The Honey Empire
Kindness before KPI — honey pays dividends to the Empire.
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 90%
The Honey Empire is Claude Silver's ethos for how VaynerMedia orders its priorities: honey (the human, emotional-intelligence layer) comes first, and the Empire (revenue, clients, results) follows as a dividend. Honey covers what most companies dismiss as soft skills — collaboration, communication, sincerity, gratitude, radical candor, even tough love. Silver is explicit that it is not sticky-sweet: her job is to be real with people, help them through roadblocks, and teach self-awareness. Her logic is that a stronger, more self-aware human makes the company more successful, so honey is the input and profitability is the output. The phrase she uses to compress it is 'kindness before KPI'.
Origin
Silver became the world's first Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia after Gary Vaynerchuk gave her a single job description: touch every employee and infuse the agency with heart. Coming from 20+ years of strategy rather than HR, she built the Honey Empire language to explain to a commercially-driven agency why people-first work is not charity but the engine of the results.
Core principles
- 01People before profit; kindness before KPI.
- 02Honey is the life skills layer: collaboration, communication, sincerity, radical candor, tough love.
- 03Honey is not sweetness — it includes being real, giving hard feedback, and naming roadblocks.
- 04The Empire (profitability, happy clients, delighted consumers) is the dividend, never the starting point.
- 05You work for a logo, not to make yourself the hero — the job is making everyone else the champion.
How to run it
- 1
Define your honey
Write down the specific human behaviours you mean — collaboration, communication, sincerity, patience, gratitude, generosity, candor. Vague 'be nice' values do nothing; named behaviours can be modelled and coached.
Pro tip Use Silver's own reframe: call them life skills, not soft skills. It changes how seriously people take them.
- 2
Put honey ahead of the KPI in the ordering, not against it
The Empire is still the goal. Honey is the sequence, not a substitute. State clearly that profitability, happy clients and delighted consumers are the dividend that honey pays.
Watch out If you present this as choosing people over results, commercial leaders will reject it. Present it as the mechanism that produces results.
- 3
Include the hard part
Radical candor and tough love are honey. Being real with someone about a roadblock is a kindness; withholding it is not. Deliberately build the uncomfortable conversations into the definition so honey never degrades into conflict avoidance.
Watch out The title Chief Heart Officer sounds sticky and sweet. Silver notes it is not — if your culture work only ever feels pleasant, it isn't working.
- 4
Make everyone the hero
Teach that the work is not about making yourself the hero — you work for a logo. Recognise and promote people who turn others into champions.
Pro tip Silver describes her own role as an uber coach or Sherpa: turn people into champions and ignite other leaders to do the same.
- 5
Close the loop to the Empire
Connect honey back to the business outcome out loud and often. At VaynerMedia the agency's job is to reach consumers empathetically, so an empathetic internal culture is the same muscle. Find your version of that synergy.
Pro tip Silver's bottom line: if you are good to people, they will want to work hard for you, and that helps both the top and bottom line.
In the wild
Silver points out that VaynerMedia's main priority as an agency is to reach consumers in an empathetic way, and the internal culture is an empathetic lot. The internal honey and the external product are the same capability.
→ Culture investment stops being overhead and becomes practice for the core commercial skill of the business.
Common mistakes
Reading honey as happiness
Silver explicitly says she cannot keep everyone happy and it isn't her aim. Honey is about belonging and recognition, not mood management.
Leading with the Empire
Putting the KPI first and hoping culture follows inverts the mechanism. The dividend cannot arrive before the deposit.
Is it for you?
Best for
Founders and people leaders in high-growth service businesses who want a defensible reason to invest in culture.
Not ideal for
Environments where leadership genuinely will not tolerate spending time on people development, or where 'kindness' would be used as cover for avoiding accountability.
From the transcript
“the honey Empire is really the ethos that we have behind putting people first so people not profit another way I say it is kindness…”
“that pays dividends to the Empire and the Empire is the success as the profitability is the happy clients”
“chief heart officer it sounds awfully sticky and sweet doesn't it it's not that's my job is to be real with people”
“if you are good to people they will want to work hard for you and in working hard that helps our bottom and top line”
From the episode
Claude Silver: Leading with Love
Claude Silver