The Secret Ingredient of Great Leadership: It Isn’t Strategy. It’s Heart.

While most leaders focus on confidence and performance, Claude Silver shows why empathy and belonging build stronger teams — and better humans.

When people feel seen, they stop hiding and start growing. Leading from the heart builds workplaces where humanity and performance thrive.

The most dangerous skill in business today isn’t incompetence—it’s pretending.

We’ve mastered it: polished emails, professional smiles, carefully filtered authenticity. But somewhere between confidence and conformity, we lost something vital—ourselves.

Claude Silver

, Chief Heart Officer at VaynerMedia, believes this is a problem.

“You can’t build a great company if people have to check their humanity at the door,” she told me.

And she’s got a point — one backed by both data and heart.

Why We Pretend at Work

Most workplaces still prize performance over presence.
We obsess over productivity, KPIs, and hustle culture—but rarely talk about how people feel.

The irony? Feelings drive performance.

Research from Stanford psychologists Priyanka Carr and Gregory Walton found that teams with higher psychological safety — where people feel safe to speak up without fear of punishment — outperform others by up to 50%.

The science is clear: people don’t give their best when they’re scared. They thrive when they feel safe.

The secret ingredient isn’t more meetings or better incentives.

It’s belonging.

So here’s the question:
What would happen if you stopped hiding at work—and started leading with your whole, unfiltered self?

Here are some thoughts...

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