Building a Culture of Empathy (Part 2)

Building a Culture of Empathy with Claude Silver (Part 2)

How to create leaders through the culture of empathy and self-awareness

I'm grateful that you are joining me in our interview, which is part two of my conversation with Claude Silver. Claude is the Chief Heart Officer of VaynerMedia, which is the digital marketing agency run by Gary Vaynerchuk and his brother. Gary is an inspiring, enigmatic, larger than life leader who is all over social media. I was grateful to get this opportunity to meet and sit down with Claude in person to interview her about how they're building a culture of empathy, putting the human back in HR and all of the things that she's doing there at Vayner.

In part two of our discussion here, we talk about some things like state interviews and culture additions versus culture fit, some things that you don't hear as much about in the HR talent development world. I hope this gives you some things to think about. Part one was popular. I've never had so much engagement with my post on LinkedIn about an episode. Many people shared it and liked it, commented about how much they love Claude and her message about empathy and self-awareness.

We're going to start this episode right off with a question about self-awareness. Before we get to that, I wanted to remind you, if you are a regular reader or tell you if you're a new reader, that I am hosting a conference called the Talent Development Think Tank. We have some amazing keynote speakers like Josh Bersin, who was on the show. Liz Wiseman, author of Multipliers, who has been on the show in the past. Julie Winkle Giulioni, who wrote the book Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go and has been on the show. Michael Bungay Stanier, who wrote the best-selling book The Coaching Habit and his interview on the show was popular as well. Make sure you check all of those out.

The conference is going to be fantastic, like nothing else out there in the HR or talent development space. I personally think it's going to be the best conference. It's going to change the game and something that's going to grow year after year because we went back to the basics and figured out what is going to be engaging and useful and what do people want in the talent development world and we built a conference around that. If you want to come to join us to learn, to connect, to grow, you can get your tickets at TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com. Thank you again for checking this out. I hope you enjoy the second part of my interview with Claude Silver.

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I want to talk to you a little bit more about self-awareness. Gary says that's his greatest strength. I've listened to other interviews you've done in your own podcast. You are highly self-aware, highly authentic, full of love and compassion and it connects with my values deeply. We're aligned and I love it. The question is, especially for people in HR, talent development roles, how do you help your leaders become more self-aware?

HR Leaders As Self-Aware

My first immediate answer is, are we assuming that the HR leaders are self-aware also?

Let's make the assumption that they're aware of the need for self-awareness. Maybe they need to go on this journey as well. They're reading and they know this is important. They see how successful you've been with it and they're going, “How do I get my executive vice president of finance to become more self-aware? Frankly, he's smart but half his employees don't like him because he doesn't recognize the things that he does.”

I would talk to him. It’s the scary thing. There are ways, obviously, to speak to people, to speak to their listening, which is offering suggestions, certainly not coming from an authoritative place. However, the culture has to be ready to embrace a culture of acceptance, of non-judgment, and of understanding that we're humans and humans are subjective or subjective creatures. However, there are three sides to every single story. The first thing is, as an HR representative, you need to get buy-in that this is okay. I don't think that we're not here to change someone's behavior. If you don't know the Serenity Prayer, dive in because there's nothing you can change about another person. 

We’re then becoming the police.

It’s impossible. However, you can make someone aware that their behavior creates anxiety so forth and so on. Their behavior is creating fear among the XYZ team. As human beings, I would like to think that we're allowed to offer others. I can't tell you how they're going to react but I hope, in today's day and age and most of the companies that we're talking to, that they work within four walls that are tender, at least, to the fact that like, “We're humans and it's not easy all the time.” We all go through our ups and downs. That goes back to this fact that work doesn't begin from 9:00 to 5:00. You wake up. You put your feet on the floor. You hope you have a wonderful day. You feed the dog, take the dog out. You have kids. You go to the gym.

Checking email, work email the whole way.

You then get into work. You've already hustled your face off. You always want to gracefully make someone aware of what's up and hopefully, they can hear you and then offer assistance, offer coaching. We have coaching as a benefit here. We work with a company that our employees can sign up for four months, eight sessions and get their own life coaching, professional coaching completely anonymous. I have no idea.

Is that available to all levels?

Yes. We subsidize like 7/8ths of it and they pay $90.

They have a little bit of skin in the game.

We have a scholarship fund for those people that might not or I'll give it to them as a surprise and delight.

Do you want to plug the company they use?

It’s Guided. It’s a fantastic company and I highly recommend them. Someone in the kitchen was telling me that their session ended and they highly recommend it. She told me the two things she learned. She's going to take with her and I was like, “Yes.”

Maybe this is part of the culture, people that say they're not that self-aware, maybe they're not as open to the coaching or they think coaching is for people that are broken. You want to try to shift that because you want to have people, that executive and be open to that feedback. You want people to be open to coaching. Do you think there's a way to suddenly start to shift that and open people up to that stuff?

Yes, but I do think it comes from the top. The reason this role works is because Gary blessed the role.

He supported 100%.

I have a seat at the table and not only a seat at the table, I have that seat.

You’re a strategic part of the business. Let's face it. In a lot of companies, HR is not.

It’s also the CFO, but this is a people over profit business. Gary has been vocal that 9 out of 10 decisions are going to be based around heart. It has to be blessed from the top, that's the first and foremost thing. If it is blessed from the top, then it will permeate throughout the organization. By the way, even if it's blessed from the top, it doesn't mean that it's Gary's responsibility. It's now our responsibility to cultivate this, our responsibility to show up.

You're empowered to go to do this as a leader.

Culture Of Empathy: The HR must be ready to embrace a culture of acceptance, non-judgment, and understanding that humans are subjective creatures.

I empower everyone else and that's the wonderful domino effect that it has. I'm not responsible for this culture. Everyone is responsible for this culture. That means that even when I get these wonderful compliments, which is you and Gary have created a wonderful culture like, “I have skin in the game. I set the tone and I'm here.” This person out there that's laughing and standing next to someone's desk, she's creating a culture right now. A person walking around with a smile, she's creating the culture right now.

I've been in for long enough. It's a crowded, noisy office. Everybody seems happy, seems to be having fun.

We celebrated our incredible housekeeper. That's awesome.

Let's talk about that for a second. Does hierarchy exist here? It seems like everybody is celebrating, everybody's part of it. I've heard you say that hierarchy can cause a lot of problems in organizations but at the same time, people need to know who they report to and have accountability.

Authority Can Cause Problems

I'm going to modify that. Authority can cause problems or it is misused or used for power and not used for the we but it's used for an I. That's definitely what I think. We would love to think of ourselves as a flat organization and there was a time when we were. I can't say that we're flat anymore but I can say that every single person has a voice and can use it at any time. Come up with ideas, offer suggestions, go talk to Gary and talk to me. Talk to the CFO or talk to the chief legal counsel. It's such a door open policy or door open company that flattens things. When I see someone in here and they're like, “I'm meeting you.” It's like, “I'm meeting you.”

You said that to me when I walked in.

I was like, “That's cool.”

We’re meeting each other.

When someone says, “I know you're busy.” It's like, “Yes, Bobby, you're busy too.” I'm busy because of my job. When you touch every single human being and infuse the agency with empathy, I have to meet every single human being. I'm busy but you are too because you're getting a campaign out the door or you're pulling a report or you're off to meet a client and hopefully win that big pitch. Everyone is busy. That type of attitude flattens things also.

It's all part of the culture, which is that inclusiveness, the openness, the ability for people to speak up and share things and not feel like they have to hold back because they might be fired for saying something. I've been big on the idea that that is what creates an innovative culture. I see this as an innovative company. Do you see that as a big part of why the company is innovative and is able to move fast, people come up with ideas and they're able to share them?

That and I also think that we have a lot of longevity here. We have people that have been here four-plus years, a lot. I mean we still have employees 1, 2, and 3 here. We've been around for years. The longevity is something that has given us a lot of speed. The trust, the connection, the bonding, the fact that we change on a dime because we're fast-paced because we work for an innovator. You have to have resilience and grit and those things add up to the loyalty, longevity, and accountability. That is what creates the ability to go fast. That doesn't mean we don't get in each other's way and we don't have meetings for the sake of meetings or you don't have ten people in the meeting room and that room only needs to be the four decision-makers. We are full of that, like everyone else.

You get the bureaucracy too.

Speed is a KPI for us, a big one.

I'm surprised that you say longevity creates speed because I can take that a step further. I've worked for an insurance company that's been around for 100 years and they don't move fast.

However, have they taken the time to connect with one another? Have they taken the time to give it a crap about each other? Do they trust one another? Have they been in the trenches?

Nobody there knew each other on a personal level.

That's the difference. Advertising agencies are built to work in cohorts and squads or pods. When I ran the Unilever team, I had a small little agency of 50 people and we trusted one another. Not only do we go out and do karaoke and all that fun stuff but were here, night after night sometimes. That longevity, that comes or that ethos in the working style creates shorthand. I do believe you get shorthand with longevity. I've been here for years. Gary only has to send me two words and I know exactly what I need to do. I only need to say maybe a sentence to someone on my team and they're off and running.

A lot of times the sentence I'm going to say to my team is going to be something that will help direct them. I will not give them the answer unless they are like, “I need the answer. What do I know?” It'll be something that reminds them to only concentrate and fixate on the issue at hand, not the tangental noise that we all hear and not the subjective nature of that feedback. The shorthand is where the longevity comes into play. I've worked on advertising agencies for many years, over a decade and more than that. Because I speak advertising agency fluently, I'm able to work with these people.

You have empathy for they’re going through.

Loyalty, longevity, and accountability create the ability to go fast. Click To Tweet

If you drop me into Goldman Sachs, I would fall on my face because I had no idea of their business and what makes them tick, other than probably high-profit margins.

Culture Fit Versus Culture Addition

That touches again on a little bit on this idea of culture and empathy. We'll talk about inclusiveness a little bit. I've heard you and other people talk about this, when you hire people, you don't look for a culture fit. You're not big on culture fit. It's more of a culture addition. I'm hearing other people talk about that. There may be a lot of people that haven't heard that before who are thinking, “We got to hire people for a culture fit. That's the important thing. Forget the skills. Do they fit into the culture?” Tell me your philosophy on that.

I'd like to throw that phrase out the door even though I have used it, I'm sure, zillion times in my past. Why do I want anyone to fit? I want people to add to this culture and add to the quilt that we're creating and that in turn, should create a nice comfort. Culture fit means apples and apples. I need peaches, pears, asparagus, garbanzo beans and whatever. I need everything that can go into a minestrone soup. I don't just need the tomato. I don't just need the chicken stock. To get out of metaphor land, there's this wonderful quote that Brené Brown said on her Netflix special and it goes like this, “True belonging doesn't require you to change who you are. It only requires you to be who you are.” True belonging doesn't require you to change to fit into this place. It requires you to be, and we will adopt and adapt to you. Culture addition is where it's at for me and that's what makes this place run because it adds people that have values in a similar zip code. Courage to them is going to be different than courage to me. You're going to jump out of a plane and this person over here is like, “No way.” However, I’d go skeet shooting. I don't know where I got that.

You would probably do some things that I would be scared to do or uncomfortable with.

Someone might say, “I do stand-up comedy.”

That's terrifying.

We want people who have values and similar zip codes. They have curiosity and creativity and they think about things in a slightly different way or a different way than us because, at the end of the day, we are creating product. We are creating a creative output that needs to speak to the demographics we're trying to reach and they are not all apples and apples. The mom in Kansas City who's buying chocolate chip cookies, Chips Ahoy, doesn't mean that the other mom, they're not the same. They like chocolate chip cookies for their house and their kids and they happen to have the buying power.

Spoken like a true strategic advertiser strategist.

You can't take the girl out of the strategy.

At the end of the day, you're looking at humans and it's the same thing inside and outside the organization. What you're saying is, you don't want people to come in and be all the same. You want people to be different. You want them to be human and be themselves and create a safe space for people to be open, authentic, and vulnerable.

Authentic and real, like, “Let's talk about what we can do to get you to that next level.” Ultimately, people want to advance and they want to feel good.

You want to have those honest conversations. Speaking of that, we’re talking about tough conversations. I gave a keynote about owning your career. There's a little bit of a challenge I'm hearing with younger professionals that they're ambitious and they want development. They want to go places but they're not having that conversation with their managers or waiting for their manager to come to coach them or tell them where they should go. It's causing a little bit of friction and disconnect. I've heard you about the importance of younger professionals or people having that conversation with their manager and managing up.

One of the things we start to implement is something called a stay interview. 

I heard someone say something about stay interview at a conference for the first time and then met another woman named Bev Kaye, who apparently wrote a book about it. I'm going to have her on the show as well.

The stay interview has been instrumental. We do it within the first 45 days. By the way, we also do a 90-day but within the first 45 days, we are asking simple questions. Have you met with your manager? Do you understand the expectations, roles, and responsibilities of the role? Do you have all the tools you need? Did you like the orientation? All the other things I could use. We want to know if that manager sat with you and explained how you're going to succeed here and the cycle. Meaning, we do reviews on an annual basis, X, Y, and Z. We don't promote every year, those types of things. I do think it's a two-way street and I think that we want to encourage people to use their voices and ask, “Can you tell me how I can advance here?” Sometimes that doesn't happen.

Fifty percent of the time, that's what my team is doing, talking to someone about their growth and their trajectory or leading them back to the manager to have that conversation. However, that means manager training is essential for us to do. We do a lot of manager training, one-on-one because we want these managers and they're young. It might be their second job. It might be three years out of school. We want them to have the skills they need to understand how to communicate, what it's like to manage friends, how to give feedback, how to give an honest, radical, candor feedback, a tightrope for a lot of people. How to talk to someone about their growth and their trajectory? How to put someone on a performance plan and when to do that? That's a lot. Training and development are important.

Do you do all that in one-on-one coaching with them or you have manager development programs?

We have programs. For example, I'll go to London and I'll roll out more training and then train the trainer. There are plenty of other people that can do it. We do feedback training and we do presentation training, facilitation training. Those things that are essential, client service training. That is as simple as everything from wiping down the whiteboard before you leave, pushing in the chairs, offering people water, that kind of stuff. There's a lot of teaching that goes on here.

That's great because people don't have those skills before they come in. I work a lot with learning and development leaders and there are a lot of challenges and successful things going on out there. The biggest challenge I hear is managers getting promoted and not knowing how to manage.

Culture Of Empathy: Managers getting promoted and not knowing how to manage can be a big challenge for the HR team.

The manager training, one-on-one, starts out with one of the first slides is, “You've been promoted. Congratulations.” Now you need to know all of these things because you're stoked that you got your raise and your new title, so that looks good and it feels good but you're like, “I don't know what to do.” It's our job to teach them.

You go for that thing because you want it and then you get there. It's like when I booked this interview with you, it's like, “I'll get that.” Now I got to do it. Let me wind it down with a couple of standard questions. What would you say has been your biggest accomplishment in your career, proudest moment?

Biggest Accomplishments And Failures

I have a few. One, when I was a strategist at JWT. I was the head strategist on Shell Motor Sports and Ferrari. Bringing Shell Motorsports and Ferrari together and social media was something that was cool. It seems archaic because it was 2009. I got to go to the Ferrari factory in Italy. I got to go the Formula One races. Ultimately, the strategy that we put together is one that I was proud of as a strategist because I was one for a long time. Another proud moment is the day I left VaynerMedia the first time and my team of 50 people, presented me with this incredible collage. As they presented it to me, they went around and they started reading everything on that collage. As they got to the third person, I started crying and I realized that they were reading things I had said to them and they had remembered.

You made an impact on them. These are things like, shine in the day or night. You are enough.

Take up space. Take up the challenges with love and compassion and be big in the room, things that remind you to be human. The third one is this job. This is a serious honor every single day and being at a place where I have the benefit. I'm humbled that someone like you wants to talk about my role. It's huge.

What has been one of your biggest failures and what did you learn from it? With the acknowledgment that there is no true failure in life, we're all learning but there are things that don't go as planned.

In this role, I can say that one of the biggest failures I had was early on when we were doing our first reorg. We were a company that never, ever let anyone go. If we kept people, we were bloated. We were kind people.

You loved everybody. That's what happens when you get to know everybody, you love them so much.

We did a reorg and had to say goodbye to about 35 people in a day. I had sent a note out to a certain group of people looking for feedback on some of the lower performers. The note ended up getting out, which was a bummer and a serious lesson learned that you don't use email to have those conversations. That was another thing about learning almost HR, if you will, even though that's common sense but my common sense failed me on that day.

It’s HR 101, you've got to learn it through experience and not the class.

That was a great, massive hand slap. The great thing about that day I would say is, I was like, “Gary, I messed up” He didn't freak. He knew it was big. He understood that I wanted to be accountable but he helped me clean up. It makes my mouth dry talking about that one.

He probably knew at that moment you already learned your lesson.

I did. The idea of hurting people is not my thing.

What, if anything that maybe there's something we haven't covered, is a trend that you're following in how people work, future of work, where you see things going from a talent development perspective or culture, people working perspective?

Going on with trend of what we're doing here and what we will continue to do here in terms of looking at the whole human is mental health. Mental health is a big issue in the world. Fortunately, we’re working with Millennials and Gen Z and they're much more vocal about what's going on. We want to make sure that we can provide the assistance that they need and we can be empathetic to what's going on in their life. We're not professionals. I'm not a doctor. To make sure that we are trained enough to help them with the next step. It's a huge topic. I have my reasons for why they might be more anxious than our generation, for example. The trend is getting back to what I said originally, which was I see HR as coaches. That doesn't mean more physicians or psychiatrists, it means that we will be able to coach someone into that next step, coach them off the ledge. Help them with their financial health. We have a CPA that comes in once a quarter and sits in an office all day long.

People are going to ask financial questions.

You go in and you book time. We've got a guy that comes in with biometrics and he tells you your BMI and how much water you're carrying, all this stuff. We look at the whole human and I think that, honestly, is what's happening here. The fact of the matter is that we are in intimate relationships at work. That is the deal. You know what I'm talking about. We're in close relationships.

You know each other.

You got to get jiggy with that. You got to figure that out and what that's like. There are dating and marriages that happen here.

True belonging doesn't require you to change to fit into this place. Click To Tweet

In close proximity, working a lot. This is an intense culture and industry.

Looking after the whole human and making sure that we can be the best guides and coaches, we possibly can be in all aspects.

Do you do anything here from a mindfulness perspective?

Yes. We bring in tons of different mindfulness meditation practices. We use Calm.

I'm a huge fan of Calm. I use it every day.

Mindfulness Practices

Calm is awesome. We have the Guided coaching I was telling you about in different offices. In London, they have a massage. They do yoga and meditation in LA. We have three offices here, two big ones in New York and one smaller one, making sure that we are addressing the 650 people here in New York. We have a fast pass. We have our membership list.

That's sounds great. You're taking care of people.

We are. There's a wellness wheel that we created, which looks at the whole human and it talks about environmental health. One of the things that we do is we help people not multitask, and that is a tricky one because I'm a great multitasker. I was told that when you multitask, it takes you 25 minutes to get back into the zone once you get pulled out. That's 25 minutes. We're all doing it.

This is how they work. Everybody thinks they can but it doesn’t. I read a great book on time management a few years ago that changed my mindset on that and helped me to see that as well. Last question for you. For anybody reading who works in HR or talent development and other companies, they're looking for ways to perform better, accelerate their career, and make more of a difference. What's one more piece of advice you would give?

Culture Of Empathy: Your top values and the values you live by are the same values that you work by as a transformational leader.

A piece of advice I’m going to give is going to be, find your top values and the values you live by because they're the same values that you work by. You want to be a transformational leader. You don't want to be a transactional leader anymore. We’re in a different world, it's the 21st century and that requires us to hone in our values, hone in our humility. Understand that relationships and people are what matters and skills are commoditized. Focus on you, self-awareness, so that you can focus on others.

Self-awareness, get to know your values and then you can have more empathy for others. For anybody reading who wants to follow you or get in touch with you, where's the best place for them to do that, Claude? I know you're on LinkedIn and Instagram all the time.

Also, Twitter. You can hit me up. I do respond to everyone that writes. It does take a little bit of time sometimes. Hit me up and I'm happy to say hi.

Thank you so much for making the time for this interview. It has been wonderful for me and I know it's been valuable for our readers as well.

Myself, too. Thanks, everyone.

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That is a wrap for my interview with Claude Silver, who is Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia. What did you take away from that episode? I took away many things. It was fascinating and I love learning from all the people that I'm interviewing. The cool thing is I get to collect all of the lessons from that learning and share those back out with you in different formats. If you haven't gotten ahold of them yet, I have created a couple of different resources for you to share things I've learned. One of them is the top five trends in talent development, which you can get by going to TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com/trends.

The other one is the top advice from the interviews that I've got done on this show and to get that, you can go to TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com/trends. You can also go to our website, sign up for our newsletter, look for free resources and it should all be there as well, TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com or TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com, where you can also learn about our conference, our upcoming community that we’re building and all the content that we’re putting out there which is growing day by day. I don’t even know what’s going to be there. Thank you so much for reading and for connecting and sharing. I’d love for you to share this episode or whatever inspires you out on LinkedIn or social media because I want more people to know Claude and she needs more followers because she is incredible. Thanks for connecting.

• VaynerMedia
• Talent Development Think Tank
• Josh Bersin – Past episode
• Liz Wiseman – Past episode
• Julie Winkle Giulioni – Past episode
• Michael Bungay Stanier – Past episode
• Multipliers
• Help Them Grow or Watch Them Go
• The Coaching Habit
• TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com
• Guided
• Bev Kaye – Previous episode
• Calm
• LinkedIn – Claude Silver
• Instagram – Claude Silver
• Twitter – Claude Silver
• TalentDevelopmentHotSeat.com/trends
• TalentDevelopmentThinkTank.com