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Sherali Karimov: “Hiring advisors is merely a symptom” | s16vc

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Aleks Shamis, Managing Partner @ s16vc and a 4x product founder, sits down with Sherali Karimov, a transformational executive / leadership coach who has helped build highly functioning, effective, and healthy executive teams behind household-name companies such as Miro, Atlassian, and Amplitude, as well as promising startups from the s16 community, including xentral, ZERO, AppFollow, Profi, and Smartcat. Sherali also coached Borzo, which Aleks helped build before starting s16vc.

This is a unique and first-of-its-kind interview, as Sherali usually prefers to shun the spotlight and keeps an incredibly low profile. During this conversation, we’ll immerse you into the intricacies of coaching and help you unravel this mysterious yet powerful instrument for your personal growth and the growth of your company.

Follow Sherali on LinkedIn:
https://www.linkedin.com/in/skarimov/

Music: Prod. by Anabolic Beatz

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https://www.linkedin.com/in/aleksandrshamis/
https://twitter.com/aleks_shamis

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https://www.linkedin.com/company/s16vc/

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https://medium.com/@s16vc

Visit our website:
https://www.s16vc.com

I tried to find other interviews to prepare for our conversation but it seems that you keep an extremely low profile. There is hardly any material available online about you. I'm not consciously hiding. I was actually thinking about it a while back. When I started exploring coaching seriously and researching it,

two people stood out as inspirations:

Andy Grove and Bill Campbell. Both are phenomenal coaches held in the highest regard. When Andy Grove died, Ben Horowitz wrote a deeply touching post about him. They both coached prominent figures such as the founders of Google and Steve Jobs yet they were extremely different. Andy Grove was a prolific writer with a systematic mind, he wrote many articles and books that I absolutely love leaving behind a lot of material. He was careful and precise with his wording and his content represents his personality. Bill Campbell was a complete opposite. He was a people person always focused on the individual not on the problem or the business. He swore a lot was really down to earth and didn't write anything. I'm not saying I'm like Bill Campbell but I think that side of coaching is much closer to me. Coaching is about unlocking growth in people

and to me that comes at three levels:

helping people unlock skillsets unlocking performance and unlocking the person. This resonates strongly with me and that's what Bill Campbell aimed for — making a person not just effective in their job but a better person overall. Helping people discover themselves and unlock their potential is a special gift to give. The journey of coaching led me there but I don't know how to write about it. It's complex nuanced and personal. At the same time, it could be just an excuse. Writing is a big insecurity of mine maybe. I mean, you don't have to write about that specifically right but what you're saying resonates with me deeply. And the names of Andy Grove and Bill Campbell and their books High Output Management and Trillion Dollar Coach as well as Multipliers which I believe you recommended to me before. These three books are like bibles to me. I used to assign them to every person on my team who was becoming a manager and getting their first subordinates. They're a must-read before they take on accountability for any other human being at the company. Before we go deeper let's clarify something that often confuses people. Are you an advisor a coach or a mentor? How do you identify yourself? If you were to ask an executive whether they are a manager coach, recruiter analyst or all of the above the answer would be the same. The roles we play depend on the situation at hand. You did a great job defining some of those roles in your conversation with Elena Verna. Can you talk a little bit about how you became an executive coach and advisor? My background is in hardware engineering. I studied microelectronics in the former Soviet Union, this was as far away from coaching people as possible. I wasn't very good at socializing and going deep into conversations. At some point I switched to software engineering and spent about 8 to 9 years in this field. However, software engineers are also not known for being a very social group of people. The necessity to understand people their intentions and motivations first occurred to me after my first failure as a manager in around 2001. When my boss who was the CTO of our startup went on holiday he made me the team lead. I lasted exactly one week in that position. Our professional services team was making customizations to our products on the customer side. They had access to CVS our source code. They checked out the source of the current release made some changes and committed it back into the GA branch. I was pissed off because they had modified something we held sacred. Instead of talking to them first to understand what happened I went and revoked their permissions to access CVS. I was in Australia while they were in the US so there was a 9 to 10 hour time zone gap. While I was asleep they attempted to continue working only to find out that they no longer had access to CVS. This was not a good leadership move on my part. A week later the CTO returned and demoted me. Wow, no second chances. Absolutely. But he had a good conversation with me. He pointed out the mistake I made why it was important to talk to those guys explain their perspective to me. I felt really embarrassed. He suggested a few articles and I came across this article on HBR that said that you could be an introvert or you could be an extrovert but as a manager you have no choice but to learn how to be an omnivert. That put me on the path of discovery that being introverted is not an excuse anymore. A year later, he I guess believed in me enough promoted me back into a manager and that's how my management career began. It was a totally different journey. The painful realization was that there are important things at the next level that you are blind to. To be successful you must first become aware that there is a skill set or area that you have to explore. It's not just about acquiring more skills it's about becoming aware of a new area that represents a significant growth leap. The next big step in my career came when I transitioned from engineering to go-to-market. It was an accidental opportunity that I didn't give much thought to but I figured why not. My new job involved talking to Atlassian partners who needed to sell software but weren't very skilled at it. I had to convince them that selling isn't lying but rather about articulating the highest value that they are trying to deliver understanding the businesses of their clients and their needs and showing empathy. It was a big challenge to learn all of that and convey the message to people who were mostly technically-minded. This taught me about the power of influence. As Andy Grove explains in his book a manager's output is not just the output of the people under his or her direct management but also the output of all the people under his or her influence. Switching to advising was another accidental opportunity. Initially I didn't think much about it but then someone suggested that I explore it as a business instead of seeking employment. This started an experiment to see if it was a valuable service that could be monetized. This was the basic level. Then there was the desire to make a bigger impact. Was this a path where I could make a difference at an even bigger level? Was this a way of self-expression that resonated with me? Because I still see myself as an engineer. Writing code or tinkering with hardware really excites me. In the last 8 years, however I discovered that helping people unlock their potential is also a very creative challenging and nuanced craft so I gradually came to enjoy it. Based on my experience working with you I have always assumed that what makes you a great coach is your unique background in both engineering and business. As you previously shared you sort of fell into coaching by accident which I think makes you stand out from an average coach Do you agree with this assessment and could you talk more about what led you to switch from coaching your subordinates to consulting? My experience in engineering building and optimizing products as well as go-to-market strategies has given me a wide range of skills that allow me to help people with practical tips and tricks. My engineering background enables me to think in models and continuously improve my understanding of how things work. Similarly, in go-to-market strategies it takes enormous discipline and consistency to build a successful pipeline and execute quarter after quarter. This experience helps me go one level deeper and unlock performance for my clients. I believe there is a third component that's super important when advising coaching or mentoring people. Being fundamentally sensitive and empathetic to them and being curious. For me the switch from defensiveness to curiosity happened through years of therapy. Shedding my defensive behavior and adopting a curious approach was the most significant moment in unlocking my coaching journey. I believe that without this curiosity it's difficult to go deep and unlock people. I love the engineering mindset. When I was graduating from high school and couldn't decide on a career I spoke to my physics teacher whom I admired and respected a lot. He said if you don't know what you want to do do engineering it keeps your options open to do anything you want afterwards. That advice worked for me and for a long time I strongly believed that everyone I hired should have an engineering degree regardless of their role. I have since expanded my horizons and no longer hold that belief, however I still believe that having an engineering background is a strong advantage in almost all fields. I think one of the things that distorts communication between people is that most of us are really bad at expressing ourselves clearly most of the time. I think the engineering mindset that you acquire when studying engineering teaches you to express yourself very clearly. You must be specific and precise and find the right words and approaches to communicate your ideas effectively. The second thing it teaches you is to think well to think critically and to think in models. For example when discussing revenue I find that many young founders lack this fundamental skill and hence struggle to build a revenue model and do forecasting based on it. It's a simple skill to learn and it can really help. The engineering mindset allows you to apply this skill to any area of your startup business or life. I first realized this when I was about to graduate from high school during my last two years while talking to one of my teachers I discovered that the final grade for the year is an average of all the marks given throughout the quarter plus the mark for the exam. This really opened my eyes. I asked my teacher to show me the paper journals where they kept all the marks for all the students. I identified the subjects where my averages were not high and not leading me to the top mark and I focused on those subjects every quarter a couple at a time so that I received all top marks at the end of the year. That was essential for me because I wanted to attend a specific university. It was a fairly unique opportunity. As a child I dreamed of becoming a spy. There was one university in Moscow where you could graduate and end up as a foreign spy in the foreign intelligence service. However, one year before my graduation the Soviet Union fell apart and Moscow became a different country so I switched to hardware engineering. Nevertheless that example of applying systems to everything that surrounds you and improving your life and building on it with an engineering mindset is still super exciting to me to this day. Just curious aren't spies supposed to be very manipulative? Well, you know I've heard Simon Sinek say a really interesting thing that resonated with me. He explained the difference between manipulation and leadership. According to him manipulation is when you manipulate to benefit yourself leadership is when you manipulate for the other person's benefit. I found this idea fascinating because sometimes you may notice a blind spot in a person but you cannot approach them directly and say"Hey, Aleks, you have a blind spot here." Depending on the level of trust, openness vulnerability self-confidence and insecurities of the person they may become defensive and start explaining why it is not a blind spot. In that case you have to lead them to discover the blind spot themselves. You are doing it for them not for yourself. One might argue that this is still manipulation but hearing Simon Sinek say that during an interview made me feel more at ease about leadership. Another deep topic is that every weakness or blind spot when it comes to humans can actually be a feature in some context, right?