We did it… At the end of September, we had the first annual Continuus Technologies retreat in Milwaukee! This came with a handful of firsts: our first ever company retreat, the first time I ever helped plan an event like this, and the first time most of our team members had ever met each other face-to-face.
Our goals for this retreat were to address both our company initiatives and the personal and professional outcomes our employees shared early in the planning process. The most common thing we heard people wanted to get out of this event was to just meet everyone; scroll to the gallery below to see all that meeting in action!
The theme of our retreat was “We Before Me,” which reflects the leadership team’s initiative of continuing to put our people and culture first. The concept of putting employees first isn’t new to Continuus; it’s been Matt’s guiding principle since he founded Continuus in 2011. But with our immense growth over the last couple of years, it was important to bring it back to the forefront to ensure we are actively working to maintain it no matter how rapidly we grow.
Some facets of that culture also include candor and transparency. We discuss and encourage these during our weekly book club meetings, bi-weekly CT What’s Up sessions (more on that below!), one-on-one check-ins, and team meetings on a regular basis.
From the first book we covered in book club, “Radical Candor” by Kim Scott, candor can be defined as, “caring personally and challenging directly, not brutal honesty.” Holding this retreat was one way we wanted to connect with everyone on a human level while also leveraging the knowledge of local professionals to empower our team to lead with candor.
Our two-day retreat started on Thursday, where we welcomed everyone to our Milwaukee office with happy hour and fabulous appetizers from Simple Eats MKE. As part of the operational team, I have had the opportunity to meet each of our employees at least once virtually. However, most of our team has not had that level of interaction with each other so it was great to see everyone getting to know each other and putting the pieces together. Everyone had the chance to socialize and enjoy games of ping pong, bags, and more.
Friday brought the “formal” retreat programming, with a delicious breakfast buffet from Saz’s to kick things off before we spent our morning with Aleta Norris of Living As A Leader. Aleta walked us through actionable steps to approach uncomfortable conversations in both our personal and professional lives, using candor as the basis of why facing these uncomfortable conversations is important in the first place.
After practicing the tools Aleta provided, we jumped into a live version of CT What’s Up, our bi-weekly virtual meeting for anyone in the company to ask Matt and anyone else on the leadership team whatever questions they might have. Transparency is the ultimate goal, and the participation from so many during this session allowed us to do just that. A lot of people asked questions, shared ideas, and brought new perspectives to the topics that were brought up.
Following a midday break and lunch catered from Glorioso’s Italian Market, we jumped back into it with Susan Marshall from the Backbone Institute, where we learned more about competency, confidence, and risk-taking and how to use those concepts as tools to improve our communication skills and move our careers in the way we each individually envision.
We rounded out our retreat programming with our quarterly company and department update, revisiting strategic initiatives for the year, their progress, things that have happened over the last few months, and what’s coming up for the rest of the year.
Finally, we ended Friday night with dinner and drinks at Merriment Social.
Having over 80% of our team take time out of their busy lives to attend was indication enough that our first ever retreat was a success! Overall, it was a great experience, we hope our team had a blast, and we can’t wait to do it again next year. Huge thanks to Nick for all his hard work planning this retreat with me, Gina for jumping in at the last minute to bring it all to life, Matt and Andy for trusting the process, and everyone who offered any kind of helping hand along the way. Cheers!