Six months into a new job, somebody walks into the Chief Heart Officer's office with a strange complaint. Everyone here is so kind. When is this gonna end?
Claude Silver told us this story on Corey-osity Unleashed. Claude is the world's first Chief Heart Officer, at VaynerX. The day before we recorded, a new hire had sat in her office and asked her straight out: "Is the honeymoon gonna end?"
Read the question again. Nobody asks it after a good experience. You ask it after a string of bad ones. Somebody arrived at a kind workplace and their first instinct was to brace for impact.
Kindness looks like a trap when you've been burned
My research found 99.5% of people have had one or more types of bad boss. I talk about it on Step It Up HR and in pretty much every keynote I give. Here's the part I don't say often enough. Those people don't leave the bad boss behind when they leave the job. They pack the lessons in the moving box and carry them to the next desk.
Research backs this up. Robinson and Morrison surveyed 147 managers right before they started a new job, then again 18 months later. They looked at who ended up feeling their new employer had broken its promises. One of the predictors: a history of broken promises at former employers.
Think about what this means. Two people join the same company, on the same day, with the same manager. One of them reads a late reply to an email as a busy week. The other reads it as the start of the end. Same email. Different history.
I'm not sure about this part: Robinson and Morrison measured broken promises from the employer as a whole, not bad bosses in particular, and their sample was all managers. I'm extending the finding to bad bosses because the boss is usually the person who makes and breaks those promises. I didn't find a study testing it directly.
The honeymoon does end. For everyone.
Here's the uncomfortable bit. The new hire in Claude's office wasn't wrong to expect a change.
Researchers have a name for it... the honeymoon-hangover effect. Boswell, Boudreau and Tichy followed managers through job changes and found the pattern. Satisfaction drops before people leave a job, jumps right after they start the new one, then declines.
A bigger study filled in the picture. Zhou and colleagues used the British Household Panel Survey, which followed 10,000 people every year for 18 years. Only people moving up the occupational ladder got a real honeymoon. People who moved down stayed dissatisfied for several years.
So the glow fades. It fades in good companies and bad ones. The question for a leader isn't how to stretch the honeymoon. It's what your people find underneath once it's gone.
In a bad workplace, the hangover reveals the boss everyone warned you about. In a good one, it reveals the work.
Claude's answer
I love how Claude answered the new hire. Yes, she told them, the honeymoon will end. Here's how:
"You're gonna come to me one day and you're gonna say, I didn't realize I had to unlearn all of these things."
Then she added, "I've had to unlearn things too."
She didn't promise the kindness would last forever, and she didn't sell the place as perfect. Earlier in the same conversation she said it straight: "It is definitely not utopia here." She told the new hire the next phase of the job belongs to them. The armor they brought in the door stops being useful. Taking it off is the work.
What sort of armor? You know the list if you've had a bad boss. Never admit a mistake first. Copy someone senior on every email so there's a witness. Agree in the meeting and complain in the parking lot. Don't ask for help, because managers remember it at review time. Every one of those habits made sense somewhere. Every one of them gets in the way somewhere kind.
I wrote about this from the leader's side in Learning Won't Make You a Better Leader. Unlearning Will. Claude's story shows the same thing from the other chair. New hires need to unlearn too, and nobody tells them.
Kind is not the same as soft
Here's where people get kindness wrong. They hear "kind workplace" and picture a place with no standards.
Claude calls the VaynerX culture the honey empire. The honey is how you treat people on the floor. The empire is the results... the wins, the promotions, the business. Both halves matter. In the same conversation she was blunt about it. You might be the best engineer in the building, but without the foundational competencies, "leadership, accountability, communication and growth mindset, you're not going to cut it."
And kindness has to survive bad days. Claude doesn't expect people to never lose their temper. She expects them to say, "I apologize for that. I was having a shitty day."
I think the second half matters more than the first. Your people with bad-boss history aren't waiting for you to be perfect. They're waiting for the first bad day, to see which version of you shows up. If the answer is an apology and a reset, the armor starts coming off. If the answer is the old pattern, it goes straight back on, and you won't see it happen.
Kindness at 2,000 people
The honey part gets harder as you grow. Claude described scaling herself at 400 people, then 700, then 2,000, across time zones and languages she doesn't speak. Her answer was to give more autonomy to her People and Experience team in each region and hold onto a short core: "We are kind, we hold space for people, we are not judgmental, we are the calm in someone's storm, and we are partners."
Notice what's missing. No program. No poster. Five behaviors, short enough to remember on a bad day.
A new hire who has been burned won't trust a values statement. They'll trust the fifth, tenth and fiftieth time they see the behavior. I covered the research on this in One Apology Doesn't Rebuild Trust. Steady behavior did the repair work, not the grand gesture.
What to do with your next new hire
On the call I told Claude I hoped her people knew how lucky they were, "because most organizations are not like that." I still believe it. So assume your new hire came from one of the others.
Ask about the armor. Somewhere in the first month, ask, "What did your last place teach you to watch out for?" You'll learn more from the answer than from their CV.
Name the unlearning out loud. Tell them what Claude told hers. Some old habits will stop working here, and it's expected. Point to one you had to drop yourself.
Don't let the welcome be the whole plan. Robinson and Morrison found people who went through a formal socialization process, and who talked with people at the company before they started, were less likely to feel their new employer had broken its promises. A good first week isn't enough. Plan the first six months.
Show your bad-day behavior early. Sooner or later you'll snap at someone. Apologize fast and specifically. For a person with bad-boss history, your first apology tells them more than your whole onboarding deck.
Expect the hangover and don't take it personally. Around six to nine months in, the glow fades. It's normal. Ask what they're finding underneath.
When does it end?
The kindness shouldn't end. The honeymoon will. Claude's new hire asked the wrong question, and Claude gave them a better one.
If you're the one who keeps waiting for the other shoe to drop, ask yourself what you're still carrying from your last boss. And if you're the boss, ask what your newest hire is carrying from theirs... then make sure your next bad day gives them a reason to put it down.