was anxious, he was afraid that, let’s say, he didn’t bring the corporate mask and was basically reacting to negative situations that were out of his control. He spoke his mind in front of the team, and he was worried whether that affected the team because he was not sugarcoating stuff. He was not, there was no toxic positivity from his behavior at all. And I remember the team, like all of the team, we actually love that, because you treat us as adults. Yeah, the situation is bad. Yeah, this is not something you can control. And you saying that without bringing any additional negativity, but you just acknowledging that situation is not good is good thing. We feel that we can trust you more. So that what you mentioned, Henry, about the authenticity, it is crucial. When people don’t have two faces, they’re more trusted.

I can tell you what I do, I’m not sure which is, let’s say again, the best approach. But if something bad is happening. So I’m a co-founder of a company, of a startup that’s trying to scale up and we have different situations that are more turbulent, especially in the past few years where the tech industry, we are focused on the tech industry. So we are attached to what’s happening there. So there is a lot of stagnation in some businesses. There are some, as you mentioned, the layoffs, it brings negative mood. And what I do is, basically, open up the discussion.

So sharing the situation and bringing the situation forward and trying to, first, to just talk about it. So even if it could, regardless of whether it’s structured or not, the first thing is just to talk about it, to listen to each other. People feel better when they feel they’re not alone. So what you mentioned about leaders resonating with what I’m explaining. Yeah, I was also thrown into the leadership role without knowing what am I going to do. Petya, my co-founder, she was in the HR department. And I joke with her, but that’s the reality. I felt that she was my mentor, because whenever I have people issues, I went to her and I was asking, she was nice enough to explain things to me, because she actually had learned things about organizational psychology.

And when people feel that they’re not the same. So when people feel other people’s worries and hear their thoughts in other people’s mouths, then they become more relieved. So, yeah. It sucks about the layoffs. In our podcast, we received a question from a tech manager. She was asking, because they had layoffs in her company, but not in her team. But she was worried that although the top managers were saying that’s finished and in a few months there will be some restructuring and even, let’s say, bonuses or so on, something positive. The manager was still worried how to bring the team morale up.

And that’s what I explained to her that. You should bring the situation up front to make sure people first share. Just share. No solution. No how do we do with that? No. Just what people are thinking. Then you can have a different discussion. Once we’ve all discussed our worries, our emotions and so on in front of each other, we can go and speak about what we can control. And in situations like this, what you can control is limited. But if you focus on, let’s say, smaller objectives, so not nothing big, but smaller when you put focus on things and you align people together on one thing, then you bring back that momentum and then you can add more objectives afterwards. And you basically spin the wheel.

So in terms of during the pandemic, for example, I remember what happened to us. So we are training organization. One of the first things tech companies did was we’re stopping all trainings. We’re stopping all budgets. So it was, oh my God, what are we going to do? But again, we followed this approach. So we discussed things. We said, things are bad. We feel it like it’s bad for us, whether we will exist or not. So it was four years ago. We were thinking, are we going to manage this or not? And there were a lot of organization in this situation. We discussed, we said, okay. So there were separate discussions, but at some point we said, okay, we can’t control whether the pandemic, what, when it would end or so on, when some limitations will stop be there. But we said, okay, let’s focus on something different. And we put our energy there. And yeah, things went better bit by bit. So this is maybe my advice on that just to be, again, maybe vulnerable to say things are bad.

Henry Suryawirawan: Yeah, I think sometimes, I find that some leaders try to embrace positive things, maybe it’s like a, I don’t know, artificial harmony kind of thing, right? Where you say, okay, things will get better from here, you know, try to motivate people. But I think sometimes it is not the right approach, right? Just what you mentioned, right? Just have a sharing session, acknowledge that this is a bad situation, and hear, just to hear people’s concerns, worries, and things that they are thinking about is definitely useful, right? So that’s the first thing is to let people share their perspectives.

And also, I think what you mentioned just now, I find it really, really important as well, is to have the unity, right? Even though we are in the bad situation, but we are in the bad situation together. So, uh, I think that the unity aspect will probably help each other, right? Support each other. And also telling to each other that we are in this situation together. It’s not like I’m suffering more than you are.

Hari Haralambiev: Yeah. And well to add on what you’re saying. So I do think that the leader should bring the positivity aspect. But it should not be as an opposite to that the situation is bad. So actually the leader should be… when situations are bad and people don’t know what to do, people look up for their leader. So if the leader is “I don’t know what to do, things are bad, I don’t know”, then what will happen is things will even get worse, I think. But if it is, yeah, things are bad. We don’t know what to do, but we will manage. And you have it, this like a process first acknowledging, discussing, bringing people together, and then showing them the way. I think this is really the process, to not to have either-or kind of thinking. You can have both the negativity aspect of things are bad and the positive aspect will get better.

[00:51:57] Maintaining Mental Health for Leaders

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So I think we’ve heard a lot of things, you know, about the role of the leadership, right? The team members speaking up and things like that. Obviously one thing that I find really important as a leader as well is about the person himself, right? Because leadership can be a lonely role. Like what you mentioned just now, people look up to you to make decision, but at the same time, you might be affected from the bad situations as well. You might have heard about so many people’s problems, debates happening. I think for the leaders to actually put their mental health or maybe their sanity, so to speak, right? What would be the good advice for you to actually give the leaders here so that they still feel strong despite all the challenges that they go through?

Hari Haralambiev: One will be basically to listen to your podcast, because this is…, uh. I currently am finishing one book about Ange Postecoglou, the current manager of Tottenham Hotspur. And I love reading some leadership stuff there as well. So what he mentions, he participated at some point with other managers of, I think it was from manager of the cricket national team of Australia. And I think it was some either basketball or something else. So he gathered together once a month with other managers that are experiencing the same bad situations, talking about stuff, asking for each other’s opinion. So basically it’s, I actually remember when we started doing our podcast, at some point, I co-hosted with another team member of our company, Vasi, and she went on maternity leave. And what happened next was I was the host of the podcast and I brought tech managers.

And for me, part of the discussions was actually, a mental health practice for me, because I can actually discuss with other managers the same problems that I have, they have. So for me, some smaller community with other people that are not part of your company, it could be part of your company, of course. But when it’s outside of your company, it is actually better, because you don’t have prejudices, previous history. So regarding the context, you can listen more openly to what others are saying. So for me, find other people that are in the same boat as you and in the same journey as you. And just talk about your current experience once a month or so.

Henry Suryawirawan: Thanks for sharing that. I think, yeah, having community can be very useful, right? I don’t know how many leaders here have some kind of a smaller community with other leaders, maybe from other companies and things like that. But I think definitely it’s useful, right? I just also listened to a podcast today, right? Actually, the guest was talking about therapy. So he suggested that actually everyone needs a therapist, so to speak, to actually talk about issues. Sometimes it’s a hidden issues that you were not aware before, right? And just to talk stuff, right? I think maybe we all need this kind of a therapies for us, right? And especially for leaders, right? To talk through about their tough situations and having to be strong, you know, to lead team.

[00:55:07] 3 Tech Lead Wisdom

Henry Suryawirawan: So, Hari, thank you so much for this conversation. There are so many learning points, right? So, Soft Skills Pills, I think for you guys to learn more about these kinds of resources. So I have one last question for you, which I always ask my guests to actually share. I call this three technical leadership wisdom. I know that we have talked a lot about so many wisdom. But if you can distill maybe just three things that you want us to take as a learning points from this conversation, what would that be?

Hari Haralambiev: Okay. That’s yeah, although you prepared me for that question, I’m still wondering what is mine. So at some point I started illustrating a comics called A Leader’s Tale, which I turned it into a newsletter nowadays. I illustrate less.

But for me, there is one leadership principle that I strongly believe in, which is the pain of one is the pain of the team. And for me, it’s very important to have this kind of thinking in mindset. If someone is having a problem, regardless of whether it’s a work related one or a personal related one, the team can support that. Yeah, of course, there are some boundaries and we can debate about that a lot. But I think that, and there is one great book, The Culture Code. There are some great examples of how teams, strong teams react to a problem of one person that no one is left behind. So this is one aspect that I’m thinking of.

Something more practical from my past experience is never to leave someone alone as part of the team. I remember I had the downsizing of a project and basically I had, as a leader, I was in parallel leading a few teams. But one team got to only one software engineer in a maintenance mode. And although I did a lot of things to make sure he’s okay, if there was a problem to support him and so on. Let’s say I didn’t catch it on time that he was about to leave, although there were no signals that I caught before that. And so I have a rule nowadays not to have a person doing something alone for a long time. So even if someone says, let’s do a team of one, I’ll be very cautious about that and will strongly advise not to have it. So this is the number two.

You mentioned three, right? I’ll borrow something from the book that I’m currently reading, because I think it’s important. So when I was a young leader, young manager, I hesitated a lot. I was always wondering, is this the right direction? Is that the right direction? Am I doing enough? And so on. So I was not listening to myself. I was believing that I should fit some kind of a norm or do it in the company’s way or whatever. And I believe that every one of us should follow our own unique approach into leading. And I don’t believe in a prescribed way of leading, because we constantly change and evolve.

Yeah, we should listen to others. We should take into account their perspective. We should use tools. We should use, read books, listen to podcasts, etc. But I think the more authentic we are the earlier in our career as leaders, the better we’ll become. Yeah, we’ll make mistakes, of course, but we’ll tweak our approach. And it’s important to have some, let’s say, strong principles you believe in and to lead, because of something more than just delivering results but to have something bigger. And once you find this thing that drives you into leading, you should listen to yourself more rather than all the external voices. I think this is something very very important.

Henry Suryawirawan: Wow, very unique wisdom, so to speak, right? Thanks for sharing all these, right? So definitely don’t leave the team of just one person, right? The bus factor is really super high, uh, unless maybe he’s the founder, right? So there’s nothing that you can do for that. But I think that’s definitely very important for leadership, right? Always build redundancy and high availability, so to speak, if we’re talking about the technical aspects. So for people who want to maybe follow up with you or they want to learn more, is there place where can they reach out to you?

Hari Haralambiev: Yeah, I’m constantly on LinkedIn, my second place for, for, yeah, so LinkedIn is, is great. You can look me up. And also through the Soft Skills Pills platform, I share a newsletter that I write from time to time so people can subscribe even there.

[00:59:41] Fun Fact About Soft Skills Pills

Henry Suryawirawan: Just out of curiosity, why do you call it Pills? Is it something that you can easily digest and we can be healthier and better because of that?

Hari Haralambiev: Well, when we bought the domain softskillspills.com, it was out of my annoyance as part of the training process that we had. Because I’m not sure whether it’s, let’s say cultural aspect locally in Bulgaria or it’s a phenomenon in engineering world as well. But people tend to look for the silver bullet, the one solution for a problem. So that’s why we said, okay, let’s give them pills for all the problems they have. So it was part of a joke. I even started illustrating comics back then. Like, let’s say, how to run an effective meetings, well drink two liters of water before entering the meeting and you make sure it will finish quickly. There was different humorous or attempts of a humorous way to share for people that there are no pills and context matters. But we love playing, so that’s why we decided to use the name.

Nowadays, there are a lot of things that are easily digestible. Yeah. People can look for tips. There are some activities that can be both from the platform that are solving a particular problem. And the assessment tools. Also, there are some ways, some pills to help people. And I hope, well, that’s the idea that when you create strong teams, you have either more fun doing work or it will be easier or both. But at least, you make your life a lot easier when you have a better team with a better climate.

Henry Suryawirawan: Right. So make sure to check those pills, people. I’ll put it in the show notes. Maybe you can check so many pills from the website, right? So thank you so much for coming here. So I hope the listeners here also learn a lot of things from this conversation. Thank you so much, Hari.

Hari Haralambiev: It was a pleasure, Henry. Thanks for having me.

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