[00:00:00] Kevin Stafford: Hello, everyone, and welcome to another episode of the Conversations with Coaches podcast. I’m your host, Kevin, and today I have the pleasure of meeting and sharing with you Alireza Balurchi. Alireza holds a PhD in computer science and specializes in instilling startup agility in large corporations. As VP at Age of Learning, he leverages a rich history of leading product and process strategies at major firms, blending academic acumen With industry expertise, that’s a, that’s a lovely linguistic sentence.
I liked, I liked saying that out loud. I loved reading it when I first saw it on the page. I was like, Oh, that’s just, that’s nice. It’s almost poetic. So thank you for being here today. Thank you for sharing some of your time with us. I’m excited to talk to you.
[00:00:41] Alireza Boloorchi: Thank you very much, Kevin. Yeah, I’m glad to be here too.
[00:00:45] Kevin Stafford: Good. Well, let’s, let’s dive in. Let’s go back to the beginning, not the beginning, beginning. We’re not gonna go all the way back, you know, you know, year one, day one, but I like to talk about, or I like to at least open the conversation up with how you got your start as a coach. Now, for some, it’s, you know, maybe they had a key mentor or teacher or guide at the right moment that sort of put it all into place for, or maybe gave them the words or the concepts or the ideas that locked it, locked it into their brains.
Like, oh, coaching is. That’s what I already am doing. That’s what I want to do. That’s how I want to develop. Sometimes it’s just, it’s all, it’s, you know, different experiences moving from one industry to another or moving out of, you know, any kind of, you know, startup culture, entrepreneurship and into coaching to kind of like, you know, share the lessons learned and everything.
So basically how did you get your start as a coach? So,
[00:01:32] Alireza Boloorchi: I think a little bit, it goes back to my background. So I did my PhD in computer science. So, basically, I tried to be a technical expert in a field. What happened to me? Actually, 2 things affected that 1 is I had an advisor who, like, you know, I was very narrowed down in wireless sensor network at the time.
It was very hard. So there were these energy sensitive things that work together and build a system that work together and build a really like fantastic result. But each of them had very like limited resources. So that got me involved with thinking about how to optimize with the collective of people.
And at the same time, I had an advisor, the PhD advisor, who was not focusing on my field of study. He was focusing on teaching me. How to learn and teaching me how to get better at what I’m doing without getting too much involved into exactly what I’m doing that got me thinking, okay, this is what I want to do.
I want to be able to help people organizations to learn how to learn because that’s going to stick with them. No matter what carrier they are, what field they’re working on. So I think that was the ignite of it. anD then like, you know, over time I got more interested in software and organizations, but that mindset of, okay, organizations are with like a collective number of people that are having their resources.
They’re very resourceful, but each of them are unique. And then they work together to build, like, you know, build a good result and outcome. And then how can I help them to optimize toward their outcome and do it better with spending less energy. And that became my philosophy of becoming a coach at an organization and teams and
[00:03:22] Kevin Stafford: helping them.
It really, it’s, it’s, it’s kind of funny how, funny, but it’s, it’s always very interesting to watch. Watch organizations, teams, units of any industry, any type, whether it’s, I mean, it’s in, in, in computer science and startup culture in, in any, any business and sports, just watching team dynamics and organizational dynamics and being able to identify usually very quickly whether or not a team is in alignment.
Cause you can kind of look and you can see pretty quickly once you know what the signs to look for, you can see where like energy is being lost. You know where you’re just like, Oh, man, you so you’re not, you’re, you kind of are working at cross purposes. And it seems like it’s taking you twice as long to get half the result.
And I think, you know what, maybe if there is just a little communication gap here that we bridged with something, maybe we can, we can fix that. It’s like, and that’s one of the reasons why I love. I love coaching in general, but I love your focus in particular, is that you’re able to, you have the, the expertise and the understanding to really have an intimate knowledge of how an organization’s dynamics work, how the relationship dynamic works, dynamics work, yet you also are a leader.
At a distance. You’re not like, you’re not in the trenches. You’re not, you know, entrenched in the organization. You’re not like, you haven’t come, you don’t have all this baggage with you. You’re able to see from a distance where things might not be functioning well, or where things might be a little rickety.
I always like, I’m in my head, I’m always seeing like an analogy of just like watching an engine, you know, run and like you’re seeing it and it’s just like, it’s making a lot of noise and it’s shaking. And you’re like, I wonder if they know how dangerous this looks.
Yeah, exactly. And,
[00:04:57] Alireza Boloorchi: and like when it comes to human being, every single person is different and with different type of talent, different behavior, and it makes it really harder to like, you know, for one person to understand everything and find all the problems, but having an eye and learning like over time, I’ll learn to be an observant person.
To look at it, read the room and find out there might be a problem and help the people to learn how to see them and fix them in the future. So instead of me being there always, my job is constantly trying to make self myself out of a job or make myself irrelevant. And Build up a system that is self correcting over time.
Teams like learn how to everyone on the team becomes a kind of a coach for the rest of the team and they constantly helping each other to get better. And that’s the goal. I think once you teach that, like what I said about my PhD advisor, he tried to teach me how to become a person who constantly look at myself and get better.
Versus like, try to constantly come to you, look at my paper, say, this is something you did wrong. Write it this way. So I think that’s the way I try to help with the teams.
[00:06:10] Kevin Stafford: It really sort of a semi famous old saying comes to mind as you’re talking the it goes in various different, different ways.
But what is it give someone a fish they eat for a day, teach someone to fish they eat for a lifetime. Exactly. Yeah. Again, that’s one of those things where I find it. I, when I first heard it, when I was much, much, much younger, I was like, Oh, that seems, that sounds very true. That’s, that’s, that’s neat. And then I feel like.
As I grow older every day of my life, I learn, I learned that lesson a little bit more, both for myself and for the people that I work with and for, and try to help and try to serve. And I also, I really, I don’t want to, you know, overly praise you, but I really love your stated approach that you want to make yourself obsolete.
You want to coach yourself out of a job, so to speak, which that’s, I mean, every coach, every good coach I’ve talked to has that mentality because they want, they want to instill. And equip and then send out. It’s like, go forward. You may now coach yourself and those around you almost like passing a fire that then can be passed to someone else and someone else.
And before you know it, you know, everyone’s everyone’s got that spark going. And I just I feel like it’s very admirable and also very necessary. You don’t you don’t want to create the conditions for your continued need your whole your whole role as a coach is to try to make sure that you’re no longer necessary that people can do what you’re doing for them.
Thank you. for themselves in the future. And I just, I, I think it’s fantastic. Yeah, that’s great. And exactly. Yes. Yeah. So let’s, let’s talk a little bit about the, about the nuts and bolts of your, of your coaching approach. Now, obviously we don’t have all day, but I like to kind of ask this in two parts to kind of get at, or at least give you the opportunity to talk about specifically how you go about your coaching practice, who you coach.
And how do you coach them? The who being obviously specific industries demographics, organization sizes, if that, if there’s variation there. And then the how being your methodology, if it’s largely like, obviously you do probably do some one to one coaching in your work with organizations. Do you do a top down coaching where you begin with the executive suite or whatever might happen to be up there and kind of work your way through the organization?
It’s the other way around. All of the above keynote speeches, books, courses, et cetera. So yeah. What’s your, who do you coach and what’s your methodology for coaching them? So I
[00:08:27] Alireza Boloorchi: do a bunch of like, you know, different things. For example, I, I am still coaching teaching at universities, but I’m teaching like agile coaching and software engineering.
I run my classes. Like I’m a coach and the students are the team members. Because I think like, you know that’s the place that like, the next generation is going to be prepared. But I usually I work with companies that are like, it can be a small, they can be large. I work with the startups also work with like large corporations.
But the idea is, I believe the startup mindset is a really good mindset to be able to shoot for this simplest thing. There is this saying in agile, we say the art of maximizing the amount of work not done. So how I can, I can make something the simplest way possible that does what I want, but I put the least effort possible into it.
And build and that mindset in the startups is much easier when it becomes a larger corporation. That’s that’s getting lost. So what I do when I go to a larger organization, I try to help them keep that mindset. So make more autonomy inside the teams, try to help every individual in the teams to be a leader.
But to build that up in a larger corporation means that yeah. Everyone is aligned with that purpose. That requires something we call trust. So how can I make trust between the team members in a team? How can I make trust between team members and middle management? Between middle management and executives.
So building those trust is coming very slowly and hand in hand. If you build one way trust between the two, it’s not going to work out. Executives constantly beating the team up to move faster. The other way around if the executives trust the teams and team like try to abuse it or not even like, you know, keep that in mind, it goes away.
If I don’t keep like, you know, if we have a team that is not keep generating what they are saying and like not holding themselves accountable, the executives will lose their trust. So what I come into play as. Build up small wins, like help the team to find out this is the highest priority for me to do as a team to get better and get slightly better.
Better make it more visible to everyone around me, including executives. So they see I’m improving and building that trust slowly. So at some point in the future, the executive said, I’m trusting this team that they’re going to say they’re going to do this and they’re going to do it because I’ve seen it before versus blindly trusting them.
And it’s going to get lost like after the first time they fail. So that’s essentially my approach to the team. What I do is I’m focusing on organizations from the team level. There are managers that I do want to want to help them to get better at what they do and become future coaches. And also I’m working with executives in larger decision making so that.
The structure of the team allows for this autonomy and decentralized leadership. So there are different layers into what I’m doing.
[00:11:39] Kevin Stafford: Yeah, it’s, it’s obviously at the, at the organizational level, the, the interpersonal dynamics get very complex, but also the work remains relatively simple. It’s like you, and I feel like you exemplify that focus very well by talking so much about trust and centering trust and that trust going both ways.
Cause I mean, it’s, it’s one of those words that gets thrown out there a lot as important. Not enough real close attention is paid to it. Not enough work is put into maintaining that trust. Because trust isn’t something you just, you get it. And then you’re like, okay, good. We’ve got organizational trust.
Everybody knows what everybody else is up to. Let’s we don’t have to worry about that anymore. It’s like, you have to, you have to work on maintaining that trust and maintaining transparency and authenticity in the work that you do so that you can have the autonomy that you need in order to produce your best work most efficiently with the least amount of energy required so that your organization is not just like prepared to grow, but it’s just like, it’s ready.
To go to whatever next level it wants to get to whatever that scale looks like you have the resources already in place. You have trust already in place. You have the organizational robustness. The resilience is already in place. All your systems are strong. Your trust is strong and you can go where you want to go.
And that’s really it does. I feel like It requires someone like you to kind of come in and make sure, especially as you’re scaling from startup through, you know, into, into larger sizes, whatever those happen to look like. There’s just so much. I often think of it like bloat, like bloatware when I’m thinking about, like when I first install an operating system on, on a, on a computer or whatever, and it was just like, there’s just a bunch of stuff there I don’t want.
It’s like as you kind of grow, you kind of accrue these things you don’t want or need or redundancies that don’t serve anybody or, you know, losses of communication or trust that, you know, start out really, really small when you’re small, but as you grow and they kind of grow with you, all of a sudden you’re wondering if the left hand knows what the right hand is doing and the organization and it’s just, I feel like someone like you is very necessary to see the things that are happening as they’re happening, see what’s developed and, and have a plan.
To take care of it, have a plan to not just fix it and then walk away, but to fix it and teach the organization how to watch out for that in the future and how to fix that if and when it happens again, how to maintain that trust structure and that resilience that you’ve helped them to recover.
[00:13:58] Alireza Boloorchi: Exactly, and 1 thing you as you were talking is that it’s having an eye on like, it’s where it’s going, but at the same time, trusting that I might fix an issue.
And we, as a team might fix an issue. And then future issues that were existing are going to change. So I don’t focus on coming. I’ve seen I’ve been training coaches and people are coming, helping organizations. And who are actually trying to fix everything, like, 1st, they jumped into the team and fix everything and it’s like backfires in that.
So what happens is focus on the most important thing that the team can focus on, create a visualize and tangible fix that, like, you can show everyone that builds up those trust that you have the ability to fix things. And then look at the next one, at least like, you know, once you’re done with the first one.
So that way you can like a slowly go to the actual things and reprioritize over time versus trying to jump into and try to fix everything and have everything half baked and nothing gets fixed.
[00:15:04] Kevin Stafford: So, yeah, sorry that I had like a little, a little emotional flashback to, to organizations I’ve been a part of that have, have struggled with that, that, that half baked.
You know, shotgun approach. It’s like, let’s fix everything. And then everything gets kind of fixed. Enough to go a little bit farther along before everything starts to fall apart again. You’re wondering what happened. It’s like, I thought we fixed that. No, he didn’t. And here’s why.
[00:15:31] Alireza Boloorchi: Yeah, exactly. That’s making it really hard.
Everyone wants to fix everything. Everyone wants to be a perfectionist. But one thing I found about coaches in corporations and in system dynamics, it’s patience. You need to have the patience to see the problem, to probably have experienced that problem and maybe know the solution because you’ve done it so many times.
But be patient. Let it go. Focus on the most important thing. Try to help the team fix that. From that, the team comes back stronger and they can fix those issues later. What you’re trying to do is build up the system. Just ignore the small things that, like, you know, just, they might bother you. Just, like, let them go and focus on the most important
[00:16:18] Kevin Stafford: things.
And you say that and that’s that’s that’s very easily easily said that’s because that can be very hard to do especially for someone who’s used to like if you think about most entrepreneurs most business owners are used to doing a lot of things themselves. And really like, and not just doing a lot of things themselves, but being able to do a lot of things themselves, being able to identify and attack and accomplish in a very, in a very fast, very, very, for them, what feels like sustainable fashion.
And after a while, that patience is, you can understand, most people understand that patience is required, but the pain, the discomfort you have to experience seeing something that you think you can fix. Seeing 10 things you think you can fix, like, oh, those are all, those are small things, I can fix, I can fix them all, I can take care of them all, and you kind of want to do it because there’s like a, there’s a pain in you, and to be able to like, have someone like you to coach, to literally coach them through and be like, you know what?
You might think you can fix them all right now, but they won’t stay fixed for very long if you even get to all of them. You need to let some of those sit. And you know what, it’s not gonna feel good. It’s gonna, it’s gonna feel strange, and maybe bad, and it’s maybe gonna be painful in your stomach. In your heart, in your head, take a deep breath, you’re gonna have to, you have to be patient on those.
We’re gonna focus on these, these one or two things, these maybe three things, or this one thing. And we’re gonna take care of this. And we’re gonna take care of this in such a way that it’s gonna stay taken care of. Because we’re gonna teach everybody else how to deal with it, if and when it comes up again.
And that’s, again, it makes, it’s, it’s relatively simple. It makes a lot of sense when you say it out loud. But man, sometimes that patience is so, so hard to maintain. Yeah. And
[00:17:54] Alireza Boloorchi: I think some people might feel like at least to me, it’s not like that. Coaching is zero and one is binary. You’re either successful or not.
Versus I think whoever is wherever they are, they can become better. Like it might be slower. It might be, it might be faster, but if you can help them to get better, you’re already making a success because if you were not there, it wouldn’t happen. So focus on getting things better rather than getting everything to a perfect place.
Yeah. That’s not going to happen. So my experience is nothing is going to get perfect and especially in software industry, because everything is changing all the time. So just focus on getting things better, focused on the thing that gives you the most gain, like you, the biggest jump with the least amount of effort, and then move from
[00:18:41] Kevin Stafford: there forward.
Speaking of moving forward, I just looked up at the zoom clock. I unsurprisingly, I feel like we could talk about this kind of stuff for, for hours but before I let you go. Where can people learn more about you? Learn more about what you do, why you do it, how you go about doing it. And, if it’s different, where can people best connect with you?
If they want to start a conversation, start a relationship, hire you as a coach, you know, have you come in immediately, when can you start? So basically, what can people, anybody who’s listening to this, what can people do next to find out more about you and connect with you? So, first of all,
[00:19:15] Alireza Boloorchi: I love connecting with people and like from different backgrounds and my LinkedIn is usually up to date.
I put a usual poster and updates and also like we can have conversations over there.
[00:19:27] Kevin Stafford: I really say I’ve grown quite fond of LinkedIn over over the over the years. How much. How much stronger it’s become as like a relationship platform. Like I’m able to like, I can, I can meet people in a professional capacity, but make real connections there and have real conversations that lead somewhere as opposed to just going around in circles.
And I, I often joke to my guests and my friends and my colleagues, how LinkedIn is the least toxic of all the social media platforms right now. I mean, fingers crossed, knock on wood for however long that lasts, but yeah, it’s a great place to start meaningful relationships. I feel like so. We’ll put a link to your LinkedIn in the show notes to make sure everybody can find you.
Ali Ressa, thank you so much for your time today. I had a really, like we talked about a little bit before I hit record. A lot of times the the, the guests I have on the podcast kind of come in waves where there’ll be batches of executive coaches and batches of career coaches, just people who are generally like on theme, whether by accident or algorithmic purpose, however it works out.
And it’s been a little while since I’ve gotten a chance to talk to someone who focuses on the organizational level. And I just find it fascinating because again, it’s It’s interpersonal dynamics. It’s all still people, whether it’s one on one or one on thousands, so to speak. So thank you for sharing some time today and talking a little bit like kind of cracking the seal on your methodology a little bit.
And yeah, I would maybe love to talk to you again sometime in the future. This is just, this is fascinating stuff for me. And I feel like it’s great for the audience too, because I think people need a better understanding of what someone like you can do for an organization like theirs.
[00:20:53] Alireza Boloorchi: Thank you very much, Kevin.
I enjoyed talking with you as well. That was great.
[00:20:57] Kevin Stafford: Good. Well, hey, to the audience, you know what to do next. The LinkedIn link will be in the show notes, of course. Do yourself a favor and get to know Ali Reza a little bit. He’s great to talk to, and I assume, fantastic to work with. So, take action, like we like to say on the podcast, and we’ll talk to you again very soon.