Claude Silver was running a major Unilever account at VaynerMedia. Sixty people on her team, cupcakes and bubbly water at the meeting every other Wednesday, and a calendar full of decisions about whether a logo should be purple, brown, or black. By every outside measure she was doing well.
She worked for Gary Vaynerchuk, at a company she loved and called home.
But one day, she had to walk into his office and tell him the work wasn’t for her anymore.
What she wanted was pretty simple. Not a better title. She wanted to stop spending her days on work that made her feel like she was no longer herself.
The hard part was that nothing was wrong on paper. She’d built a good career in agencies across two decades, San Francisco to London to New York. Walking away from advertising meant walking away from the thing she was good at, with no promise the next thing would pay. And she knew herself well enough to know she’d chase the next sexy job title if she did it alone. So she hired a coach.
When Gary asked what she wanted to do instead, she didn’t name a department or a title.
“I only care about the people here. I care about the heartbeat”.
What came next is the public part. Gary made her the world’s first Chief Heart Officer. She’d told him she never wanted to do HR. He told her she’d learn it and hire a great team around her, which she did, and she renamed the department People and Experience. She’s run it ever since. When she joined Vayner in May 2014, the company was around 400 people. It’s about 2,200 now, across the globe.
We had her on Sacred Business Stories this week. The part worth examining closely is what that pivot actually asked of her, and what she’s done with it since.
When Gary handed her the role, she asked him two questions. First, what are we building? His answer: we’re building the single greatest human organization in the history of time. Then, how do I know if I’m successful? His answer stuck with her.
You will touch every single human being and infuse the agencies with empathy.
Years before any of that, she’d done a harder version of the same leap. A CEO in London called her in San Francisco and needed her in two weeks. She’d been in San Francisco sixteen years. It was home. She was almost forty. She called her grandmother, who lived to 101, and got one line back.
All decisions can be undone.
So she sold her bike, sold her car, put the rest in storage, and within two weeks was the lone American walking into a stuffy British agency, knowing no one. That pattern, saying yes and trusting she could handle wherever it landed, is the same muscle she used later to walk into Gary’s office.
Two moments from the conversation stood out.
The first was something she did with that sixty-person team, back before she was Chief Heart Officer. She scrapped show-and-tell at the team meeting.
Let’s just start bringing in poetry or songs or song lyrics.
She said it turned into something like a liberal arts curriculum the whole team built together, out of people being who they were instead of reporting which campaign hit which number. The point wasn’t the poems. It was giving people a way to be themselves at work without being asked to perform. You can borrow this anywhere a team has gone flat, anywhere connection got replaced by status updates.
The second came up when she talked about people who tell her they want to be just like her. She stops them.
Be you. Don’t be me. I’m already me.
It sounds simple. It runs against most of what gets sold as professional development, which is usually a quiet instruction to become someone else. Claude’s whole case, and the title of her book, is that becoming that version costs you the thing that made you worth hiring in the first place.
The way she frames the starting point of the book is one line.
You are the CEO of you.
The belief worth challenging is that being professional means putting on a mask, and that productivity and your real self pull in opposite directions. Claude’s career says they pull in the same one. She didn’t earn the title, the team, or the results by becoming someone polished. She earned them by refusing to.
Carolina named it in the conversation. Productivity isn’t attached to a mask. You can give results and still be the person with a song stuck in her head all day. The masking doesn’t make the work better.
You can find Claude at claudesilver.com, and her book, Be Yourself at Work, has been out since October.
She speaks mostly to leaders, and to anyone trying to build a workplace where people don’t have to leave themselves at the door. If you run a team, or you’re the one quietly wondering whether you can stop performing at work, she’s talking to you.
Check out the full replay, glitchy video and all. The roughness turns out to be the point in the end.
Thank you to Gary Allen, Claire Machado, and many others for tuning into episode 048 of Sacred Business Stories with Claude Silver and Carolina Wilke!
This essay was originally published on sacredbusiness.com on June 24th, 2026. You can find the canonical version, along with related essays on sacred business and nervous system work, there.
