Building a Compassionate Company Culture with Claude Silver

What happens when you blend empathy, strategy, and a deep understanding of human behavior in a corporate setting? Meet Claude Silver, CHRO and 'Chief Heart Officer' at VaynerMedia, whose unique career journey - from the dot-com boom to founding an outdoor adventure surfing company and strategic agency roles - has shaped her into a leader dedicated to building a compassionate company culture.

In the conversation with host Bill Banham, Claude takes us through her early experiences, her innate passion for coaching, and how she became a pivotal force at VaynerMedia, infusing the agency with empathy and human connection.

Claude is an emotional optimist, coach, manager, and mentor. As the first-ever Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia, she is in touch with the heartbeat of every single person in the company. Her role is to infuse the Agency with Empathy. 

Questions for Claude include: 

• Can you share the journey that led you to become the first-ever Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia?
• Why try to create the "kindest and most compassionate company"? 
• How can we spot and tackle toxic employees?
• You say that culture is three-dimensional and alive. Can you elaborate on what this means and how you cultivate this vibrant culture at VaynerMedia?
• What advice would you give to companies looking to create a role similar to the Chief Heart Officer?

We do our best to ensure editorial objectivity. The views and ideas shared by our guests and sponsors are entirely independent of The HR Gazette, HRchat Podcast and Iceni Media Inc.

Chapters

• 0:03 Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia
• 13:58 Creating a Compassionate Company Culture

Transcript

Speaker 1: 0:03

Welcome to the HR Chat Show, one of the world's most downloaded and shared podcasts designed for HR pros, talent execs, tech enthusiasts and business leaders. For hundreds more episodes and what's new in the world of work, subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit HRGazettecom. And visit HRGazettecom.

Speaker 2: 0:26

Welcome to another episode of the HR Chat Show. Hello listeners, this is Bill Bannam. Your host today and joining me on the show today is none other than Claude Silva, chief Hearts Officer over at VaynerMedia. Claude is an emotional optimist, coach, manager and mentor. As the first ever Chief Heart Officer over at VaynerMedia, she's in touch with the heartbeats of every single person in the company and her role is to infuse the agency with empathy. That's a pretty good mission. Hey, claude, welcome to the show today.

Speaker 3: 0:59

Bill, it's great to be here. Thank you for having me.

Speaker 2: 1:02

So, beyond my short introduction there, why don't we start by getting to know you a little bit more? Take a couple of minutes to tell our listeners all about your career background and what you get up to.

Speaker 3: 1:12

Okay, great. Well, I started in the dark arts of digital, if you will, in 1998, I was in San Francisco and it was the first dot-com boom and away I went. I got a job as a project manager. I had no idea what that was. Remember, this is pre Facebook, this is pre Google. I was actually working at a like a little boutique grocery store pre Whole Foods as well and a repeat customer kept on coming in and one day he said I think you'd be a great project manager.

Speaker 3: 1:44

I have a startup, an internetcom startup, and it was around creating content, quite frankly, for surfboard surfing, snowboarding and mountain biking. And I raised my hand so away I went down to Silicon Valley and started my career. I had no idea what this world of communication was, or marketing. I had no idea how TV commercials got made. I had no idea about any of it. However, I soon understood the power of user-generated content, feedback from users, what we now know is so important in social, which is the comments, those types of things. So I've always been interested in human behavior.

Speaker 3: 2:31

I studied to be a psychotherapist before I got this job at this internetcom company in 98. And I love working with people. I am a natural coach. I'm a natural cheerleader, without the pom-poms, if you will, and so every job I had after that I was able to manage larger and larger and larger teams, probably because I have an affinity for that. I'm not, I was not a great student in school at all, but I liked poetry. I could recite song lyrics from the Doors or the Cure or anything like that, so I'm very liberal artsy in that, and so as I was running these big, big teams, I was always adding some of that culture building to the team meetings, if you will, and having people bring in their favorite poems and whatnot.

Speaker 3: 3:24

Needless to say, after 9-11, a lot of us got laid off, and I was one of those people, and I started an outdoor adventure surfing company with a friend of mine and I spent about 250, 260 days in the cold Pacific ocean pushing people on nine foot, 10 foot, 11 foot foam boards. I had a wonderful tan from my neck up and my hands down, because everything else was enclosed in a very, very thick wetsuit, and that's also where a lot of my you can do it, I got you, you know, empathy came out, I would say, in terms of just how to hold space for people, especially when they're doing something that's very, very courageous. Anyway, needless to say, I went back and we sold that company and I went back into the dark arts of agency world. And one thing led to another and I received a phone call. One day, when I was at JWT San Francisco, I received a phone call from JWT London and it was the CEO and he said in a very posh accent which I will not try to replicate I hear, we need someone with your skill sets. And two weeks later I was in London. What I recognized what he meant by that is I had a lot of digital know-how, I had a lot of social media know-how, even though it was the beginning of Facebook and so my career in London was fantastic.

Speaker 3: 4:53

I then actually went to Publicis London as a strategist and again running teams and doing a lot of brand strategy, marketing strategy, communication strategy, lot of brand strategy, marketing strategy, communication strategy. And, lo and behold, one day my best friend had just met Gary Vaynerchuk and wrote me an email and said you need to meet this guy. You're two sides of the same coin. Of course, I had been following Gary. I had been following him since 2009. And this was 2013 when she wrote the email and one thing led to another and we hit it off and I moved to New York and started at VaynerMedia May of 2014. And that is where this wonderful adventure started.

Speaker 4: 5:43

Thanks for listening to this episode of the HR Chat Podcast. If you enjoy the audio content we produce, you'll love our articles on the HR Gazette. Learn more at hrgazettecom. And now back to the show.

Speaker 2: 5:59

I love that. What a great backstory. Okay, so on your LinkedIn, you've got yourself down as Chief Heart Officer, which I think is a wonderful title, and I've got loads of questions for you about that. You also put in brackets CHRO and Chief People Officer. Obviously, you don't have a traditional HR background and you've adopted this title, chief Heart Officer and I've never spoken to a Chief Heart officer before, claude, so I've got a bunch of questions now. Um, can you start by sharing the journey that led you to become the first ever chief heart officer at VaynerMedia? So, yes, what, what, what were those skills that you mentioned skill sets? You and Gary had a conversation. Uh, you had, you had particular skills. What, what are those unique skills that that makes for a successful chief heart officer?

Speaker 3: 6:47

Yeah, I want to say that when I started at VaynerMedia, I was his first senior vice president, hire, and I was running the account and strategy groups. So we didn't have a CHO, we didn't have HR. I mean, we were 200 people. So I think Gary saw that I was very quickly a mentor to pretty much everyone and I was doing the role of what you would call HR in many ways, without the employee legalities, but I was really holding space for people and really helping people unlock and whatnot.

Speaker 3: 7:22

And so upon my year anniversary with Gary at Vayner, I told him that I no longer wanted to do advertising. I didn't want to get a product into your hands anymore and I knew that there were people that loved it and were much, much better. And he said to me quote, what do you want to do? And my verbatim back to him was I only care about the people here, I care about the heartbeat. So that was the first mention of heart. And Gary said I need you to do great, I need you to do this job for 18 more months. And he doesn't remember me saying I'll give you six months. But sure enough, I found my backfill and I actually resigned because there wasn't a role for me to move into. And three months later he and I had breakfast and he said that's it. You're coming back, you're going to be the chief heart officer, and I knew what that was why?

Speaker 3: 8:15

Because it's who I've always been. It's a person that knows how to make people feel safe. It's a person that knows how to walk beside another person and not take on their hardships but coach them through that. It's a person that knows how to put their hand on someone's shoulder and say I got you, it's going to be okay. It's a person that knows themselves well, which I do, and knows my limitations and knows when my imposter syndrome heats up. I know how to help people out of their imposter syndrome.

Speaker 3: 8:49

And also, quite frankly, my only job here, the only job description I have, is to touch every single human being and deploy empathy across our agencies, which are 2,000 people now. So that was an enormous job description and a big honor to undertake. Of course, I can't do that alone, and so I found people for a team we call it the people and experience team, I don't call it HR, and I have culture champions in every office people that I know care about others that will take the time out of their day to sit and be kind and create a sense of connection and warmth and trust with another person. So really, in a nutshell, it's emotional intelligence, big time and strategy. That's what you need here, that's what you need in this role.

Speaker 2: 9:41

And heart, of course. By the way, this is, of course, an audio podcast, but behind Claude, here are a bunch of wonderful mantras, lots of lovely words. So, for example, we've got tackle challenges with love and compassion, lead with grace and humility. I can see up there lots of lots of awesome sentiments that support what you've said so far. Um, okay, so you mentioned just a moment ago that you can't obviously, uh, get around the chat to everyone. I mean, there are 2 000 plus employees, right, but you've got a team that helps you with that. So, between you and the team, you make sure that you have touch points with every single employee. You've had conversations between you all, with every single employee. Is that correct?

Speaker 3: 10:22

Yeah, I would say that myself and the team the team is global, my has had. So, bill, I'll take that from the top. That is absolutely correct. My team, plus myself, has had touch points with every single human being now, and my remate from Gary is to meet all 2000 people this year, so that's for 2024. My work is to meet all 2,000 people and I get to know them, and the reason we want to do that is because we really believe in high touch connections. We believe that there are solutions for pretty much everything, with the exception of someone's health, and if we're aware of what's going on with that person, whether or not it's at work or at home, we are able to help guide the situation and guide them. And that's what we want to do. I mean, the vision for Vayner is to create the single greatest human organization in the history of time. Now, that's Gary's aspirational vision for our companies, which I believe one day we'll get there.

Speaker 2: 11:38

So follow up question to that is why. Why are you guys on that mission? Why is that so important? What are the benefits, such as retention, engagement levels? You tell me, yeah, I mean innovation, creativity, doing something different, knowing that kindness and compassion is what works engagement levels.

Speaker 3: 11:49

You tell me yeah, I mean innovation, creativity, doing something different, knowing that kindness and compassion is what works, and cynicism and fear doesn't work in a workplace. That's not getting you anywhere. So our belief is that when you put time and energy, kindness and compassion into the water, it will feed everyone it absolutely will and it will also kill the cynicism, but you have to do it consistently. This isn't a one and done. That's why I'm always meeting with people, listening to people, that's why the team of HR business strategists are always listening to people, guiding them. High touch connections filled with empathy and possibility is what it's about. And you know, we work for a disruptor, we work for an entrepreneur. Where it the answer is always yes and it's not no. There is no no here.

Speaker 3: 12:47

One of the things that was very apparent to me when I took this role is I wanted to do what is called HR differently, because I had been on the receiving end of HR for 20 years and I wanted to do something that really was rooted in common sense, which was to actually take care of people and the experience they were having within our four walls, really understanding the experience. Were they getting the right education? Were they on the right teams? Were we setting them up in positions of strength? Were they getting feedback? Were they growing and developing and getting big opportunities? Those types of things, and that's what I spend a lot of my time on.

Speaker 5: 13:34

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Speaker 2: 13:57

Okay. So you and your team, you have all of these conversations. You want to create a company that's compassionate and is kind and is caring. I get that. That's important. It ain't always going to happen. You're going to meet some folks. You're going to have conversations with some employees would imagine that are frankly toxic. They're not. They're not. They're not contributing. Maybe they are bullying um or being aggressive to to colleagues. What do you do in that situation? What are your tactics? To try and get them on board, to try and get them buying into the mission of the company? And sometimes do you guys need to make those difficult decisions and say thanks, but it's not, it's not working.

Speaker 3: 14:34

That's right. So as soon as we know that said person is being cynical or that group of people is being toxic or cynical or just negative, we spend time with them, and so it is literally a question of, hey, how's it going? They'll start to complain and then I'll work through that complaint with them. What part is their accountability? What part is our accountability? Why is this not something they want to do anymore? Have they fallen out of love with social media? Have they fallen out of love with agency life, which is possible, very, very possible? So the business strategist myself, we're trying to figure out the root. What is going on? And is it something here or is it something outside of here that we have no control over? That's really important. Is your father in the hospital? Did your dog get sick? Whatever it is, we have lives right and we always say work-life balance. It's not, it's life-work balance. We forget that work is a part of our life. It's not work-life balance.

Speaker 3: 15:34

So it is literally. You know, when we have to have hard conversations with candor, potentially putting people on growth plans or, you know, performance plans, potentially exiting people, we try to do that with as much grace and generosity as possible, and sometimes we have to do that for a variety of reasons. It could be business, it could be financial. Most often it's performance and we are going to always try to help that person land that next job. We have an alumni program here. We have one person that looks at all of the job postings that come into Gary's inbox every single day big, big companies looking for social media managers or directors of strategy and we do our best to help the people that we're exiting network with those people at the jobs that are open.

Speaker 2: 16:24

Okay, so it's life, work balance, not work, life balance. That sounds amazing. Do you guys practice what you preach? Are you guys open to folks working in flexible ways, working from home, if they need to come into the office only one or two days a week? What do you think about the four-day work week? Do you think that's a terrible idea? Give? Me some examples.

Speaker 3: 16:41

So I think the four-day work week would be fantastic if it could really work and if we really could get the most out of us ourselves in that four-day work week. I'm not sure if that's possible right now, but I think it's something that certainly our children will see for sure. I believe in hybrid working. I used to be someone that didn't. I did not know how you could work in an advertising agency and not be within five feet of another person, but COVID showed us that a lot can happen on the screen.

Speaker 3: 17:14

I do think it's important to come to the office two, three days a week, because the osmosis, the relationships, the camaraderie, the warmth, the curiosity all of that really matters, and we like each other. We have to remember that we like each other. We used to be together all the time. So do we practice what we preach? We absolutely do our best to do that. We spend a lot of time in well-being conversations and mental health conversations and really helping people with their boundaries. We've been around 15 years. When I joined 10 years ago, the average age was 23. The average age right now is 32.

Speaker 3: 17:51

We have people that are in a very different life stage. They are getting married and they are having their first or their second child. How do we adapt and how do they adapt to the working world? How do we adapt to the fact that they have doctor's appointments to take the kids to and soccer practices and maternity leave? These are things that we're huddling together and figuring out together. There is no right way to do it. Unfortunately, we don't have the same type of maternity parental leave that you do in the UK.

Speaker 3: 18:22

Ours is very, very different. So how are we helping someone really navigate, coming back to the workplace after they've had a baby? Those types of things are always on our mind. Are we giving people the right benefits and how do we know? These are things that I think about all the time, and I actually think about the person in our Bangkok office right now or a person in Toronto office. Do they know what it's really like to work at VaynerMedia? Do they know how good it is? And I'm not sure. I'm not sure I have to really trust the people that are touching them every day.

Speaker 2: 18:58

I'm not sure I have to really trust the people that are touching them every day. Well, despite my accent, I'm also Canadian and the company is Canadian, and paternity benefits, paternity leave, for example is amazing. However, it's my company, so I don't get to benefit from most of this. We are almost out of time. I can't believe it's got a couple of minutes left here, claude, so just two more quick questions for you, because I'm so in love with this term, chief heart officer, I can't let it go just yet. What advice would you give to other companies looking to create a similar role?

Speaker 3: 19:27

And can you answer that in one minute or less? The role has to be blessed from the top and it has to sit next to the top. So I'm Gary's number two. He's been very vocal about that. This role wouldn't work if I wasn't next to him and it wouldn't work if he didn't provide the air cover. That is the truth. That is the absolute truth. Or this role has to be the CEO and the CHO at the same time.

Speaker 2: 19:49

Well, did that in 30 seconds. Good work. And just finally for today. How can folks connect with you and learn more about you?

Speaker 3: 19:55

Yes, please find me on LinkedIn. Please write me a note. I will write back to every single person. I have a website, claudsilvercom. I'm on Instagram. I'm writing a book. Hopefully, it will be out and in the public's hands in April of 25. So I'd love to hear from everyone. And, bill, thank you so, so much for your time today.

Speaker 2: 20:17

And thank you, claude. Okay, in that case, I'm going to hound you in Q1 of 2025 to get you back on the show and we'll talk all about your book. But for today, then, that just leaves me to say listeners, as always, until next time, happy working.

Speaker 1: 20:33

Thanks for listening to the HR Chat Show. If you enjoyed this episode, why not subscribe and listen to some of the hundreds of episodes published by HR Gazette and remember for what's new in the world of work? Subscribe to the show, follow us on social media and visit hrgazettecom.