Speaking and Communicating Podcast

It doesn't matter how technical you are, how brilliant you are.

If you cannot output what's in your brain in a language, people can understand and connect to them and relay this to a personal story, to a metaphor.

It doesn't matter how smart you are.

Welcome back to the Speaking and Communicating Podcast.

I am your host, Robert and Leila.

If you are looking to improve your communication skills, both professionally and personally, this is the podcast you should be tuning in to.

Communication and soft skills are crucial for your career growth and leadership development.

By the end of this episode, please log on to Apple and Spotify and leave us a rating and a review.

Now, let's get communicating with Evgeniy Kharam, who is a cybersecurity expert that specializes in soft skills.

Let's talk about a perfect guest for this show.

He is the author of the best-selling book, Architecting Success, The Power of Soft Skills in Technical Sales.

As we've discussed many, many times on this show on how important soft skills is, especially in the tech industry.

More than $37 billion is lost annually by businesses due to lack of communication, especially between tech teams and salespeople, and that's what Evgeniy is going to focus on today.

Before I go any further, please help me welcome him to the show.

Hi Evgeniy.

Thank you.

Thank you, Roberta.

Very, very honored to be on the show.

You're absolutely right.

It's a perfect match for me.

I can talk about technology, I can talk about cyber, and I can talk about soft skills.

Exactly.

You're home.

Welcome to the show.

Please introduce yourself.

Tell our listeners more about you.

Definitely.

By trade, I'm a solution architect.

I'm a very, very technical person.

I've been in the industry for quite a while, more than 20 years.

If any of you in US and watching Shark Tank, I actually worked for Robert Herjavec, one of the Shark Tanks, for 16 years.

Yes.

Majority of the career in North America was working for Robert.

I graduated two years ago from the company.

The company merged with another company, and I decided it's time for me to leave and start my own business.

But I learned a lot about communication, and I learned a lot about working with customers by being and building the Herjavec Group with Robert together there.

What interesting is, I was never thinking about writing a book about soft skills.

But then in one moment, I realized, that it doesn't matter how technical you are, how brilliant you are.

If you cannot output what's in your brain in a language, people can understand it could be a business language, it could be a simple language, and connect to them and relate it to a personal story, to a metaphor, it doesn't matter how smart you are.

And this could be sales, this could be consulting, this could be even a person trying to sell an idea to his manager about a new device, a new structure.

Because if you think about that, we all are sales.

We will wash the dishes, which movie we're going to watch today, which project we're going to do, where we need to focus, can I have a vacation day, and many, many other things.

Right.

The way you speak, it's almost like you read the trailer for the podcast, because that's essentially why I started it.

Here's the thing about that.

We always say it's not about the fact that you are communicating, but how do your audience, how do others experience you?

So you are technically brilliant here, but if they don't understand you, it means absolutely nothing.

Or you tend to do a society, what we do is we put technical people in this box of, oh no, they're introverts, they just do all their programming quietly, they don't bother anyone, but do you run a business when you work in a vacuum?

And there's a couple of things here, because we all learn differently.

When we're communicating with the person, we forget it's not about us, it's about how they understand the information.

And this was one of the motivation for me for the book, because I joined so many different pitches from the vendor to sell technology.

The majority of them, the salesperson will say, oh, look at my presentation.

And the engineer will say, look at the demo of this amazing product.

But do you ask the customer what they want to see?

How they want this time to be spent?

So we forget about this very, very important part.

And as you mentioned, introverts or whatever we want to call them, extroverts are now apparently half and half as well.

Doesn't really matter.

If we go all the way back to our childhood, we all knew soft skills.

We all knew how to manipulate our parents to get the candy, to watch more TV, to stay more with the park, whatever it is.

But then with time, I believe what happened that we realize what we do as soft skills, we potentially can be slapped on our hands.

Or maybe somebody will say no, or somebody potentially will not be so nice as our parents.

So we started to lose the soft skills.

Because while soft skills are supposed to be soft and fluffy, they actually have to take you outside of your comfort zone and do something you're not used to do.

That's why there's a lot of debate about calling them soft skills.

They're the hardest to learn.

Why are you calling them soft skills?

But here's the thing about that as well.

There's this Catch-22 situation.

If you're a tech person, you're brilliant.

When you are pitching, like you gave that example earlier, where do you draw the line between, these people need to know that I know what I'm talking about, that I know my industry, and then bridge then that gap of they are not technical people, this audience of mine, I need to speak layman's terms in the language they understand.

So how much do I show them of, I know what I'm talking about, but then this is how it applies to you.

What I used to do, and I can provide my examples, I cannot speak for everyone again because everyone is different.

When I used to present, you don't always know who is in the room and how technical they are or not.

So what I will do, I'll start presenting, I'll go very high on the high level, then I will go very deep to show the people that I understand the nuances, and I will try to watch the eye contact and understand like, oh, you know, what are you talking about?

And I'll come back very fast to middle ground.

And from there, I will navigate where to go to understand what they want to do.

This is where it was much easier face to face.

And this was also part of motivation for the book because face to face, we were very focused.

We had the full audience.

People didn't have four screens.

I have four screens right now.

People didn't have messenger running on the side.

You saw that if I'm doing that, going on the right in case you don't see it on video, I'm writing a note because you don't know right now in the video, if I continue moving out of the screen, I'm actually writing notes, but you don't see this.

So we had the full attention.

Right now, not everyone on the video, not everyone in touring video.

What if your camera is on the left side and I'm talking to you and you see just the right side of my face, but I see your eyes, then what happens there?

So the focus part is not fully there.

But if we have the focus and we have the understanding, I can watch your eye movement and I'm not going away from the question.

I can look on your facial expression and I hope I can understand, are you nodding, are you bored by what I'm talking about or something else?

So there is two-sided communication when we always present.

As it shares the sound, people say, oh, interrupt me, ask me questions.

I'm here for you, but you need to commit.

Do you really want people to interrupt you or don't want people to interrupt you?

When people present to me, I usually ask them, would it be okay if I interrupt you?

Why?

Because I like to interrupt.

I don't want them to go for 20 minutes to explain if I have a question right now.

People may say, yes, please interrupt.

The mature people will say, can you wait 10 minutes, we'll finish the presentation, we'll finish the demo, we'll finish the story, and we may answer all your questions.

I'm fine with that as well.

Then I'm going to sit down and write my questions on a piece of paper, on a note, but then do this.

To finish answering the question, you want to show that you have the knowledge and you want to come back to the middle ground to understand what's happening.

Then you can provide option.

If you guys want me, I can go deeper on the technical.

It's reading the body language, which is actually the bigger percentage of communication than just words, than just the verbal.

Then when it comes to your audience as well, we always say that when you go to university, who's your role model, so to speak, of making a presentation?

Your professors, your lecturers, and how do they do it?

They know how to read the crowd.

They are not monotone.

They're not like, hello, we're here to present about physics, or we're here to present about that.

They're almost like a show players, almost like doing show, because they want people to be interactive, and they want to connect and ask questions, and not just present, like they have a task to deliver and then be gone.

People that I like to watch, if this is a question, or you're asking when I present in universities, I guess, this is the...

At university, because one of the things we always ask is, it looks like, especially technically brilliant people, they are very prepared technically, but communication and presentation-wise, they're not.

We're not teaching this enough in general, and this is the interesting part.

People think because they're technically brilliant, it's going to be enough.

Unfortunately, it's going to be depend on who they land on the interview.

If they land on a techie, it may go by.

If they land on somebody different, then they may even have a hard time to present.

That's why, for example, I don't really like job description and the job application when you need to talk to a computer and record yourself speak, and they give you like two minutes.

And I saw friends doing that.

If you don't have the knowledge how to record yourself, you're going to be having a hard time.

You've been in podcasting for several years.

Did you like your voice when you started to record?

Not only did I not like it, I thought nobody's going to listen to this.

Maybe I should just delete this and think about doing something different.

Think about a girl or a boy that never listen to themselves.

It's actually in the book.

I have a chapter to talk about recording yourself and analyzing yourself.

Because we are okay to go to a doctor if they have a sore back or pain or teeth.

But I don't think a lot of thinking about go to a speech therapist or a voice professional to actually work on our voice and improve our voice.

So imagine a person, first time ever, potentially recording themself and listening to themself.

Just the idea in their head that they need to present, they're not going to be in the same way talking as they're talking to their friends.

They're going to be more nervous.

They're going to have more filler words.

Many, many times I had people in my podcast when we just spoke with them, everything was fine.

The moment I click the record button, something's switching their head and now they, hi, I am, so we today.

It takes like five minutes to slow down, relax, and then speak normally.

It took me time to remove filler words.

It took me time to analyze my voice and realize, instead of filler words, we can just do the pause for a second or two, and nothing's gonna happen to you.

That's a very good example of when you start recording, something switches.

What happens mentally?

Because that's the same as presenting in front of an audience.

That's why people are afraid to stand on stage and the spotlight is on you to make a presentation.

Not only think about presenting on stage, it's done in 20 minutes, 40 minutes.

Recording a podcast, we're gonna live there forever, thank you.

So what I'm thinking what's happening, my mom gonna listen to this, my dad gonna listen to this, my kids, my wife, my husband, whatever it is, my neighbors, because now they understand it's going somewhere.

Remember this movie in the cloud?

There was a movie about a tape that went to the cloud and they couldn't remove it.

Something like that, like eight years ago.

Like the moment it's recorded, it's gonna be somewhere for a long time.

So something switches in the mind and they afraid, the main key is when they record people, are you gonna tell them, I'm gonna click record button, we're not recording, but you're just gonna talk.

Then we're just gonna talk and in one moment, I'm gonna start actually recording the real session.

I don't even realize because I forgot I click record.

So they're just themselves?

Yes.

It takes time to relax.

Because there's something that happens mentally when you think you're being judged, when you think, oh, if I make a mistake, because everybody's afraid of being judged, making a mistake and that kind of thing.

And that's why they're even afraid to stand in front of an audience and make a presentation.

And then it's become even worse because then they created some kind of script to introduce themselves.

Hello, I'm Evgeniy.

I'm a senior solution architect.

I've been working in this industry, whatever it is.

Now, they don't have teleprompters.

They don't have a good environment.

So now you look on their eyes, but they're actually watching somewhere different screen because you're reading from a text.

So if you have a video recording, they're not communicating with you eye to eye, or you actually hear the reading because they're not punctuating it correctly and breathing a bit differently.

So it becomes even more skewed.

So I'm a second time immigrant.

When I came to Canada and we needed to do introduction in the sales meetings or with the customers, there's many people, I will just repeat what I'm saying several, several times and in many cases, when my turn come to talk, I will say completely different something because I was just panicking.

Right.

But now let's talk about technical sales and sales engineers, right?

Where is the disconnect?

Because a lot of companies, I've had several guests in the past who've said, we lose millions as well.

When the sales team didn't communicate the right information to the technical team to create the right app for the customer, the customer complains because they didn't get what they asked for, and the sales team tells the tech, but we told you and the tech says, this is what you said.

Where is the disconnect?

There's two things.

Majority of the sales teams have a sales person and a sales engineer.

So the sales engineer is the technical person, and the sales person is the one that is responsible on the deal.

Having said this for the last 5, 6, 10 years, we do see the sales engineer doing more sales because it's become very complex, and the sales person actually doing a bit of recruitment because to close a deal, you need to understand all these documents.

There's MSAs, there's NDAs, there's legal, there's so many documents you need to do.

In the past, without saying anything, but the engineer will almost be like a demo monkey.

They will come in, do the demo, and leave without disrespect to anyone.

But not anymore because they now need to connect, they need to tell the people, they need to understand what the customer want.

This is also part of the book a lot.

What's happening is a sales engineer together with the salesperson need to capture the requirement.

What's interesting is the salesperson usually get more commission than the sales engineer.

So the salesperson wants to close the deal because they don't want to make more money.

Now, the sales engineer, the good one, are trying to put the deal in perspective to make sure it's actually possible by the company to do.

What happened later, the good sales team don't try to sell you something that it's impossible to deliver.

Why?

Because the customer will be unhappy and probably never buy from them again.

Because after the deal is closed, you're writing an SOW, Scope of Service, Scope of Work, where you're describing what you want to do, and the license, or whatever's happened.

And then it's going to a different team, depending on what you're selling.

Software development, a product, not one way, that's going to deliver this.

Because SaaS, for example, Software as a Service or Software, in many cases, you're buying product or you build.

So the only thing you're choosing is the license.

But if you're buying a product that needs to be created for you, there are many, many, many nuances there.

This is where the project management come in, or the product management come in, or the business development people that are interacting with the customers and making sure what's delivered, it's what the customer needs.

The majority of the problem happening is the salesperson wants to close the deal as soon as possible.

Because they want to make money in the people.

Right.

We say on this podcast that soft skills, in addition to your technical expertise, also opens up doors for leadership one, or career growth if you want to go horizontal, if you don't want to deal with people, because some people just don't want to deal with people, which is fine.

But you're going to be the wizard in your field.

Has that been your experience?

100 percent.

The ability to communicate with other people, and I'm sure you probably read Dale Carnegie, How to Find Friends and Influence People, and I hope many people as well.

There's an entire idea of hooks.

And there's another size-core NLP, when this is describing why we're liking some people or we don't like some people.

Example could be we went to the same school, we work in the same place, we've been in the same city, we like the same baseball team or football team, we are playing the same sport, we have the same car, we like the same singer, whatever it is.

But the moment we find something in common, automatically, we like this person much more.

I'm sure if you're going to come to a place, I should depend on the woman and the man.

Not a good example, because if the man will come in the same place and see somebody wearing the same t-shirt, they're going to laugh and talk about this.

If the woman going to come to the same place and see somebody with the same dress, probably not going to be a good idea.

So better example.

But if you come somewhere with the same car, for example, you will automatically not talk about the car.

For example.

So there's many ways to connect to people.

So back to soft skills and career growth, if you can relate to your manager or to other people to understand what they like, to understand, this could be even to the point that your kids like the same hobbies or you have kids, or both of you have kids.

Now, I'm not talking to be a fake person and talk to someone about something you don't really know or understand.

So this is where emotional intelligence come in.

The more you understand about life, the more you understand about the world, the easier you connect with the other person and understand what they do.

So I never going to have a guitar behind me and I call it a reversal.

Because if I'm going to connect with you, for example, and have a guitar behind me, you may ask me, Evgeniy, what's up with the guitar?

I say, oh, I play a guitar.

Why?

Because I know you play guitar and I don't play guitar.

So I'm not able to do it.

But if you have a guitar behind you, I'll ask you, do you play guitar?

What do you play?

I understand enough to talk about the guitar, but I'm never going to say I play guitar.

But I can at least have the communication.

But if I have a spaceship behind me and you like spaceships, and I can talk about spaceships, I do like spaceships as well.

I did a space program in April for my birthday.

It was very, very fun.

So there's a different way to connect to people.

And the moment your manager, your supervisor, your customers have a personal connection with you, hobby, ideas, then it's much easier to move later on to ask them for a favor.

To the point that when I was managing people in a previous company, I always told people, you're going to go to a customer for a week.

You're going to do a professional service for them.

Doesn't matter on which field.

There is no way you will talk to them only about work for 40 hours, basically like five days.

Look, you want to understand what do they do on a weekend.

Hey, you're running a bike.

Nice.

I don't ride the bike.

Can you explain to me about bikes?

I want to maybe have a bike in the future.

Connect to them.

Why?

Bring them a coffee.

Next time you're coming, ask them what kind of coffee they like or tea.

When something is going to go wrong and usually in cyber stuff goes wrong, they're not going to blame you right away.

They're going to potentially, because they already like you, like, oh, Evgeniy, this thing doesn't work as expected.

What do I do?

Versus Evgeniy building this thing, come fix it.

It's a bit different conversation.

Build the relationship.

Like you said, everything is sales.

It's the same as a sale.

If a person doesn't buy the first time, you don't block them and want nothing to do with them, they may come back later.

Just continue building the relationship.

Yes.

The majority of us believes that the world is round.

I know there's people who don't believe in this.

We're not going to talk about this right now, but the world is round.

So there's a good chance this person move to a different company.

You move to a different company and you will connect again somewhere else.

Never ever burn your bridges.

I believe you have a soft skills development plan.

Like we're saying earlier, a lot of technical people when they graduate, they know they need the skills because the more we talk about them, but they don't know how to get started.

Yes.

In the end of the book and on the website as well, there is what we call SSDP, Software Skill Development Plan.

It's a 30, 60, 19, 120 days plan to improve your soft skills.

To have ideas what to do, reflection, very, very important.

I think the most important part is to find someone that will be not a judge, but a companion.

Somebody, they actually have to tell what you're doing.

Because it's very, very easy to start, and also very, very easy to steer away the same ideas as we do.

Like, you know, New Year's resolution, we start and we give up in two weeks.

This way, I do suggest to find someone that basically almost will be like a judge, almost someone you have to report on what you did and why you did.

Accountability partner, yeah.

Yes, yes, good point.

What I'm doing right now is I'm trying to figure out how I can build an adaptive plan because right now it's very, very zero one.

So there's basically one way to do it.

But I want to create a quiz and questionnaire to the people when somebody can come in, answer 20, 40 questions, and I'm going to build a plan for them.

They're going to be specified on what they do, how they do and what to do.

Should leaders be involved or take the initiative to help their new technical hires with these soft skills or this is not their job?

So I guess we need to explain what are leaders.

Managers in my mind are people that tell people what to do.

Leaders are people that help people to grow.

They have this man about the leader is putting the water on the plan because they wanted to grow.

So yes, they need to understand what's the option for people to grow.

During one-on-ones, they can understand the person better.

What do they like?

What do they don't like?

Probably what they don't like is whether they need to push them.

I'm a very big believer of 80-20 rule that the 20 percent, you have to push yourself out of the comfort zone.

Everybody that reported to me knew there's no way you are going to push you to do something you're going to be uncomfortable doing.

I like to tell people you need to be comfortable being uncomfortable.

You really like pushing people out of the comfort zones.

This is the second time you mentioned it today.

Yes.

Yes, I do.

I do.

Not always good, probably.

I can tell you in a personal message where it doesn't really work.

It's a good thing though, because you do grow as I said, leaders help people grow.

I believe you're a host of two podcasts.

Please give us a summary of what it is that you've discussed and tell us about them.

Yes.

The first podcast I started was my partner Dimitri.

He is a very smart CTO in a company, and we were thinking about what's missing in the industry.

We decided to start a podcast about basically architecture and design in cybersecurity.

So I saw a need, he saw a need.

Like he said, okay, let's partner on a podcast and do this together to basically help customer before they buy a solution to understand what questions they need to ask the vendor.

This way, when you're buying a security solution, I don't want to go to new answers and being very specific right now on cyber.

But before you go and buy, you can watch the episode almost like Netflix.

We will interview several different vendors and ask them the same questions so you as a customer can watch the episodes and understand what's missing and be more prepared.

Why?

Because when I was doing a lot of work with enterprise customers, I saw a problem when people will buy a solution and do not deploy solution because it didn't fit, because somebody left and because it didn't do the technical due diligence.

This is the first podcast, very, very technical about architecture and design.

The second podcast called Cyber Inspiration, I started it two years ago and it's completely not technical.

It's interviewing business founders, mainly in cyber, about their inspiration to start their company.

How did they come up with the idea?

How did they raise money?

How did they hire people?

What kind of cultures are building in the company?

How did they decide to hire type A personality, type B personality of people?

So it's more about business and lately I added a couple of episodes about books.

So cyber inspiration about book, what motivated to write a book and how you did.

So the one is about technical skills, architecture, and then the other one is about business.

Speaking of books, yours is Architecting Success, The Power of Soft Skills in Technical Sales.

What motivated you to write that book?

A couple of things is one, I saw that we're losing this focus.

So during COVID, we had the Zoom calls, and I saw how we don't really have the capturing that mention of the people.

I realized, okay, we need to connect with them much faster on a personal level.

They will care about us before we even present.

Two is as mentioned in the beginning, I was talking about that people learn differently.

I was annoyed that everybody will come in and tell me, can I show my presentation?

And some people asking me, what is the best way to present this information to you?

You want a presentation, demo, talk about it.

And three is the evolution about engineers and sales, how they all changed.

Combination of this, this was the motivation for the book.

And when I started to write the book, many stories came in from what I did to myself.

How did I learn about become better speaker, modify my voice, how did I figure out how to use video, audio, teleprompter, how to overcome fear?

What if I know everything and I'm very smart, but I'm afraid to present to a board of directors, I'm afraid to present to a big crowd.

And interestingly enough, one chapter that was not originally completely in the book is about burnout.

Because the art of being present or just how to be present.

If I'm really, really good at everything I do, but I have a headache while I work, it doesn't matter everything else because I cannot be present and actually do my work.

And you found that burnout is a huge challenge in the industry?

Yes.

I was interviewing people also, I was interviewing friends for the book, and while interviewing friends, I realized how burnout is a big problem.

Especially in this industry.

Just in summary, thank you so much, first of all, Evgeny, for sharing your experiences and the things that you've learned, how they're going to help technical people.

But do you have any last words of wisdom for anyone wondering, how do I get started?

Where do I go from here in order to accelerate their career?

Because sometimes people say, why am I stuck, but I'm brilliant?

Why am I always in this desk and nobody notices my brilliance?

One is curiosity.

You have to be curious to actually go and learn new things.

And think about what does it mean.

This is not just watching YouTube videos, but actually trying what people tell you to do.

Two, practice soft skills not at work.

Practice soft skills anywhere.

While you're waiting in line, talk to someone that's waiting with you and show you frustration.

How long is the line?

See if they're going to react to you and connect with you.

Or vice versa, tell about how good is the weather and you're happy to be in line to buy whatever you're buying.

Try to make the cashier smile when you're buying groceries.

There's so many different office to connect to people.

To the point right now, my kids tell me, Dad, it's impossible to go with you everywhere.

I'm like, why?

Because you talk to everyone.

Sounds like my mom when church is done.

Just make small talk with complete strangers.

Get some practice.

It doesn't have to always be a technical conversation.

It doesn't have to have any outcome.

But if you made somebody else smile, it's a good outcome as well in general.

Because then you develop all the emotional intelligence, the empathy, and all the things that we talk about are now required in leadership nowadays.

Thank you so much, Evgeniy Kharam, the Cybersecurity Expert who is a member of the Canada Cybersecurity Network, author of Architecting Success, The Power of Soft Skills in Technical Sales, and host of two podcasts.

We are really thankful and appreciate you being here today.

Thank you so much.

Thank you very much.

My absolute pleasure.

Please tell us where to find the book.

If you have a website or anything you want to share with our listeners, so that we can reach out to you.

Yes.

On LinkedIn, search for Evgeniy Kharam, E-V-G-E-N-I-Y, and the last name K-H-A-R-A-M, M like Mary.

There is a website for the book SoftSkillsTech.ca.

SoftSkillsTech.ca and Evgeniy Kharam on LinkedIn.

If you want to reach out and learn more how to improve your own soft skills, especially if you're in the tech industry.

Thank you so much.

Thank you for joining us on the Speaking and Communicating Podcast once again.

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