The word “thrive” is one of those expressions that instantly conjure up a host of feelings and connotations. It’s funny how one small word can immediately call to mind a fully formed idea – one of flourishing in a place, opportunity, or environment that has been carefully selected by/for you. All too often, however, “thriving” is not a word most folks would use to describe their career trajectories (or, from the company perspective, their employee base), but Craig Van Bremen (Darden EMBA ’18) and Dr. Adam Hastings (Curry ’16) of Thrive Partners believe that their venture can be a key tool for change in that arena. Ultimately, their mission is to help both businesses and employees find that magical phrase falling naturally out of their mouths when asked the inevitable question, “what do you do?”
Thrive’s third team member Kate Meckley, a PhD in Psychology with 13 years of experience, has intimately studied the science behind how companies hire and retain employees, and she’s helped create Thrive’s core principles under the guidance of a specialty called Industrial and Organizational Psychology (I/O Psychology, for short).
In a recent conversation with Van Bremen, he shared more about the ethos behind the burgeoning boutique consulting firm’s distinct approach to talent management. For Thrive, it all starts with company culture. Van Bremen believes that what many companies lack is a higher-level strategy when it comes to shaping their employee base, often falling back on heuristics such as a “gut feeling” to make employee decisions that ultimately have a huge impact on the health of an organization, not to mention its bottom line. Van Bremen is constantly surprised by “how most companies don’t actually think about building a talent strategy, [despite] hiring [being] so critical to the success of their venture.”
The current landscape of talent management firms is littered with consultants willing to tackle one particular phase of the process (generally sourcing the potential talent) but contains very few who provide a bird’s eye view of what a company’s longer-term talent strategy can and should look like. According to Van Bremen, Thrive “want[s] to bring all that together – identify[ing] their needs, putting people in the funnel for them, [and providing] assessments, interviews, a select pool of highly-qualified candidates, and even an interview guide, so that every hire is within the context of the larger firm.”
Thrive firmly believes that, by taking these extra steps on the front end, companies will be able to significantly reduce the disappointing breakdown of employee fit that plagues so many companies on the back end, often leading to costly turnover and a lack of stability within work teams and departments. This belief is borne out of years of observing and understanding the pitfalls of careers across the board – from a career’s nascent stages to a senior-level executive job search. Hastings, as Dean of Business, Mathematics, and Technology at Piedmont Virginia Community College, has worked for years advising folks on their early post-grad path into the workforce. On the other end of the spectrum, Craig has swapped job stories with his Executive MBA classmates at Darden, surprisingly touching upon many of the same struggles and themes that Hastings has witnessed.
These tendencies and questions are so universal that Van Bremen and Hastings have even seen some of them echoed in their own quests for career satisfaction and fit. Van Bremen says this is because many of us fall into the same psychological traps: the “my mother was a nurse, so I’ll be a nurse” line of thinking (or lack of serious thinking or soul-searching) that ultimately leaves people with a misalignment of expectations and aspirations vs. reality. Meckley’s I/O Psychology expertise has been invaluable in understanding and counterbalancing these destructive career habits, ensuring that both employee and employer find more satisfying, longer-term fits.
Van Bremen is excited to progress Thrive Partners further over the course of the team’s i.Lab residency, particularly because he’s so genuinely eager to help his target market – small companies who can’t afford an endless string of consultants giving conflicting pieces of advice at each stage. Describing the services and guidance they plan to offer as “high touch” and “focused on the individual client,” Craig says his EMBA class and the mentor network gained through the i.Lab have been enthusiastically helpful and eager to help him connect. As Thrive thrives, so will the companies and the workforces that the venture comes into contact with, and a prospering career community would be the ultimate job well done.