A successful team is one that is created based on a business’ core values.
Investing in your team’s success is one of the best ways of growing your business from the inside out. In fact, according to Forbes, “..highly engaged teams show 21% greater profitability.”
As a rule, you can expect a successful team to sell more, work harder, and, even, display more creativity, and innovation, than their less engaged counterparts.
But, what does it actually take to build a successful team? And, for that matter, what kind of qualities should even be considered when determining whether a team is successful or not? Learn all this and more from the perspective of the CEO of one of Canada’s fastest-growing tech companies:
The Secret to Success: The Best Team for Your Business
How do you determine whether a team is good enough to be successful?
Well, according to Maropost, a good and successful team is one that can leverage the core values of their business’ mission in their work.
The ‘mission’ is different for each company, of course. As an example, for Maropost and its CEO, Ross Andrew Paquette, their mission had always been to provide a service that puts innovation for the sake of its customers first — above all else!
In the words of Paquette himself, “It’s become a part of our legacy to ensure, for our clients and even our client’s customers, that we are providing the most value possible — rather than just treating them as a number. Something that I wish to continue for many years to come.”
To summarize, when it comes to building a good and successful team, you must always remember to do so with your business’ values in mind. This is true whether you’re in the process of hiring new employees or training old ones.
A team that can work for the sake of your company’s values is the best kind of team.
Growing a Team to Scale with Your Business
Once you’ve squared out what kind of values you want in the people you hire for your team, all you need to do now is grow that team along with your business without forsaking those values.
Going back to Maropost for our example, in the beginning, the team had been incredibly small. According to CEO Ross Andrew Paquette, they had only 5 people in their team from 2011-2015. And, they only began hiring after that in order to keep up with Maropost’s rapid growth.
But, even when they jumped from being a $3.3 million revenue company to a $13 million revenue company, their team had stayed relatively slow-growing — with only 10 people in the company at the time. According to Paquette, this was all the better, as it allowed him to better establish a proper workplace culture, one that stayed true to Maropost’s core values.
It should be noted that this remains true even now that there are over 175 employees working in Maropost — which Paquette believes is what has allowed the company to grow as quickly it did.
Fine-Tuning: Keeping Employees Engaged
Once you have employees that suit your company and are willing to grow with you, then all that’s left… is the fine-tuning. This is all the ‘finicky’ bits.
At this stage, businesses are actively investing time, money, resources, and so on, to keep their employees engaged, happy, and efficient. This can be done in a multitude of ways, of course, but here are the three most fundamental “fine-tuning” strategies that you should remember:
- Creating a positive workplace culture: Workplace culture is crucial to employee productivity rates. A poor working environment makes for inefficient work and low employee retention. So, invest in creating a positive workplace culture by building strong leadership; encouraging positive values, beliefs, tradition, and attitudes; empowering your employees with goals and training; and so on.
- Clear communication: Communication is key. According to Smarp, “…employee productivity increases by 20 to 25% in organizations where employees are connected.” So, encouraging open communication at all times is a must, even when external factors may make it difficult.
- Goal-oriented mindset: Studies have proven that those with goals are 10x more likely to succeed than those without. So, make sure that your employees have a goal. Whether it’s something specific and short-term like completing their tasks in time, or something bigger, like making sure that they work with their workplace values in mind.
As a final bit of advice for this stage of team-building, you should remember that the process of “fine-tuning” is a long one and one that will require many revisions.
With Maropost, for example, Paquette finds it necessary to constantly adjust how his company communicates depending on external factors.
Like making sure that his Maropost teams in Canada and India are connected with weekly virtual meetings. Or opening channels for even more virtual communication, during COVID-19, so that everyone was on the same page while working remotely from their homes.
Prepare to have to do the same to ensure that your team stays successful over the years.
Final Thoughts: How to Build a Successful Team
In conclusion, if you want to build a team that is ‘successful’, then you need to build one that is for your company. Hire based on your core values, grow as needed, and adjust based on your external and internal environments.
It really does not need to be any more complicated than that!
