Episode 35
Creating Culture Champions In Your Organization
Consciously building a culture of kindness and empathy may be the key to attracting and retaining high-performing talent for the long haul.
Berta Aldrich: “So tell us about what these culture champions look like and who are they and what is their charge in your organization.”
Claude Silver: “I will say they are global. They are in all of our offices. They have their own jobs. They have day jobs. They have been, you know, anointed is not the right word, but they are culture champions. They call them that, meaning someone’s having a bad day, someone needs to go for a walk … ‘Want to have a coffee? How are you doing?’ Reaching out, making sure people have friends at the workplace, making sure that they’re not the ones sitting alone at lunch, that type of thing. And so the way I found them was they were people just like me, that were doing this already, but having a day job. … We build the connective tissue because that’s our strength. So there are people I can rely on in my heart of hearts who have great intuition and want this to be the greatest career choice that anyone makes.”
Subscribe
Guest Spotlight
Claude Silver
Chief Heart Officer, VaynerMedia
Claude Silver is VaynerMedia’s (and the world’s) first-ever Global Chief Heart Officer, tasked with fusing empathy with agency to unlock employee potential and foster a culture of belonging across the 2000+ person organization. Between her deep education in psychology and spirituality and the two decades she has spent as an advertising strategist, Claude has been studying and influencing human behavior for over three decades.
Outside of her role at VaynerMedia, Claude speaks globally about the need for heart-led leadership in today’s workplace and the importance of treating “employees” like people, not numbers. Her success in guiding client relationships, global brand strategies, operations, management and culture is driven by her abiding passion for creating spaces in which people can show up as their true selves and thrive as a result.
“We created core competencies across the board in every department for every role. These core competencies are foundational and functional. Foundational means how you behave, your behaviors that we expect: kindness, being the bigger person in every situation, going out of your way to help someone out. Functional is the skills you need, the craft you need, to do your job efficiently and effectively and exceptionally.”
Claude Silver, Chief Heart Officer, VaynerMedia
Dive Deeper
