Three reflections from my first week as Director of Growth at Tecknuovo

After 10 years in talent attraction, branding and people engagement, I was thrilled at my recent appointment to Director of Growth. I’ll be working to make Tecknuovo the go-to place to work for both our HQ team and our talented community of associates, and to say that I’m excited for the next few months would be an understatement!

I dove head-first into my new role at our team offsite this July 2022, where we spent three days in the Norfolk countryside packed with team-building, workshops, nice meals, and of course, the inevitable sports day.

It made me reflect on just why it’s so important to connect with your team in a new environment and away from the weekly grind — especially for a fast-growing scale-up. On that note, here are my top three takeaways from the week.

1. Building personal connections strengthens flat hierarchies

Having grown our team by 110% in just the last six months, we had a tonne of new faces from all corners of the business joining the fun over the week. It was a fantastic opportunity for them, but also for longer-standing team members, to get to know each other on a different level.

A key piece of our culture revolves around leaving our egos at home, meaning that no matter how senior, experienced, or talented anyone at Tecknuovo is, they’re no more important than anyone else.

By giving everyone – from our C-level leaders to those starting out in their first role in tech — the opportunity to connect in a relaxed environment, the offsite helped to keep down the barriers between hubs (what we call departments) and seniorities to reinforce the flat hierarchy that underlines our success as a fast-moving business.

2. Communication powers diversity in opinions

Our business is growing, and each month we’re all getting more busy working with our own expanding teams and tasks.

Without intending to, we sometimes lose sight of what’s going on with colleagues across other hubs, despite all working toward the same goals: disrupting the technology consulting industry with our Zero Dependency framework and delivering unmatched value for our customers.

To help us re-gain perspective, we ran cross-hub workshops at the offsite that focused specifically on lifting out diversity in opinions and perspectives. Almost every internal project on our backlog comes to life through collaboration between Marketing, Talent, Delivery, Compliance and beyond, and I always see this as a huge opportunity to tap into unique viewpoints.

By teasing out a wide range of opinions — from Directors to Delivery Analysts to Financial Controllers — we were able to build on these perspectives to inspire creative solutions that ring true to our Deliberately Different ethos.

The workshops resulted in a unanimous conclusion: communication is the glue that will hold us together as we grow, evolve, and change our industry one step at a time.

3. The power of taking a step back

This leads me on to my next observation: how powerful it can be to take a step back and open your eyes to the bigger picture.

Leaving your daily routine and location behind for a few days can do wonders for clearing your mind — freeing you from the impending to-do lists and letting you focus on longer-term goals and strategy.

The offsite was a reminder to everyone about why we’re all here. We’re an exceptionally motivated bunch of people at Tecknuovo, and taking a break from the nine to five gave us the chance to re-align around all the reasons we come to the office with smiles on our faces, including but not limited to:

• Being an inclusive and fun place to work, with our values of curiosity, openness, pace, courage, and connection running through everything we do.
• A motivation to push for disruption in the technology consulting space with our Zero Dependency framework
• The drive to continue improving how we work with each other and our customers as our growth trajectory continues to skyrocket, following a whopping 52.4% three-year compound annual growth rate

I’m looking forward to applying these learnings and many more as we work towards exciting new heights this year and beyond — be that in the office, at home, or whilst battling it out for the welly wanging champion’s title in a field.

If our culture, people, and mission have piqued your interest, find out how you could join the Tecknuovo team — at our London HQ or as part of our community of associates.