Kind candor, hard convos: VaynerMedia’s CHO on team performance

Claude Silver can spot genuine feedback – and the lack of it. She’s Chief Heart Officer (CHO) at VaynerMedia, the digital marketing agency led by entrepreneurial force Gary Vanderchuk.

The ‘heart’ in her HR-spanning title, she says, is less punny and more precise. “Gary wants me to keep the pulse of the company. We recently agreed that I need to meet and talk to every single one of our more than 2,000 employees,” explains Silver.

You probably know VaynerMedia as the energetic advertising agency that tops $1 billion in annual ad spend and racks up social media wins for Pepsi, Bose, Budweiser, and Duracell. Content-heavy, fluent in TikTok and TV alike, the agency’s disruptive approach to advertising attracts top-notch global talent. Yet in VaynerMedia’s early years, says Silver, employee feedback was neglected and retention issues were papered over with pay hikes.

“We’ve been around for 15 years. I‘ve been there for 10 years. Before I joined, people would just walk into his [Gary’s] office and say I need a raise. He’d say how much?  $30K, $10K, a trip to Hawaii, here you go. We were very generous, and we didn’t ask questions… It was like Santa Claus every day,” she recalls.

Today, VaynerMedia is a transformed company with a very different way of engaging employees. In a talk for the Face Value series Silver covers how to transform workplace culture and what it really takes for change to stick.

Change management: Moving on from toxic positivity

In VaynerMedia’s start-up era, Silver didn’t feel she had a workplace mandate to deliver honest performance feedback to staff. “I noticed there were a lot of terminations that took people completely by surprise… They didn’t see it coming, and they would tell me during the termination process that ‘I’ve never been given this feedback before’”.

Both Silver and Vaynerchuk knew something had to give. The company’s then-culture of ignoring unpleasant job effectiveness issues, or what she calls “toxic positivity,” had spillover effects. “Around 2019, we could see it on socials, on Glassdoor reviews. We were not creating friends on the outside,” says Silver. “We weren’t letting people know where they really stood.”

Yet even as workplace culture struggled, revenue and headcounts were up. VaynerMedia expanded beyond headquarters in New York and Los Angeles to launch offices in London, Kuala Lumpur, Sydney and Tokyo. To keep these new hires and grow their talents, something had to change.

Planting kind candor in the company soil

“What we realized by not telling people the truth – by not practicing kind candor – we were creating cynicism and creating people not wanting to be here anymore. If I withhold feedback, I’m not letting you grow. People pick up on vibes, on body language when you’re not telling the truth,” she explains.

To carry out this change management effort, Silver’s first pivot was to hire an executive coach, who advocated for unvarnished honesty to overhaul performance assessments. Dubbed radical candor, the new style of feedback was a leap too far for managers and staff alike. 

“Gary told me I don’t want to do radical candor, I want to do kind candor,” says Silver. “That meant changing from a culture of scarcity, of toxic positivity to a kind culture that offers instant feedback, quarterly reviews, [and] where everyone is trained several times a year on practicing kind candor.”

Kind candor pairs truthfulness with empathy, says Silver. “Kind candor means I want to wrap you up and support you, it means, ‘How can I help you?’”  By her estimate, Silver and her team have now trained almost 2,000 VaynerMedia employees on practicing kind candor, both specifically as a performance review strategy and more generally as a method of workplace communication.

“That’s literally how we give you feedback now,” says Silver.  “What we have now is a healthier place to be.”

Feedback culture feeds on frequent training, check-ins

So how do they do it? “For getting to kind candor, we’re not doing typical classroom training. There’s a lot of show-and-tell, there’s SNL-type skits,” says Silver. “We’re learning together how to feed information to one another in a way I call emotionally efficient, without the drama.”

Silver says this journey toward practicing kind candor began slow and small. 

“We started with executive leadership, so this kind candor approach could trickle down and their managers could later start using it with other employees,” remembers Silver. “It took us a good year to get kind candor into the soil, Now it’s there,” she adds.

Silver wants to remind you that kind candor applies to employee wins and strengths too. “At work, if all we tell you is ‘great job’ when you do a great job, that’s not feedback, that’s praise. That feels great for the ego for a second then it’s gone. This is the heavier lift. If you did something well, what is it you did that went so well? Go share it with someone, peer-to-peer, that’s mentorship, that’s growing.”

The advice Silver gives to other execs transforming feedback culture

For others hoping to emulate VaynerMedia’s success across performance assessments, Silver has clear advice: “You want to be clear, you want to be kind, you want to be immediate. Don’t tell me what happened three months ago. The feedback has to have action, it has to come with an action plan.”

Silver defines kind candor as a game-changing approach with five steps: Be kind, be clear, be specific, be current, and be actionable. “It wasn’t easy. It wasn’t quick. You can’t just say to people: ‘Here's our vision, now change,’” says Silver.

Carrying out this massive change management went easier because both Silver and Vaynerchuk share the belief that If you want to develop your business, you need to develop your people. In interviews, Vaynerchuk also evangelizes on kind workplace candor and its benefits for employee engagement.

How kind candor can unlock the talent potential of every employee

Kind workplace candor has also played a pivotal role in helping VaynerMedia scale. At the start of this decade, the company counted around 400 largely North-American based employees. Today, the company’s 2,000+ strong headcount is spread across six continents. (For the record and calendar keepers, that’s a 500% growth carried out during mostly pandemic-laden years.)

As Vaynerchuk once put it: “I so intensely did not want to become what I had seen so many other companies become, and that’s a place for unhappy minds.” Instead, Silver and Vaynerchuk ensure that getting to know their employees, and their performance, remains top of mind.

Trusting in the process of giving honest feedback, neither spiteful nor sugarcoated, Silver is confident that she is helping build a resilient workplace culture. She says, ”If we get it right.. that means the culture is kind, there is friendship and innovation and we’re doing kind candor in the workplace so we can focus on doing creativity at work.”

Casey Sanchez

Writer

Casey is a writer at Celonis. He has written about technology, engineering, and finance for Deloitte, Exponent, and Google for Startups. His work has appeared in The Los Angeles Times and as branded content for Wired UK.