Earning Your Candor at Both Ends
A spirit of candor and frankness, when wholly unaccompanied with coarseness, he admired in others, but he could not acquire it himself.
— Anne Brontë, The Tenant of Wildfell Hall
When’s the last time someone was truly candid with you? Pulled you aside, maybe, sat you down, and told you — however kindly — an important but unpleasant truth that you needed to hear? How did you respond?
Candor is an important part of communication. Let’s not call it mere “honesty,” because honesty can be cruel and unnecessary, where candor often carries the extra connotation of kindness and compassion. Honesty could say “you’re being a jerk, stop it” where candor would care to say instead “I’m not sure you’re aware of how you’re coming off, but it seems really aggressive and counterproductive. Do we need to talk about it?”
Candor is the best mechanism we have for course-correcting relationships. This is why we train managers on how to be candid so very earnestly. We may not call it that, necessarily, but every bit of training around “how to give feedback” is really training in being candid. Every book written about navigating difficult conversations is a bunch of tips for fighting the urge to slip out of candor and into raw honesty. But all of this training only goes one way — it’s all about teaching you to be more candid. Equally important is getting everyone else to feel free to be candid with you. How do you accomplish that?
The best way to encourage candor from folks you work with is to demonstrate your willingness to accept candor. Think about any time you’ve had a tough topic you wanted to bring up with your boss — your mind automatically starts playing back previous incidents where your boss received some difficult feedback. How they responded in those situations is going to heavily influence your decision to broach the subject with them now. Did they get defensive, argumentative, or try to ignore the topic? If so then you’re much less likely to try to be candid with them now. This can be cancerous to a relationship, because it encourages you to suppress the problem or start acting against it in less direct ways. Almost every instance of passive-aggressive behavior stems from a perceived lack of freedom to be candid.
So if you want people to be candid with you, you need to start modeling that in your interactions. Try to identify when people have taken a risk with their feedback and reward them for it — listen, address their concerns, thank them for bringing it to your attention. Publicly acknowledge, if appropriate, your appreciation that they raised the issue with you and what you intend to do in response to the feedback. This is not a natural human response, because we want to deny and hide any failings — perceived or otherwise — as much as possible, but if we let ourselves default to that mode we’ll be discouraging people from being candid with us.
Knowing how to give feedback and handle critical conversations is an important set of skills, especially for anyone in a management position. But equally important is keeping the lines of communication open in the opposite direction by encouraging candor from those around you. This is something I know I don’t do perfectly — or, if I’m going to be candid, that I probably don’t do well at all — but it’s an important goal for my professional development.
