3 Lessons For Building A Winning Team

Would you love to say that your company is one of the fastest growing technology companies in the country? What if you could say that your company was one of the best places to work in the Country?

That’s exactly what Achievers can say as winners of Deloitte’s Fast 50 and for being recognized as one of Canada’s Best places to work.

Recently, we sat down with David Brennan, General Manager at Achievers in Toronto, Ontario. Achievers works with organizations to implement their advanced behavior-driving engine. Their platform empowers employees to recognize the great work all around them, it aligns your employees to a single purpose: success.

Here are the three lessons for building a winning team.

#1 Recognition.

As humans, we all want to be part of something bigger than ourselves. Recognizing the contributions of team members and acknowledging how they play a part in the mission is an amazing lesson. A lesson that David puts in to perspective; “You have to make your employees feel like they’re part of the organization, you have to capture their hearts and their minds to be productive”. Achievers uses social recognition as a cornerstone to this approach, providing the ability and encouraging peers to recognize each other for a job well done. Not just with a thank you card, or an inner office note but publicly. As was obvious with our tour of the office, public recognition is a method used within Achievers. David encourages organizations to create opportunities for social and public recognition. Achievers uses TVs and monitors around the office, where each employee can see it on their computer and they also use their weekly “To the Point” meeting as an opportunity for social recognition.

#2 Ditch the annual review.

David points out that the idea of sitting down with employees once a year and giving them feedback about actions they took months ago is an outdated approach to communicating information.He points out that Millennials are looking for something different, “they grew up in a world with instant feedback”, which leads to the desire of receiving instant feedback on the job.“It’s a frustrating process and again, most annual reviews really only focus the last 30 days because that’s all the human mind can actually remember.”

#3 Build supportive relationships.

Regardless if it’s your team, your boss or your customers, healthy relationships build a healthy organization. David’s human approach to leadership creates a strong culture at Achievers. “I think we have to recognize that just about every day, for all roles, all employees, something’s going to go wrong. It’s how the company, your manager and your peer group react to that. Do they react in a supportive way? Are they building you up with a saying “hey don’t worry about that”. You end up having the huge win. I think we have to recognize that employees have bad days; it’s how we support them during those bad days to create successful careers”.