VaynerMedia’s Claude Silver: Moving to a culture of ‘we’

What is HR’s role in sustainability? In order to have a culture that is more inclusive, I think sustainability and inclusivity go hand in hand.

There’s a big relationship there. And at this point, I can’t imagine us ever going backwards at this point in time.

There’s going to be a move from a ‘me’ culture to a ‘we’ culture. An ‘all about me’ culture is very top down: What have you got for me? What are you doing for me to make sure that I get the win?

The ‘all about we’ is more collaborative, more empathetic, much more of what I would call a human-centric culture where there’s more partnership, mutual support, alignment, and emotional agility. And in order to do that, you have to be obsessed with your people, you have to be obsessed with finding out where the cynicism is and where any of the toxicity, or micromanagement is.

I do think that top-down leadership and massively hierarchical organizations will, in time, either evolve to this way of thinking, living and being or wither out at some point, because the generations that are coming up are not going to tolerate that.

When it comes to business sustainability, or corporate social responsibility – act with empathy and kindness.

If you say that in your business ‘What You See Is What You Get’, you have to be able to back that up. And how would you back that up? When people ask me, what’s the ROI of empathy in the workplace? And what’s the ROI of kindness?

The real answer is, what’s not the ROI? What isn’t the ROI of taking care of your people?

You don’t have a company without your people. But, it takes time to build a company and a really authentic leadership team that doesn’t have duelling agendas, where they can honestly say, not only do we appreciate each other, we respect the work that each other is doing. And I definitely think it has to come from the top.

I think the ‘Great Resignation‘ sets us up for 2023 to be a massive year of robustness and success, but: success means different things to different people.

Walking into the pandemic, we all were reacting. Absolutely no one could be proactive, but I think this is giving us all a bit of time to be proactive when the time comes. But I don’t think we’ve seen the last of it.

We’re all still feeling the effects of how to retain our high tech, our high performance, high talent, and everyone I talk to is talking about the importance of talent now. So I really think that 2023 is going to be an incredible waterfall year for all firms.

Creating sustainable cultures that can still scale, that can still grow, that can still find success and profitability with what they have, shoring up what you do have – this means surrounding your top talent now, making sure that your top talent is secure, making sure that they have what they need in order to get ready for 2022 and beyond.

To stay successful you need to prioritize. My job is overseeing all 1300 people in all the different companies that we have and making sure that people are getting what they need, that we’re casting appropriately, setting people up for success – with both hard and soft skills.

Prioritization is interesting because it can change on a dime. But, because we’re rooted in a very simple, collaborative agenda with a North Star, and wanting to be the best at what we do, prioritization isn’t as difficult as it might be if everyone had different agendas.

Ask yourself – who’s in your top 50 employees? Who are those people that you really need to take care of? It takes a lot of incredible bravery and leadership to do this. It’s easy to be a peacetime general. It’s easy to be a leader when everything is chill. But it’s much harder when things are coming at you and changing at the speed at which they’re changing now.