This year we celebrate our 20th year as TiER1 Performance. Through these 20 years we’ve been blessed to impact, and be impacted, by many people: employees past and present, clients, our communities, partners, suppliers, mentors, and friends. It really is through the people we serve and the relationships that come from them that we receive our greatest reward.
When we started in 2002, we set out to build a different type of organization. We envisioned an organization built on high performance and high trust, one that created space for people to do what they were great at doing, unencumbered by bureaucratic policies or hierarchical structures.
We envisioned a place that had a positive impact on the lives of those we were fortunate enough to meet. We also envisioned a place where people brought the entirety of who they were to work, co-creating a different kind of environment, one where people were driven by challenging work, but humble enough to care about each other first. While all of that was aspirational—and building it was perhaps easier said than done—the commitment to that vision was worthwhile.
We’ve discovered purpose, passions, and friendships
We discovered things we weren’t good at and those we were. More than anything, we discovered a lot about people. We learned about the potential in people, and about the intersection of people and work.
We discovered how people love to be challenged but also need to be supported; how important trust is; how badly people want to serve in their work—to serve others and to serve each other; how important it is to be a part of something, and to be included. We discovered financial success is essential but also generally uninspiring, and we discovered that healthy organizations can scale.
Along the way, we were fortunate to be recognized by many: Inc. magazine named us one of the 15 fastest growing companies in the United States 15 years in a row. They also named us a nationally recognized best workplace. We became an employee-owned company and a certified B Corporation. We’ve been named “Best for the World” by B Labs in the worker category since 2019. And we were awarded countless regional awards recognizing us as one of the best places to work.
We’ve proved that “healthy” and “high-performance” are not in conflict with each other
Rather, they create a tension that supports each other. A healthy organization sees the good in people; provides the transparency and security that lead to trust; is financially and psychologically strong; and cares about the well-being of its people. Much like high-performing athletes rely on health to perform at their best, truly high-performing organizations must be built on healthy cultures—the two are mutually reinforcing.
When organizations perform at a high level, they provide an impactful service to others—both outside and within their organizations. They create value through innovation, quality, and efficiency. They provide challenging opportunities for employees to grow, financially, professionally, and personally. They reinvest resources to stimulate new ideas and realize new potential.
I’ve come to believe that the central, most important asset of every healthy and high performing organization is trust. Organizations can simply not have enough of it. And it is not something that is easy to come by. Trust begets trust, and to create it, organizations—and leaders —have to start by showing unwavering trust in others.
When I reflect on our path, I think that all of TiER1’s success is rooted in the only real asset we had at the beginning—the trust we had in people. When we trust people and create space for them to come together, amazing things happen. We’ve been blessed with 20 years of them. Thank you all for being a part that journey!
