We Promote People Then Abandon Them! - The Leadership Crisis Nobody Is Talking About | Claude Silver

0:00Claude Silver:We need leaders to be courageous as well. Whether or not we want to call that vulnerable, transparent, it doesn't matter. But when someone says, you know, I'm really struggling because my dog got sick, you can also say, hey, my dog got sick too. You don't want to leave someone out on a limb. So there's a lot of unlearning. And you said that already. And especially if you've come from a very different kind of agency.

0:26What would happen if we just told the truth?

0:28Claude Silver:Welcome to TruthWorks, where we dig into the nitty-gritty of leadership and work. And what needs to change. I'm Jessica Neal. And I'm Patty McCord. Our journey together started in HR, but trust us, it's evolved into something wild, honest, and, well, a bit rebellious. So throw out the handbook. We're here to redefine rules to work for us, not against us. Let's dive into another episode.

1:04Hi, everyone. Welcome to another episode of TruthWorks. I am your host, Jessica Neal. And today I'm here with a very special guest. I'm so excited to talk to her. I think she's the first chief heart officer ever. And there may be more now because perhaps she set a trend, but we, I don't know. I think we're going to have a lot in common, me and this guest. She's written a book called Be Yourself at Work. Her name is Claude Silver. She does what I used to do at Netflix, but they call it something else and are rebranding the whole HR thing. So I want to dig into all of that, Claude, but welcome to the show.

1:45And we're so excited to have you. Thank you so much, Jessica. Great to be here. Yeah. So I think in researching you, you never wanted to be a chief heart officer. You especially never wanted to be a chief human resources officer. And I think you started your career out in like advertising and media and, you know, we're publicists and organizations like that, like, this is not what you did. So can you back up and tell us the story of how you actually got here?

2:15Claude Silver:Yes, absolutely. So I was at the right place at the right time, which means San Francisco at the first dot-com boom. So pre-Netflix, obviously, pre-Google, pre-Facebook, pre-all of that. It was 1998. And I was working at a grocery store. I was managing a grocery store in the Castro. And this guy, repeat customer, came in and he said, I think he'd be a great project manager. And I was like, what the heck is that? And next thing I knew, I was driving down to Palo Alto in my beater Saab. And that was my first foray into this wide world of digital, which I never left. So I started as a project manager.

2:50Claude Silver:And then I ended up in the agency world after many layoffs, because we had a dot com bust. In the agency world, yeah, agency world, they placed me as a an account person as a client partner, being good with people, I like to, you know, I like to educate people, like to learn curious about people. And then And the greatest thing happened. The chief strategy officer at Organic, this is when I was at Organic, which was an Omnicom company back in the day, said to me, I think you're a strategist. And I said, what? He said, you're a strategist. Come with me. And my career then completely shifted into doing what I've always loved, which is I have a fascination with human behavior.

3:37Claude Silver:I was fascinated with my own. I'm fascinated with other people's. And I really, you know, kind of like see what happens in the workplace in terms of we all get triggered. We all act out. We all shrink, blah, blah, blah. And so one thing led to another. And I ended up having an incredible career as a strategist, a digital strategist, creative strategist at JWT and then at Publicis in London. And then I met Gary, Gary Vaynerchuk, who's my boss. We met, we were connected through a great, great friend. And the next thing I knew, I was in New York in May of 2014. And I was the first SVP that he hired, meaning I was the oldest person, really.

4:17Claude Silver:And I had the most work experience, agency experience, because everyone was, the average age was 23. True story. I'll back up, though, and say, while I have never, I never wanted to be in the world of HR. That was just like a, no, I don't feel it. I would rather I wanted to be a psychotherapist actually is what I wanted to do. But in terms it's funny, and I'll get there with the chief heart officer title, it's the greatest title in showbiz. And it's fantastic. But the work is something I've always done, which is to champion people. And you know that, right? That's what we do. That's what we love.

4:50Claude Silver:That's why we get into the into the world of HR coaching or whatever. So a year into me being the first SVP and running our hugest account at the time, I just went to Gary and I said, you know what? I love it here. You're the best. I do not want to work in advertising. And he said, what do you want to do? And I said, I only care about the people here. I care about the heartbeat of this place. We ended up coming back to heart months and months later after I found my backfill and I actually resigned. Okay. And then he, he and I sat down. You were leaving. You were out the door. I was Just like getting this into your hands, like it's not important anymore.

5:32Claude Silver:But I love the team. I love the teamwork that does this. And, you know, being in the trenches and trying to win pitches and all of that stuff. And so we sat down at breakfast. He said, great, you're coming back. You're going to be chief heart officer. I knew what that meant in many, many ways. It just, you know, I care about the heartbeat, right? I care about the people here. And I asked, I said three things. One, you know, I never wanted to be in HR, right? And he said, well, you're going to learn it and you're going to hire a strong team around you. So, you know, 10 and a half years later, the team is awesome.

6:05Claude Silver:And they're all pros and they know the experience of HR. I said, what are we building here? Because I had been at the company by that time, about 16 months. And he said, we're building the single greatest human organization in the history of time. And I was like, all right, well, sign me up, please. And then, of course, I said, how do we know if I'm successful? and he said the following which is the only job description to this day I still have you will touch every single human being and infuse the agency with empathy we were almost 400 people then we're 2000 globally now still an independent agency and so that's how this all came about and then of course I needed to figure out what was that and how was I going to scale it and and what am I going to do?

6:51Yeah. And what was the, why was that the mission?

6:55Claude Silver:Well, Gary is a very people first operator. I mean, he's very, for anyone that follows Gary V on social, I mean, he's very much about practical optimism, I would say, and really the belief in humans, wanting them to, he really wants them to believe in themselves. And he and I have aligned before I even accepted the job on our belief in people and possibility. We're both optimists. And he saw that that was already something I had equity in within the workplace and already had that as a strength, which was wonderful that he saw that. I was really interested in bringing a lot of care, compassion, courage to the workplace, bravery, all of that stuff.

7:37Claude Silver:And so what the job was and what the job continues to be is to scale him and to scale empathy. And that's why, because he needed someone to, you know, we were too big and now we're way too big. Yeah. Well, what does that look like in practice? Like, how do you scale empathy? Like, what does that mean? If I'm an employee of your all's, what do I feel through that? Well, it depends on where you are. If we're just meeting and you started six months ago, I'm really going to find a way to ask you how it's going without saying like, so what's going on? Anything bad? I might play Rosebud Thorn with you.

8:16Claude Silver:I might just say, you know, if you and I, Jessica, had a magic wand, what would we change here? Right? And you might say, it's the best culture ever. I don't really know. And so that might happen. If I'm reaching out to you because I've seen smoke in the horizon, or someone tells me like, I should probably check in with Jessica and everyone in that kind of group, then I'm going to be asking you different questions. Every question and everything we talk about will have some kind of coaching embedded into it. My job is to leave you feeling great about you. With the exception of, if I know that you are headed for a performance plan or you're on one, I'm certainly not going to blow sunshine.

8:58Claude Silver:I'm going to say, listen, I understand that X, Y, and Z is a real vulnerability of yours. And so how can I help you? I know that you've got this plan. I know you're doing check-ins. Are you doing check-ins with your manager? All of that stuff. So there's a, that's, I think in my one-on-ones, I get a lot. In my group chats, I obviously get so many data points and patterns, but also early on, I had to figure out how to do this. And so what I did was I found other like-minded people, similar DNA, had a heart to help, cared about people. And they are all called culture champions. They are all over our offices now.

9:38Claude Silver:Most of them have stayed, we have a lot of longevity in the company. And I know that if I wake up, and I see a slack from someone in Amsterdam saying, so and so is suffering, their dad is in the hospital, I know exactly who to slack back and say, Hey, would you mind taking David out for a coffee today? He's having a tough time. I'm not going to say he's having that. So I can do that anywhere. The culture champions are fantastic. They're wonderful. And then I had to create an HR group, right? They're called the people and experience team. And the business partners are really modeled after the heart, modeled after creating psychological safety.

10:18Claude Silver:They all have been trained in knowing how to create and hold space for someone to try to move their bias to the backseat and to help find solutions. So they're all we're all kind of modeled and in a very similar way, obviously, they have their own gifts and personalities. And so that's really how we've done it. And then leaning on leadership in these past three years, to take accountability and to really be adults and lead, lead in the way that I would like them to, that Gary would like them to, and the way that, you know, to really like, you know, leave a map for people to make sure that everyone knows that as leaders, we work for them.

10:56Yeah. Now, I think most organizations don't really talk about heart. No. In fact, they would like to not talk about heart. And, you know, perhaps, you know, maybe the organizations come off more control versus contacts. But what do you think you gain as an organization when you lead with heart versus the opposite?

11:22Claude Silver:The truth. I think you gain real ROI when it comes to making someone not only see that they're valued and that they belong, but that they matter. They're worth something here. I think that's an enormous, enormous piece of it. So, you know, heart, human, it's very interchangeable to me. love you know I don't say that a lot because I know there's an aversion to that and people are like well we don't want intimate love and it's like okay I'm not talking about that's not what I mean yeah I'm talking about just being a human and having you know using the foundations that we learned as children kindness compassion how to share our toys we learned all of these things we really did and then we forget them somewhere and we think that IQ is the most important thing and then you realize, oh wow, work is really about connection.

12:15Claude Silver:Work is really about building relationships and seeing how you all can grow together, how you can innovate something together because she comes with this type of mind and you come with this type of mind. It's all about connection, but we think somewhere that work should be, you go to work, you really don't have a good time, certainly don't have any friends, it's top-down leadership and then you can go have your life afterwards, which is what Gen Xer like me grew up as. Right, same, yeah. Twerk hard, put your head down. I mean, Jessica, like if I could get a dentist appointment on a Saturday, thank you.

12:54Claude Silver:Because there's no way I was saying, I'm leaving at three to go to a dentist. No, you never did that. No, no, you never did that. I didn't even take vacation. Right, so what was that policy? You would accrue it. Right. Yeah. You would get it. Yeah. Yeah. But I never took it. I mean, I never took a day off, but I got paid, you know, for my. Yeah. Yeah. And it was a different way of working. But I think that one of the things that I learned over time as a leader, and it sounds like you've learned the same things. But when you lead with empathy, when you lead with heart, when you are authentic and you can be vulnerable with the team, the trust goes through the roof, the connection goes through the roof the honesty and ability to be honest about whether it's just feedback for the team feedback for you things that are going on with themselves that goes through the roof and then that unlocks productivity I think a hell of a lot of it and the one thing that you said, but didn't say is accountability.

14:20Yes, true.

14:21Claude Silver:We want to be accountable. I really, truly believe that at our, at our best, we want to take, we want agency for ourselves. And we also want to say, you know what, I messed up. This is what I'm going to do. And then guess what? It's done. There's no drama to it. Right. That's the honesty that you were talking about. Yeah. And I think, you know, when I look at other organizations, and one of the things that I tried to do is that even when things, to your point, weren't perfect, right? Maybe there's a performance issue. Maybe we're working through some things. You can still have a heart through those things.

15:01And I can't think of a time when I let somebody go where they didn't give me a hug. Yes. Or thank you, right? Right. Yeah. Like I can't, there could have been, but cause there's been, there's a lot of them that have happened, but, um, but we always left the conversation with a hug. And I think organizations make saying goodbye so horrible, you know, and shameful for the person.

15:30Claude Silver:Yes. Yes. Do you remember? I don't know if this happens anymore, but like, I can clearly remember getting the boxes together for people when we were going to do a layoff and like, they would leave in that box. Right. I know. Terrible. Like, and it's, I mean, I don't know, maybe like you have to be mad at them to be able to do it. And, you know, cause it's not, Nobody likes to do it, right? It's terrible for everyone. Yeah. But if you do it with like grace and care and humanity, it's okay. It's a conversation then. And hopefully it's not a surprise. That's what we want to mitigate. And that is not, that's not, we're not, it's not a perfect science as much as you and I would like to think it is.

16:18Claude Silver:It's not. But I think that the conversations that lead up to that are what I think where the real connection and transparency can shine, which is literally like, this isn't working. These are things that we can put in place. Obviously, the person needs to do the work. Right, of course. You need to show up and do the work. And to your point, there is nothing that isn't an ROI that's not going to go through the roof when you're clear. When you're clear, have clarity, transparent as much as you can be, right? And also offer a little bit of vulnerability. Oh, yes. Like one of the things I say to our residents every three months when they start immediately, and these are all basically, it's our what we have an internship rather than we have a residency and I just say as I'm talking by the way if there's any other dyslexics like me you can come talk to me let's just get it out of the way yeah so then their manager doesn't come up to us later on and say so-and-so really misses words when they're writing and Grammarly or chat isn't helping them and it's like okay well let's go back a little bit there right yeah yeah I love that well let's talk okay so So I kind of understood my mission at Netflix.

17:39If I could get my leaders really good at being better humans, that they would be better leaders. And so, again, you lead how you were taught to lead, right? And, you know, you grew up how we grew up. You're kind of raised by wolves. You probably lead that way, right? But I realized I had to deprogram, not unteach a lot of leadership ways of working that were not going to scale at Netflix. And so we spent a lot of time thinking about that, and we built a whole seminar around it. But do you do a lot of that at your firm, and what do you guys do? Yeah.

18:26Claude Silver:How do you teach this? Yeah, I mean, Netflix has written the book. Let's just say that you've written the book. And I think we all want to emulate a lot of what you've put out there, which is thank you. That's the first thing. In terms of not being afraid to get real. And certainly not creating any kind of entitlement or coddling, which is very difficult to do. yeah very difficult to do with generation z of course because they are kind of looking for that unconsciously or not so we do a lot of leadership off sites and we bring in outside trainers and so this last one we did we did strength finders and then they all had three coaching sessions with outside coaches which i thought was very very effective and then the strength finders through the strength finders they brought the pod leaders together so we have pods so whether or not, you're the head of PM, head of client, head of creative, you're all together, then discussing the strengths.

19:24Claude Silver:And when she does that, it doesn't mean she's dismissing me. She's just taking a moment to think. Right. So I feel like in these last, I would say in the last two years, especially we've up leveled our leadership training and development, I would say from VPs up because it's so essential to get a common language. Yeah. in a common denominator. I would say that if you're at Vayner and this is not your first or second job, you pretty much subscribe to the values we have or else you'd go someplace else, right? And so it's very value-based leadership if you think about it. It's put into ways of, you know, these are human beings.

20:09Claude Silver:They have a lot going on in their lives also before they walk into a workplace. Some of them are going to need to be met this way. Some of them are going to need to be met this way. What are you not only capable of doing, where can you push yourself? Right? Because we need leaders to be courageous as well. Whether or not we want to call that vulnerable, transparent, it doesn't matter. But when someone says, you know, I'm really struggling because my dog got sick. You can also say, hey, I had my dog got sick too, whatever. I mean, you know, You don't want to leave someone out on a limb. No, I know.

20:44Claude Silver:Right? And so there's a lot of unlearning. And you've said that already. And especially if you've come from a very different kind of agency, maybe a holding co, which is completely different than an independently owned agency and one that Gary Vaynerchuk runs and owns. So we do a lot of that. We do a lot, I would say, not only, you know, emotional intelligence. We speak about that. But the one thing I've brought in, I would say in the last only three months is this concept of emotional fluency, which is being fluent in the way that emotions speak in human, right? And that's really being able to empathize, not just say, oh, empathy is a part of, oh, emotional intelligence.

21:25Claude Silver:Empathy is on the, oh yeah, kind, compassionate, gratitude. But how do you bring that to life in your language or in your actions, the way you show up? So for example, when you walk into a room like this, hey, what's up everyone? Hope everyone had a good weekend. Do you really think I care if anyone had a good weekend? No, I just know I have to be performative. Right. And so talking to these leaders about, okay, this is how you show up. How do you know you're showing up that way? How do you know? Have you gotten the, huh, right on? Or have you gotten the, what are your, where are your reviews?

22:00What are people saying about the way you show up or concentrate?

22:04Claude Silver:Are you always on your phone? So we've been very, I would say, very, very honest about where everyone is rather than grouping leaders into a group and just assuming like we were. You got it. You got it. You got to go figure it out. Yeah. No, I mean, I very much, and we subscribe to this at Netflix for sure, but each leader is different and their capabilities are different and they need that coaching and that mirror and they need the feedback, right? On how they're showing up and what they're doing. And it's not that we want them to be perfect because nobody is, you can't be, but pretty good. You got to be pretty darn good.

22:50Claude Silver:And you're looking, you know, you're looking over large sums of money or huge groups of people that are, and yeah, it's the real world. It's not, you know, monopoly. Yeah. And so the expectations are enormous and we have core competencies. I'm sure that you did as well. Our foundational core competencies for everyone, growth mindset, communication, leadership, and accountability based on where you are. I'm a junior copywriter or I'm a C-suite. They vary. And so by the time you are a VP or you are a C-suite, we expect you to know how to be the bigger person in any situation. And that means you know, pointing thumbs, not fingers.

23:34Yeah. No, I, I, I very much dislike when very senior leaders are like, it's the team, not me. And you're like, I learned very early in my career, you have to look at you first. Thank you. And what you failed to do in terms of setting context or what have you, before you start pointing fingers at your team. And, um, my, my founder of read he's the the one that taught me that and you know it was one of those things that's how i it's shaped how i lead it's how it's how i approach it but um i was talking to a founder the other day and they were like oh it's you know it's the team it's this i was like oh my goodness

24:17Claude Silver:like it's actually you and if you saw that and owned it we can move on right because you're not seeing it and owning it, we're going to be in this little purgatory for a little bit. Yeah. Yeah. And that got to take it just to be clear to be it just creates so much more efficiency, if we could own it and get rid of the drama and teach other people to as well so that there isn't like, okay, so you messed up, I mess up 20 times a day, I'm sure I do, right, or 20 times a week. But if I know I messed up, I am without a doubt going to be like, that's on me. that is completely on me I'm so sorry I led you down the wrong path let's come back okay let's go then yeah then you're done right I know um drama free thank you how I I like things okay well let's talk about the book a little bit because I see it behind you it is there it's there yourself at work yes yeah so how so how did that come about what how'd you decide to write this book?

25:24Claude Silver:Yeah, I decided to write it about 10 years ago. That's what I'll say. I didn't start until COVID. Okay. For my own limiting beliefs and my own imposter syndrome and like, do I have anything ready? I mean, you read powerful and you're like, is there anything else to say? Right. But really what the impetus was, is I was very tired of watching people shrink in the workplace. And I myself had done that in my earlier years. And so I was watching mirrors of myself, reflections of younger Claude. And it was, not only did it upset me, it broke my heart. It really did. Because you know, when they say, well, what would you tell your younger self?