What does it take for your team to support you in building the systems that could potentially risk them losing their jobs?

The metaphoric answer: if we move away from seeing our teams as the “cog in the machine”, and rather consider them as the “force that holds the machine together”, we can all strive for maximum freedom from repetitive tasks.

The practical answer: If your team trusts that their process of self-actualization aligns with your business goals, enrolling your teams in the work needed to create the systems that free them up from repetitive tasks becomes more natural.

This article continues our series on building systems to free ourselves up from the trap of repetitive tasks. We’ve addressed how to think about which elements of the work to systematize. We’ve established the importance of building a bedrock of trust so that people can contribute to system building.

Here, I want to share what I’ve learned from positioning my team as the force that holds “the machine” together.

And how that shift in mindset made it more natural for everybody to want to build the needed systems that automate a lot of the repetitive tasks.

Because of the dynamic nature of running events, this approach has helped us be very agile and flexible in adapting to change.

For this article, I’m drawing on 15 years of experience building a teaching organization.

I will give you a more detailed version of my story, but I’ll do so at the end of the article so that we can first dig into the ideas.

Especially, around the ideas of how we can create space for self-actualization within a heterogeneous group of adults.

And, I’m curious to see if my non-standard experience can spark new thoughts for you.

How to think about growth at an individual level:

The idea starts with understanding how we grow from a well-designed challenge.

And, for the sake of this article, I’m making the assumption that self-actualization happens through the process of learning and growing from challenges.

So, at the highest level of abstraction, growth happens when we absorb negative energy and convert it into positive energy.

Each time we successfully convert the energy, we internalize it into something like higher well-being, confidence, and skill.

The negative energy comes in the form of “stress.” Stress can be introduced as a well-designed, controlled piece of challenge that we’ve chosen to take on. Or, stress can also be introduced in other ways, such as through conflicts, accidents, mistakes, or any other undesired event.

For each individual, there is a sweet spot between comfort and frustration that determines the level of stress we need to expose ourselves to in order to grow.

If we stay within our comfort zone, growth is too slow, but also, excessive exposure to stress is counterproductive, as any growth we experience can come at a great expense to our personal health.

You want to aim for the greatest amount of discomfort that you voluntarily take on. Admittedly, plus or minus the amount of stress, depending on the speed of growth you wish for yourself.

Even if some of those moments are filled with frustration, as long as you’ve chosen to take it on, you have the chance to grow from it.

That “sweet spot” between comfort and frustration is commonly referred to as the “Flow zone” or just “Flow”.

You’ll best recognize the feeling of flow by a sense of losing track of time while being in deep concentration.

In my experience, the main advantage of finding Flow is that you can endure the tension for a lot longer.

And simply by keeping yourself under tension for longer, you can give yourself more time to solve the problem, learn the lesson, and give yourself the time needed to turn this into your new comfort zone.

Which means, to find flow again, you’ll need a new and harder challenge. This is how we can speed up our growth.

And, as per my assumption, this growth will contribute to your process of self-actualization.

The bet that boosted my career:

The bet I made that accelerated my career as an educator was that I believed that most people do not seek “fun” as much as they seek “flow”.

But because they don’t know how to get into “flow”, they think they seek “fun”.

However, I’ve found that as I could help people experience “flow”, they enjoyed working with me and showed immense dedication and long-term commitment.

I’ve experienced this within my customer base, my team, and of course, my own development.

Within the context of an organization, you want to create an environment where each individual can experience “Flow” for as much of their time as possible.

This means that each person can opt into taking on the right amount of challenge that helps them spend more time in the Flow state.

And this way, experience growth by converting the stress that comes from taking on that challenge into new achievements and learnings.

This is why we need to continuously build systems that free us up from repetitive tasks, as these repetitive tasks eat up all our time within the context of “comfort.”

But we do have a paradoxical situation here.

You need people to build systems to free themselves up to take on new challenges.

But if they manage to automate away their tasks or teach others to do their work, they risk losing their job.

This means that, as an organization, we need to repeatedly demonstrate a strong commitment that people are better off when they help free themselves up from repetitive tasks than when they are not.

Now, if we really want this to work, and for self-actualization to flourish, we actually need to make commitments and take responsibilities at three levels at the same time: the individual, the immediate team, and the organization as a whole.

Individual Responsibility: 

If I were to distill what I’ve learned, down to the simplest terms,

The two factors that play the biggest roles in making sure you nurture your ability to seek, enter, and commit to growth are: 1) Self-regulation, and 2) how you control your Trigger Responses.

Point 1, Self-regulation is about your biology.

It’s about making choices that keep your Dopamine and Serotonin neurotransmitters working for you, not against you.

• Dopamine is what drives your motivation and your desire to pursue your goals.
• Serotonin reduces your anxiety and helps you sustain longer spurts of effort.

Both these neurotransmitters are deeply impacted by your habits around sleep, nutrition, sunlight exposure, and physical training. Not only that, but also from how you approach your recreational activities.

Point two: Handling your Trigger Response is about your mental strength.

This is about you developing your ability to delay the response to a stimulus just long enough to exercise your values.

Some stressors, more than others, trigger an autonomous reaction in us.

You might know this feeling of regret when you said something before you had a chance to think about what you wanted to say, and how you really wanted to say it.

The better you get at extending this gap between the “stimulus” or “trigger”, the better your ability to react according to your own ideals.

This is a mental “muscle” that can be trained through various mindfulness practices and just learning more about yourself.

The more you manage to nurture self-regulation and your trigger responses, the stronger your ability to push for your process of self-actualization.

But I think it’s pretty clear why I think this should squarely land in your own domain of responsibility, rather than something that is handled by the organization you work with.

How you choose to deal with your food, sleep, recreation and mindfulness training is just such a personal thing that I know, I would at least feel that my organization would be overstepping their boundaries if they wanted to try to influence that.

On the other hand, if I come to work with my Dopamine and Serotonin neurotransmitters all wacked, and my trigger responses are immediate, and I can’t stay true to my values and commitments; understandably, it will be harder for the organization to integrate me into their ambitions.

In this regard, I do think that an organization can support you with training programs. However, these need to be voluntarily taken on, and ultimately, you have to implement them in order to make the necessary improvements to how you show up.

I’ve explored both self-regulation and trigger-response topics extensively. If you have any questions, please feel free to write them in the comments or send a private message.

Immediate Team’s Responsibility:

One of the more important insights I’ve developed over the years of teaching and building communities is that when we feel we need a homogeneous group of people in order to make progress, we inevitably start fragmenting the community.

Meaning, we will keep splitting the individuals into smaller and smaller groups who are “at the same level” as each other, so we can finally make progress at the right tempo.

A big issue I have with it is that this fragmentation also leads to a strong culture of “second-class citizenship.”

And this is working against creating an environment where self-actualization happens.

When we changed our mindset about how to go on about grouping people. And importantly, developed the necessary skills to handle heterogeneity, we could suddenly move a heterogeneous group of people forward homogeneously.

Heterogeneity comes in multiple forms.

Some are by design, others are unwanted, and yet others are coming from the unpredictable nature of life.

This is why we need to develop the skills to distinguish between these and handle each according to suitability when working effectively as a team.

So, the Wanted Heterogeneity comes from each person having different sets of skills and backgrounds.

In many cases, we need to cover a broader range of skills and perspectives in order to successfully move a project forward.

Between my co-founder and me, I have more experience in business, our market, and sales. While my partner has deep engineering experience.

We also approach thinking very differently. When discussing features, I like to sketch out the user interface, while my partner prefers to sketch out the database schema.

This is “wanted heterogeneity”.

But still, under pressure, it’s tempting to label and be condescending towards each other when one is not able to step into the world of the other.

With the right set of skills, we can remove most of the interpersonal friction that can arise from such interactions and be left with the benefits that come with this form of collaboration.

When I talk about Unwanted Heterogeneity, what I mean is that when people have different objectives, meaning, their “vectors” are misaligned, group work becomes close to impossible.

As each person is pushing towards a different goal, we end up canceling each other out and make no progress towards any single goal.

Besides not running out of money, aligning all vectors is, in my opinion, the CEO’s most important job.

However, the immediate team is closest to the source of the individual vectors, and we all need to develop the skills necessary to address the interpersonal discomfort that comes from talking about misalignments within the team.

The third form of heterogeneity is “Unexpected heterogeneity“: This is when a person, for one reason or another, can’t show up the same way as they had previously.

Perhaps a child has blessed the family. A person got sick. Their car broke down.

There are many reasons why a person may not be keeping up as planned for a period of time.

I believe a strong team is one that can smooth this heterogeneity out and still produce a consistent output by frequently checking in with each other with questions like:

• How is your workload?
• Do you need help with anything?
• Should we shuffle tasks around?
• Would you need me to cover for you?

Let me double-click on this:

I mentioned that an individual can find “Flow” in the area just between comfort and frustration. And this area is different for each person, for different types of challenges.

Our immediate team is our first source of buffer to help each person in the team calibrate stress to find “Flow”.

Our team members can nudge us when we drift back to comfort, and relieve us when we are hurting from too much discomfort.

To continuously engage in this dance with each other, we need to become comfortable with our ability to handle interpersonal discomfort that may arise when we check in on each other’s flow state.

I would bundle these skills under the category of non-violent communication.

This category is built on many individual skills, such as active listening, constructive confrontation, and the ability to keep the other person’s humanity firmly in mind while under tension.

I’m very passionate about this topic and will place a lot of importance and resources on making sure my teams have these skills honed.

In my experience, this is a superpower that every person can develop, but sadly, too few people do.

I believe that with the right skills, we can actively take on the tension needed to make rapid progress without needing “abuse from the top”.

Meaning, we should not need the CEO to be a tyrant in order to make great progress as it sometimes seems like.

The challenge we face in our immediate team is that, because of our daily interactions, we put so much value on harmony.

However, without the necessary non-violent communication skills, this harmony ultimately gives way to interpersonal politics.

So, how exactly do we do this work?

We start by making sure that our “systems” do not replace the need for communication.

This allows us to regularly check in with each other using variations of the questions I mentioned earlier.

We ask, for example, “What’s on your plate, and do you feel you can handle it?

You explore whether it’s needed to rearrange the tasks to adjust the stress level to the right amount.

And this does not only come from the team leader, but rather something we all ask each other regularly.

These types of questions allow the team as a whole to help each individual calibrate stress better to hit their Flow state and reduce the time in the frustration zone.

With the non-violent communication skills developed, each individual finds more ways to bring issues that are in the way of getting to Flow to the surface without fearing lasting interpersonal tension.

 👉 We will be able to frequently establish awareness of where we are as a team and where we need to go next to deliver on our commitments.

 👉 We’ll be able to bring clarity to vague statements through better questions.

 👉 We’ll be able to help bring conversations back to the core issues and figuratively help park unrelated conversations that have been added to the conversation out of the discomfort of the moment (as is common in many conflicts).

 👉 We can be better at commenting on unwanted behaviors coming from any direction. Not just when it happens to us, but also when we witness it happening to others.

 👉 We actively seek out conflict to surface issues that are hiding under a blanket of discomfort. For example, during a meeting, when we hear a tone of resentment or disengagement in a person’s voice, we’ll find ways to address it so that it can be resolved.

 👉 We sometimes actively aim to develop some degree of overlapping skills and situational knowledge to help cover for each other when needed.

These conversations enable the team to align vectors, view the situation clearly, and buffer for one another when the level of stress becomes too high.

Meaning, the team can make steady and homogeneous progress, even though work is turbulent.

Organizational Responsibility:

From the lens of creating an environment that prioritizes the process of self-actualization, I believe the organization needs to follow this concept:

Are people able to opt into, and buy into, the work given to them?

When teaching adults, even after they pay me good money to teach them, I know better than to assume they’ll do what I ask them to do.

Rather, at each turn, we make micro-agreements about what I suggest we do next and wait to see if they accept this challenge.

If they don’t accept my challenge, it provides me with an opportunity to learn what is missing, either from my presentation of the next steps, such as clarity and motivation, or from their readiness to take on the new challenge, perhaps because they’ve already reached their frustration zone.

In other words, it provides valuable feedback that you don’t want to ignore.

This sounds tedious on the surface, but the speed of development dramatically increases in a sustainable way.

And all it takes is a bit of chunking of your commitment time frame.

You see, for learning and growth to occur, a person needs the willingness to take on the challenge and stress that comes from stepping into the unknown.

If it feels coerced, we are quickly taken into our frustration zone.

The damage this does to flow and progress can take us several steps back, and we’ll actually experience negative progress. Perhaps not right in that moment, but definitely as the stress accumulates.

The micro-agreements and frequent opt-in and buy-in processes allow you to assess whether people are ready for the challenge, and if not, gather valuable feedback that provides the necessary input to make better decisions as a leader.

I learned this back in 2014 when SwingStep was only months away from bankruptcy.

I decided that the team needed to push for certain revenue growth targets, and I felt perplexed when I got pushback on these goals as we were talking about our ability to stay in business.

Fortunately, I listened to their reasons and decided to make what could be the final experiment for SwingStep.

I decided to scrap my goals and instead focus on taking the team out of the frustration zone and into the flow zone.

Somehow, this resulted in us actually digging ourselves out of that situation better than I could even imagine.

Today, both SwingStep and MergeLabs are operating under this micro-commitment principle, as my goal is to help each person find and expand their flow zones.

I present what I think needs to be done, seek advice for my ideas, and then present the tasks that need to be done. If a task is not taken on, or if they are not completed at a certain tempo that I’d counted on, it’s all valuable feedback that allows me to learn what is truly going on.

Now granted, I scaled SwingStep down two years ago to focus on MergeLabs, which is still a young startup just coming to market with its coordination solution. It will be interesting to see how these concepts will work at scale.

If you want to explore these ideas with me, let’s grab a digital coffee together.

The way I’ll be moving forward is to focus on creating an environment through policies, training, and inspiration that continuously improves my team’s ability to take on new and greater challenges.

And if that’s not happening, I’ll take that as a reflection and the necessary feedback I need in order to improve our systems.

My Personal Journey: 

Earlier, I promised to also give you a bit more information about my personal journey:

I started off as a Chemical engineer in Sweden, but found myself as an organic Chemist in France, and then spent four years in the complex world of Alzheimer’s research in Germany.

In contrast to Engineering, organic chemistry and brain drug development are both so full of unknowns that it’s impossible to operate with any degree of certainty.

I think it was during this period that I started to develop a better understanding of how to deal with abstraction and find something tangible within abstraction.

However, since the 2008 global financial crisis also affected the 2010 European job market, all the jobs I was interested in as a Chemist evaporated.

So, I decided to try my luck as a professional Swing dancer, teacher, and event producer.

But also here, my ability to find something tangible within abstraction helped me quickly reach some of the highest professional opportunities in this community.

I had the opportunity to teach and perform all around the world, and I built one of the largest companies in our community.

Now, it’s a tiny industry where, SwingStep with it’s, at one point 20 employees can be considered as one of the largest ones.

If you search on YouTube with “Ali taghavi Lindy Hop”, you can enjoy my performances and classes.

For the two decades of being engulfed in Lindy Hop, I also learned a lot about Black American art forms.

The different values I learned about, have opened my perspective towards learning and growth.

When it comes to the process of self-actualization, my Eurocentric upbringing helped me appreciate and strive for structure and order.

However, the Afrocentric value systems have taught me that, by exposing ourselves to abstraction and holding on to abstraction, we actually have the opportunity for uniqueness and self-expression.

This is a paradox to learn from, as these values drive you in opposite directions.

However, I believe that the process of navigating this paradox has given me new insights that have tremendously benefited me, my team, and the community we are a part of.

This is for example, the source of my recognition of the difference between homogenic and heterogenic groups.

I believe this is also helping me as a startup founder a lot. As it’s never been easier to access information from experienced entrepreneurs, investors, and everybody who studies them a lot, it has also never been easier to just follow “best practices.”

However, this increased clarity has also led to startups all looking the same. They all use the same SaaS solutions, the same AI tools, and the same go-to-market strategies.

But if you think about it, a startup succeeds based on its ability to create a unique category, its ability to solve a big problem in a unique way, and find a unique way to attract great talent.

If we want “unique” or “novel”, we need to hold on to abstraction and use different execution strategies that take us into a new direction.

I’m very excited to see how I manage to navigate my way forward to create a unique startup. so far, I’ve broken many “best practices.” And I’m looking forward to continuing to share what I’m discovering along the way with you.

Let me know what resonated and what your experience has been like from the lens of this topic.

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You’ve been great! Thank you for reading.