‘I think that to be a good HR person, you have to understand every aspect of the business,’ says Brianna Madron
As a mental health support services organization, DiveThru has taken a distinctive path: scaling fast while refusing to compromise on being, in its own words, “human-led.”
For Brianna Madron, DiveThru’s Director of People and Culture, that philosophy is a daily operating principle. She says she joined the Edmonton-based company when it had a single physical location, a small virtual platform, and roughly 25 to 30 team members.
She’s helped steer its people and culture as it has grown to four clinics and a triprovince virtual therapy platform that’s nearing 100 team members.
“Getting to scale a company as much as we have over the last couple of years has been the most fun ride ever,” says Madron. “I feel really lucky with all the great people that I get to work with.”
From consulting crash course to calm in the storm
Before getting into HR, Madron cycled through education, accounting, and marketing before landing in a university HR course, where from the get-go she felt she had found her field, she says. She quickly immersed herself in Edmonton’s HR community through student leadership and volunteer work.
A junior consulting role became a crash course in HR fundamentals and leadership, she says, and while she was still finishing her degree, she advised leaders across industries and saw “behind the curtains” of different cultures and operating models, helping her decide early what kind of leader she wanted to be.
Her first HR leader role was quickly stresstested by the COVID19 pandemic, and overnight she was managing a new team while getting used to her role and navigating temporary layoffs across the country. That period, she says, is where she truly learned the power of communication and the importance of being “the calmness in the room when things feel really hectic, really trying to just keep things steady and calm, and figuring things out one step at a time.”
Building human-led culture for 'heavy work'
DiveThru’s business is mental health support, and Madron is clear that supporting clients starts with supporting the clinicians and frontline staff who deliver that care.
“My number one job is to support our team so that they can support our clients,” she says. “They do really heavy work, and I want to be really intentional about the space that we’re creating for them to be able to do that work.”
That intention shapes everything from policies to daily interactions. Madron describes Divethru’s approach as “human-based,” rooted in the value of being “human-led,” which the team reinforces with a simple message: “You’re a Divethru crew member second and you’re a human first.” Leaders start from the individual’s needs – whether time off, access to a public benefit program or other supports – and work flexibly to find solutions, even in parttime, clientfacing roles, she says.
When Madron joined DiveThru in November 2023, the company had one physical location and a virtual platform. The most consequential shift in that growth journey, she says, was moving from one to multiple locations. The first site was highly handson, with early hires helping shape policies and processes. Adding more clinics introduced distance, limited leaders’ visibility of frontline staff and quickly showed that the original structure wouldn’t scale, she says.
According to Madron, the answer was to build a middle layer of leadership – studio managers responsible for daytoday operations and culture in each site. “That was a really uncomfortable shift for a lot of people — change is hard for anyone — but it feels like now we've gotten to a place where we have the right structure in place, we have the right supports for everyone, but it was trial and error for us to get there,” she says.
Business fluency
For HR leaders in similar environments, Madron stresses the importance of broad business fluency. “It’s really being able to not always look at things in an HR lens, but from a greater business perspective and understanding, how does this impact ROI, how does this impact our revenue, and what does it mean for that?” she says.
That fluency has made her time at DiveThru particularly rewarding, according to Madron.
“What I love most about my experience at DiveThru so far is not only how much we've scaled, but I do so much more than just HR,” she says. “I have a deep understanding of every business function in DiveThru, whether that's operations, our finance team, and marketing — I think that to be a good HR person, you have to understand every aspect of the business, and I’m learning to round myself out as a professional.”
One early decision in her DiveThru tenure that Madron highlights is that HR was at table from the beginning. She says the company’s CEO and founder created the Director of People and Culture role early on and before much had been established in the company. “I could build and scale, rather than having to go back, fix, implement, and see how that lands,” she says. “I think HR gets left behind a lot when it comes to growing organizations and they're brought in when they have to be brought in — I was brought in so early, which was such an impactful piece for our organization.”
Since then, Madron has layered in initiatives that have contributed to retention, engagement and the company’s ability to meet growth targets. Those include paying team members to volunteer, offering generous referral bonuses, providing comprehensive benefits that reflect DiveThru’s mental health mandate and investing heavily in professional development through ongoing training, she says.
Feedback-informed HR and setting an example
Madron frames all of this as an ongoing dialogue. “I am extremely feedback informed,” she says. “I want to hear from the people at the front line what they want, what kind of an organization they want, and what types of initiatives make the biggest impact for them.” This includes regular oneonone meetings and open conversations about what is and isn’t working, she says.
Madron’s professional philosophy is grounded in her own commitment to personal wellbeing. Whether through physical activity or mental health practices, she says she takes her health seriously because she knows she can’t show up effectively for others without it.
She believes that example has helped normalize healthy boundaries and worklife balance within DiveThru. “The folks that work at DiveThru have said to me a number of times, ‘I've never actually experienced work-life balance until getting to be at DiveThru,’” she says. “I make sure that I'm taking the time for myself and I encourage others to do that, whatever that looks like, for them.”
Madon says she wants work to be enjoyable for DiveThru’s team members. “That means taking time for ourselves so that we can show up as our best version,” she says. In the mental health space, Divethru calls that ethos “collective care” — a reminder that caring for each other starts with caring for ourselves.
For Madron, when there’s unrelenting pressure and transformation, being calm in the storm may be one of HR’s most valuable contributions.
