Strive Health’s 5-Step Playbook to Reducing Attrition Through Career Growth

TL;DR: Discover how Strive Health tackled attrition by building a scalable, manager-driven career growth program in Lattice. By rolling out targeted career tracks, integrating IDPs, and tying performance reviews to promotion readiness, Strive re-engaged managers, retained top talent, and promoted over 40 employees—turning career development into a growth engine for the entire organization.

At Strive Health, growth is personal.

The company, a national leader in value-based kidney care,  is scaling fast —rapidly expanding its current workforce of 620 — and with that growth comes the challenge of keeping top talent engaged. A few years ago, leadership noticed that attrition was trending upwards. High-performing employees were leaving not because they were dissatisfied with their roles, but because they couldn’t see what came next.

“We realized we were losing great people simply because we weren’t showing them a future here,” said Frannie Warren, Talent & Development Manager at Strive Health. “We needed to get serious about career paths — and we needed to equip managers to have those conversations.”

That realization sparked a company-wide transformation. Rather than introducing a top-down solution, Strive took a deliberate, manager-led approach to building a culture of growth — one that could scale alongside the business and meet the needs of a diverse workforce.

With Lattice as their foundation, the team rolled out structured career tracks, individualized development plans, and a consistent, data-driven promotions process. The result: stronger retention, empowered managers, and more than 40 employee promotions in a single year.

This impact earned Strive Health Lattice’s 2025 “Growth Accelerator” People Success Award — a recognition of their commitment to making career development a core part of the employee experience.

Here’s how they did it — and how other companies can follow their lead.

Step 1: Start With Managers — and Train Them Early

The foundation of Strive’s approach is a simple truth: career growth happens when managers are empowered to drive it.

That’s why every new manager — whether hired externally or promoted internally — is trained on how to use Lattice to support their team’s development. Manager Training includes deep dives into 1:1s, Feedback, and Goals, with practical guidance on how to integrate Lattice into their everyday leadership style.

“We walk through how to sync 1:1s to their calendar, how to use templates, and how to give feedback. It’s not theoretical,” Frannie shared. “We make it real — and relevant — from day one.”

The Lattice 1:1s feature quickly became a manager favorite, providing much-needed structure for ongoing development conversations.

Pro tip: Don’t wait until review season to introduce Lattice. Build it into manager onboarding and show them how it can make their day-to-day leadership easier and more impactful.

Step 2: Don’t Boil the Ocean — Start With the Right Teams

Once the foundation was in place, Strive turned to career tracks. But rather than rushing to roll out a company-wide framework all at once, Frannie took a more strategic approach.

“It’s tempting to go big, but our advice is to pick the department that’s feeling the most pain from unclear career paths, and the team that already believes in Lattice,” she said.

For Strive, that meant starting with the Technology department. Not only was the team growing quickly and in need of structure, but they were also early champions of Lattice. That enthusiasm helped make the rollout a success — and gave other departments a real-life example to follow.

From there, Strive expanded to the Clinical team with a tailored career guide built in Lattice, clinical employees could see how to grow within their roles — and feel supported in their long-term potential.

Pro tip: Launch career tracks in phases. Begin with a high-need, high-readiness department, then use that success to generate momentum for broader adoption.

Step 3: Make Growth the Goal of Every Performance Conversation

At Strive, performance management is about more than ratings — it’s about readiness.

That’s why every mid-year and end-of-year review is designed not just to evaluate past work, but to fuel forward-looking conversations around development and promotion. With Lattice, Strive uses custom templates tailored to role types, ensuring performance criteria are fair, relevant, and clearly tied to advancement.

“Before Lattice, a lot of teams were still using spreadsheets or one-off Word docs,” Frannie said. “Now it’s consistent, centralized, and aligned with our career tracks.”

Even promotions are run through Lattice. Managers use the platform to submit cases with supporting performance data, competency evaluations, and peer feedback — ensuring every promotion decision is transparent and defensible.

In 2024 alone, this process led to over 40 employees being promoted — each one backed by a clear, data-driven case for advancement.

Pro tip: Use Lattice’s customization tools to align your review templates with real promotion criteria. It turns evaluation season into a moment of clarity — not confusion — for employees.

Step 4: Use Data to Re-Engage Disconnected Teams

Not every development opportunity is about climbing the ladder. At Strive, one of the biggest breakthroughs came from addressing a group that wasn’t asking for more — managers in clinical roles who were quietly disengaging.

Lattice engagement surveys helped surface the issue. These managers weren’t unhappy — they were just disconnected, unclear on how to grow, and spread thin between patient care and team leadership.

To address it, Strive created Individual Development Plans (IDPs) for each manager. These weren’t generic templates — each IDP included personalized stretch assignments, coaching support, and check-ins aligned to Lattice’s 9-box framework. Managers co-created them with their leaders, and tracked progress directly in the platform.

“We update the IDPs quarterly in Lattice,” Frannie said. “It’s become a living tool — not a checkbox.”

This initiative re-engaged 36 managers and helped Strive retain high-potential talent in roles that are notoriously hard to fill and even harder to keep.

Pro tip: Let your data guide you. Engagement signals — especially silence — can uncover high-impact development needs that aren’t always obvious.

Step 5: Build a Culture of Recognition (That Actually Sticks)

Career growth isn’t just about checklists and competency models — it’s also about feeling seen. Strive leaned into Lattice Praise to foster a culture of real-time appreciation.

By integrating Lattice with Slack, employees and managers could shout out great work the moment it happened. And during quarterly all-company meetings, the team spotlights Praise Wall shoutouts to reinforce the message: your work matters, and people notice.

“Especially in clinical environments, it’s easy to focus only on the task at hand,” said Frannie. “Praise gives people a moment to pause and celebrate each other.”

Pro tip: Recognition doesn’t need to be formal to be powerful. Build lightweight rituals that fit your company’s pace — and make gratitude visible.

The Results: A Culture of Growth That Scales With the Business

What started as a response to  attrition has evolved into a fully scaled, people-first growth strategy. By building career tracks, enabling managers, and tying performance directly to growth, the organization has created a consistent, scalable development strategy — one that works across departments, from tech to clinical roles. 

With Lattice, over 50 new managers have been trained to lead with clarity, more than 40 employees have earned promotions through a transparent and fair process, and 36 managers have re-engaged through individualized development plans. Career conversations are no longer ad hoc — they’re part of the fabric of how Strive operates.

Strive Health isn’t just growing — it’s growing with intention. And Lattice is helping them ensure every employee sees where they’re going, knows how to get there, and feels supported along the way.

“Lattice helps us stay focused on what matters most — our people,” Frannie said. “It’s become a core part of how we lead, grow, and build the culture we want.”

Want to build a strong career development program like Strive Health? Book a demo with an expert to see how Lattice Performance and Grow pair together to create high-performing teams. 

Inspired by Strive’s story? Book a demo with a Lattice expert to see how Performance and Grow can help your team scale with intention.