Toxic leadership and empty promises
Pros
You know how some of your closest friendships are forged in the trenches? That’s what I experienced at Thesis. Many of my friendships at this agency began due to the awful conditions cultivated by senior leaders, but have translated to real life and continue to this day. I am incredibly proud of the work my team and I were able to accomplish under difficult circumstances.
Cons
You’ll see themes from the other real reviews on this platform that continue to bubble up: the inexperienced leaders are awful communicators, they are callous in their change management (or should I say: they have no ability to handle change management), nepotistic in their hiring and promoting, and unable to retain talent. Leadership talks a big game about how they want to be “a different kind of agency” yet they fall into the worst toxic tropes: they don’t meaningfully listen to their people and avoid making changes that matter - then pat themselves on the back for how amazing they are. You’ll see this evidenced in their misguided responses to other critical Glassdoor reviews. Their responses lack substance, acknowledgment of feedback, and accountability for their role in these issues. It’s a perfect representation of what it’s like to work at Thesis: you’ll spend weeks/months/years upleveling concerns, hoping that things will change for the better, only to get an empty response where they opt to tout the positives they believe and sidestep the negative reality of the people actually doing work for their agency. My time there was emotionally, physically, and spiritually exhausting. With a team of high-performers working on one of the single biggest accounts at Thesis, we were constantly bogged down in the politics, agency changes/ lack of management of those changes, and lack of support for professional growth. Leadership often promoted those at the top while neglecting everyone else. Everyone on my team felt overtapped, underpaid, and undervalued. During my last year at Thesis, more than 100 people chose to leave. Teammates, including myself, had to step into more senior roles that we were never compensated for. Since then, they’ve lost critical accounts and there have been rounds of layoffs. Based on their unchanging and toxic leadership team, I would not expect a positive trajectory moving forward. To anyone considering Thesis: you can do better.
