Gary Vaynerchuk - Twelve and a Half: Leveraging the Emotional Ingredients Necessary for Business Success

Years ago, I had the most difficult conversation with a client that Ive ever had to have in the course of my career.

It was with a top executive from one of the biggest brands we were working with at VaynerMedia, a contemporary creative and media agency where Im the CEO. The executive called me and asked if we could meet in Midtown Manhattan. She wanted to talk face-to-face.

That day, an entry-level employee at my company had accidentally posted a tweet from the clients Twitter account, thinking she was logged into her personal account. It was a very negative tweet about another agency that VaynerMedia was working with to support the brand. To the world, it looked as if the brand had made disparaging comments about the other agency.

It was a very quick meeting. The executive told me that she expected this not to happen again and asked me to put the proper protocols and systems in place to ensure that.

Then she said to me, The only way our company sees that we can go forward working together is if you fire the individual who posted that tweet.

It took me about a hundredth of a second to think it through.

I said to her, I cant do that.

I had to be able to run my own business and make my own decisions about my employees. The executive had every ability to fire us if thats what she felt was necessary. But it had to be my decision what the ramifications of that tweet would be.

She was surprised. That brand represented about 30 percent of our total revenue at the time.

I was mentally prepared for them to fire us, but at the time, I knew that we had just enough new business coming in that we could afford a year with no profit. I also had enough saved up that, if we lost money that year, I was willing to help bridge the gap if needed. If we could weather that storm, it would be a clear indicator to our employees as to what we really value.

This conversation was one of those interesting moments when you have to decide what youre going to stand for. We scheduled a call the next day, and I stood my ground. Luckily, the client didnt fire us.

I tell that story because modern societys definition of a smart business decision is disproportionately predicated on analytics. Business leaders tend to find safety in the black-and-white. They find safety in the academics, math, hard data, and what looks good on spreadsheets.

Its harder to gauge the 30-, 60-, 90-, 365-, or even 730-day effectiveness of empathy, kindness, and self-awareness in an organization, but their results will play out. When you can eliminate fear from your organization, very good things happen. If employees dont have to spend their time trying to outmaneuver one another, trying to kill one another politically, they may actually achieve the task at hand. I dont know which six-year-old girl in Tennessee is going to invent the system to score this, but at some point, it will be mappable. This level of common sense and human truth will play out.

In big companies especially, many decisions are predicated on ninety-day numbers. That practice comes from Wall Street and business school, where youre being judged every quarter on performance. It can lead to short-term behavior, even though many of us are still planning to be in business over the next five, ten, twenty, or even fifty-plus years.

Unfortunately, the bias toward short-term metrics can also make emotional intelligence a nice to have rather than a requirement. It creates a scenario in which a leader looks the other way when one employee makes everyone else in the office miserable, just because that employee happens to be bringing in the most revenue. It makes people think negative behavior and a poor EQ (emotional quotient) are just side effects of being good at business.

The business world I entered in the late nineties put the black-and-white on a pedestal. At that time, it wasnt recognized that soft skills could be the key to building a successful company. I dont recall hearing these traits being emphasized in the mainstream business community. Business was dog-eat-dog, an endeavor where only the strong survive.

Ironically, I also believe that only the strong survive. I just believe that leaning into your humanity is the actual strength that will help you survive and flourish. Not yelling at someone else in a conference room. Not being a tough negotiator with aggressive words. To this day, I think the strongest person is someone whos able to deploy kindness in the face of the opposite. The twelve ingredients I describe in this book (well get to what the half means later) are some of the traits that have led to my success and happiness over the years, in addition to others that Ive observed and admired: gratitude, self-awareness, accountability, optimism, empathy, kindness, tenacity, curiosity, patience, conviction, humility, and ambition. The black-and-white is still wildly important, but in my opinion, its a distant second to mastering soft skills.

I couldnt be more aware that there are fifteen to fifty other ingredients that couldve made it into this book. But these twelve stood out to me after seeing other leaders fall short in deploying them and how that gap made people around them feel. Many people in conference halls, dinners, lunches, buses, and flights would tell me stories of these twelve ingredients being neglected. One of the sad things about human nature is that negativity is louder than positivity. Its been one of the driving forces of my life to make positivity louder. One of the reasons Im writing this book is to cheer for these traits and put a spotlight on them in business.

My greatest challenge has been extracting these ingredients and articulating them. Theyre not tangible. They cant be tracked or measured on a spreadsheet. In fact, in May 1998, when I walked into my dads liquor store, I didnt understand their significance.

My dads not a big talker, but on Thanksgiving weekend in 2020, when I had started writing this book, he told me that he hadnt believed in company culture back when I first started working with him. Coming from the Soviet Union, he thought that fear and money were the most effective motivators. Thats how he drove his career. But today? Now he believes in positive company culture over everything. Even though it doesnt come naturally to him and he struggles in explaining it to his friends, he told me that he knows its crucial. I find it poetic, especially if you realize how rarely my dad tells me stuff like that.