You Can Only Win if You’re Honest with Each Other: Interview with Valentina Gissin, Chief People Officer of Garner Health

I recently went one-on-one with Valentina Gissin, Chief People Officer of Garner Health.

Adam: Thanks again for taking the time to share your advice. First things first, though, I am sure readers would love to learn more about you. How did you get here? What experiences, failures, setbacks, or challenges have been most instrumental to your growth?

Valentina: First, I am an immigrant, and growing up, our finances were never stable. That drove me to attend law school and become a lawyer—it was clear to me from a young age that I needed a secure fallback. After that, I briefly pursued my passion as a screenwriter but was eventually drawn back to law when I became financially responsible for my parents at age 33.

I was fortunate to be recruited from law into Bridgewater Associates, where my leadership journey truly began. As a senior management associate, I was one of many "Swiss-army knife" managers who could be deployed against any challenge. My second management rotation was pivotal: I was tasked with building and running our key talent programming. This was an amazing opportunity—I worked directly for the investment leaders, not the HR team, and my success was measured by theirs. We leveraged predictive people analytics using cutting-edge AI developed by the team behind Watson. It gave me a taste of what the people function could and should be.

Adam: In your experience, what are the keys to building a successful organizational culture?

Valentina: The first step is designing your culture. You have to understand the behaviors that will drive success for your particular company. However you document your culture—values, principles, etc.—it must describe the behaviors and trade-offs that will propel your specific mission forward.

Institutionalizing your values and principles follows two main avenues. First and foremost, culture is taught through apprenticeship. If you've designed your company values correctly, your leaders will become more effective by leading through the culture. Others will see that and think, “I, too, want to become more effective in that way.” Leaders must then seize every opportunity to teach others how to operate within the culture. 

The second critical avenue for institutionalizing culture is through everything the people function does. Anything that touches a large portion of the company must embed the culture and not dilute it, especially aspects that are more challenging or don't come naturally to people. For example, transparency and candor are core values at Garner Health, and team members can find those challenging. To help normalize them, we publish peer and upwards feedback to the entire company. This is a powerful tool—it demonstrates how to give feedback, reinforces that everyone receives feedback, and makes it hard to justify withholding feedback at other times of the year. It's a great way to set the contours of our culture through action, in a way that thousands of words or hours of teaching might not achieve.

Adam: What are your best tips on leading in remote and hybrid settings?

Valentina: You have to be deliberate and thoughtful about the activities and opportunities that happen naturally in-office, and how to replicate or replace them remotely. I think about this in terms of the Employee Value Proposition (EVP): what aspects of the EVP are most negatively impacted by being remote versus in-office? Then it's imperative to determine exactly how the negative impact is happening, so you can decide how to address it.

Belonging, safety, community, and career advancement—these are core components of our EVP as a company with both hybrid and fully remote employees. For example, community: in-office teams typically find time to learn about each other's lives, whether it's while grabbing coffee, during a break, or on an elevator ride. We strive to replicate this remotely by incentivizing employees to spend time together outside of work and by bringing them together ourselves three times a year. Another example is psychological safety: if an employee has a difficult meeting with their skip-level manager in the office, they'll see that person the next day and get a smile or a nod of affirmation that assures them the relationship is intact. They may even receive a word of encouragement that shows the manager believes in their ability to improve. In a remote environment, they may not see that skip-level manager for weeks and may wonder if the relationship is damaged. It's not hard to know how to fix any one of these situations; the challenge lies in determining which moments matter and equipping managers to identify and address them.

Adam: What do you believe are the defining qualities of an effective leader?

Valentina: There's enough data to show that a brilliant mind or the ability to deliver excellent outcomes directly doesn't define an effective leader; those are table stakes among all decent leaders. First, truly effective leaders must be able to set a vision, inspire and motivate others to deliver it, and grow themselves and their team in the process. This requires stepping out of the day-to-day reactive mode and focusing meaningful energy on building up the people and processes under your remit to best augment your leadership style. The most critical traits for this are self-assessment, vision, strong people skills and emotional intelligence (particularly in developing others), and a positive, motivating yet calm leadership presence.

Second, the best leaders have an incredible balance of curiosity and decisiveness. They’re comfortable making clear calls with limited information, and continuously soliciting feedback to adjust course. The curiosity prevents overconfidence and the decisiveness ensures focus.  

Adam: How can leaders and aspiring leaders take their leadership skills to the next level?

Valentina: It comes down to having a really clear picture of your own strengths and opportunities. Don't shy away from developing an accurate portrayal, even if it's not exactly what you want to see. The truth can be a huge relief because, on some level, you likely know there are gaps and have a rough sense of what they are. If you work at a company that doesn't provide you with this critical insight, be proactive and seek it out. Map out the behaviors and competencies critical for your success (e.g., at this company, in your role, for your aspirations). Then ask people for feedback about you. Conduct your own 360s—ask everyone who works closely with you to give their unvarnished view. Push back against those that sound too rosy.

Compare what you receive to your map and categorize the feedback into themes. Decide what to do about everything. Start with your opportunity areas—if any are clearly holding you back, tackle them. Your options are to improve or accept them and guardrail with (a) people and/or (b) processes. If your opportunity areas are minor or not directly needed for your goals, focus on your strengths. People typically grow faster when developing their strengths than when battling their weaknesses.

Adam: What are your three best tips applicable to entrepreneurs, executives, and civic leaders?

Valentina: (1) Your words and actions probably have much more power and influence than you think. You can make or break someone's day with a word or a look. Use that power for good.

(2) Be absolutely clear—and even ruthlessly repetitive—about your company, team, or personal mission, vision, and values. Use them constantly and use the same words every time. Ensure everyone around you has a clear framework for understanding what you're about, and constantly pull them back to it with every decision and trade-off.

(3) Have a crystal-clear picture of what's needed to do your job excellently and where you stack up against it. Always optimize the system around you—people and processes—that will enable you to capitalize on your strengths and guardrail your weaknesses.

Adam: What do you believe is the future of work?

Valentina: Given the push and pull between in-office collaboration and culture versus remote flexibility—and what I see most leadership teams doing—I think we'll go backward until there's a way to move forward that makes sense to those in power. What I see now are mostly Millennial and Gen X leadership teams who grew up in-office, are struggling to manage remote work effectively, and are giving up on it. We're letting our biases guide us instead of really looking at hard data about what works. Either companies will see a slip in productivity and rethink their return-to-office mandates, or it won't be resolved until we're in the metaverse. At that point, each company's metaverse office will probably resemble whatever the leadership team's favorite last office experience was. I know it's cynical, but this is a place where I'm seeing mostly a failure of first-principles thinking and a retreat to the familiar. That said, when leaders prioritize holding true to their company values, and pay attention to the moments that matter in an employee’s lifecycle, it goes a long way toward creating a positive work environment.

Adam: What is the single best piece of advice you have ever received?

Valentina: Hire people who are better than you.

Adam: Is there anything else you would like to share?

Valentina: For years, I've been advocating for bespoke cultures. Generic values that could apply to any company are useless to employees. Culture needs to be designed around the company mission and vision because different behaviors are needed to achieve each company’s unique goals. However, I'm beginning to believe there are some universal cultural elements. One of them is candor. Companies can't—and shouldn't—build cultures that don't require candor. It doesn't have to be radical, but it has to be prevalent. When it comes to team activities, you can only win if you're honest with each other.


Adam Mendler is an entrepreneur, writer, speaker, educator, and nationally recognized authority on leadership. Adam is the creator and host of the business and leadership podcast Thirty Minute Mentors, where he goes one-on-one with America's most successful people - Fortune 500 CEOs, founders of household name companies, Hall of Fame and Olympic gold medal-winning athletes, political and military leaders - for intimate half-hour conversations each week. A top leadership speaker, Adam draws upon his insights building and leading businesses and interviewing hundreds of America's top leaders as a top keynote speaker to businesses, universities, and non-profit organizations. Adam has written extensively on leadership and related topics, having authored over 70 articles published in major media outlets including Forbes, Inc. and HuffPost, and has conducted more than 500 one on one interviews with America’s top leaders through his collective media projects. Adam teaches graduate-level courses on leadership at UCLA and is an advisor to numerous companies and leaders. A Los Angeles native, Adam is a lifelong Angels fan and an avid backgammon player.

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Adam Mendler