At its core, my mission is to help leaders lead their teams in a meaningful way – where every employee feels seen and heard, and no one’s quality of life suffers because of toxic or ineffective leadership.

Why?
For many reasons. But one of the biggest drivers, of course, has been my own experience. My first job at age 14? Let’s just say I had a total jerk for a manager. Pardon my French – but that’s really what he was. And he had a major impact on my self-worth. Luckily, I have parents who taught me that I can get through anything if I put my mind to it, so my confidence came back – arguably a little too strong, some might say 😉 but that’s another story.

Still, my experience is secondary when you consider the harsh reality facing today’s workforce. The official State of the Global Workplace: 2022 report shows that we’ve once again hit new records:
44% of employees reported experiencing a lot of stress the previous day.

Here’s another alarming excerpt from the same report:

“When Gallup looks at global data combining engagement and wellbeing, the results are striking.”

• When asked if they felt stressed:
  
  49% of employees who were disengaged and not thriving said yes.
  30% of employees who were engaged and thriving said yes.
  
  

• When asked if they felt angry:
  
  24% (disengaged, not thriving) said yes
  11% (engaged, thriving) said yes
  
  

• When asked if they had health problems:
  
  16% (disengaged, not thriving) said yes
  8% (engaged, thriving) said yes

Are we really okay with the fact that the place where we spend the most time – work – is also a place where we don’t thrive or feel engaged?

I’m definitely not.

To me, time is the most valuable thing we have – and the hours we spend at work, we never get back. We have to find a way to enjoy work – at least a little. And if we can’t make it enjoyable, we should at least make sure it doesn’t harm people or bleed into their personal lives through stress and exhaustion.

What I know about stress – and how it affects people’s lives – is a huge part of what drives my passion for improving working conditions worldwide. I genuinely fear that feeling stressed and disengaged at work will become the new normal. If it hasn’t already.

The physical and mental consequences are just too serious to ignore.

So how do we counter this?

It’s a tough task – and I don’t take it lightly.

But I believe the biggest impact comes from leadership.
Not everything is the leader’s fault, but it is the leader’s responsibility. And only leaders have the power to meaningfully shift a team’s culture.

At Successteam, we focus on three things:

1. We create unbiased feedback loops and collect anonymous input

2. We analyze and prioritize that feedback so it’s actionable and digestible for leaders

3. We help leaders take the right action based on what their team is telling them

And here’s how we know it works:

Over three years ago, we started developing Successteam. Then, in April 2021, we launched a “fake version” of the platform.

Why launch a fake product, you ask?
Simple: we wanted honest reactions. Real feedback. And we knew we’d only get that if users believed the product was real.

Feedback from focus groups, friends, or our network was always glowing – but that was mostly because our own enthusiasm rubbed off on them. That kind of feedback is dangerously flattering – and deeply unreliable. So we built a pretotype – a fake version designed to get real reactions from people who didn’t know us personally.

Like many others, we had a million ideas for clever features in the beginning. But feedback taught us an important lesson: you can’t solve everything. And trying to do so only leads to building a bloated monster of a platform, overflowing with features no one needs.

A platform should solve the problems people actually experience – not the ones we imagine they might have.

As hard as it was (because no one enjoys killing their own brilliant ideas – if you know, you know), we aligned and adjusted internally.

Today, our goal isn’t to do everything – but to do what we do exceptionally well.

Successteam is built for real leaders – the ones who don’t have time or resources to waste on overly complex tools.

It’s team feedback and employee wellbeing in the simplest way possible.
Nothing more, nothing less – just what matters.

And thankfully, I have an incredible team of people who are much smarter than I am, helping me make this dream a reality.

With our official launch back in November 16, 2022, that dream is no longer just a vision. It’s here. It’s real.