Candor

What Candor means in leadership

You lead a small exhibition project. The longer opening hours you proposed cannot fit the available staffing, so you choose a shorter day. Your draft announcement calls it “an exciting refinement of the visitor experience.” You cross that out and explain the hours, the staffing limit and which visitors will lose the later option. The announcement has become less exciting and considerably more informative.

Plain explanation gives affected people a fairer chance to respond. You name the tradeoff and the reason for choosing it, including what remains uncertain. Candor does not require sharing a colleague’s private circumstances to justify the staffing limit; relevant truth and indiscriminate disclosure are different things.

Candor gives…

People can plan around a decision they understand. They can also point to a cost you have underestimated. An explanation need not win agreement to make your exercise of influence more answerable.

Finding the balance

A usable explanation names the change and its cost while leaving private information with the people it concerns.

In ordinary life

A changed deadline

Say what changed and which part you can still promise.

An uncertain estimate

Distinguish a working estimate from an agreed commitment.

Nearby virtues, different work

Integrity

Integrity connects conduct with ethical conviction; Candor concerns stating relevant truth plainly.

Compassion

Compassion attends to the difficulty the answer creates; Candor keeps that concern from becoming a misleading reassurance.

Recognizing a counterfeit

Cruel bluntness is a counterfeit of Candor when insulting the listener is presented as telling the truth. Candor explains the relevant fact without adding a verdict on the person.

How to cultivate Candor

• Replace a vague improvement word with the actual change.
• Name a material cost alongside the reason for accepting it.
• Separate what people need to know from private details about others.

Try it today

Revise one routine explanation you are entitled to give. State the decision, its reason and a relevant inconvenience in plain language. Keep other people’s private information out of it.

Questions worth returning to

• Which fact would a reader have to discover after relying on this message?
• Am I explaining the decision or managing my appearance?

Choose your practice

These pages offer ideas for reflection and character practice, not professional advice. Choose practices suited to your circumstances and abilities. You may adapt, pause, or skip an exercise; putting yourself or someone else at risk is not proof of virtue.

Quotations and further reading

Seven selections to return to through the week. Follow a source link to read the surrounding passage.

1. Truth is scarcely to be heard, but by those from whom it can serve no interest to conceal it.

   Samuel Johnson, The Works of Samuel Johnson, Volume III: The Rambler
   The Rambler, No. 150

   Johnson draws attention to incentives for concealment. A leader who wants accurate information must consider what truth-telling costs the speaker.

2. concealment consists in trying for your own profit to keep others from finding out something that you know, when it is for their interest to know it.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK III THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND THE EXPEDIENT; section 56

   Cicero distinguishes withholding every possible fact from hiding information another person needs. The changed closing hour belongs in the explanation because it changes what visitors can actually do.

3. Would that all things were already known, that truth were unveiled and recognized, and that none of our doctrines required modification! but as it is we have to seek for truth in the company of the very men who teach it.

   Seneca, Minor Dialogues, Together with the Dialogue on Clemency
   THE EIGHTH BOOK OF THE DIALOGUES OF L. ANNAEUS SENECA, ADDRESSED TO SERENUS. OF LEISURE.; section III

   Seneca makes teachers fellow seekers rather than owners of completed truth. A candid explanation can acknowledge what remains uncertain.

4. Of course I have done this upon what appear to me to be sufficient reasons, and yet I think it best for you to know that there are some things in regard to which I am not quite satisfied with you.

   Abraham Lincoln, The Papers and Writings of Abraham Lincoln, Volume Six
   Letter to Joseph Hooker, 26 January 1863

   Lincoln gives a newly appointed commander an account that includes his reservations. The act of appointment does not require pretending the concerns have disappeared.

5. therefore, always when thou changest thine opinion or course, profess it plainly, and declare it, together with the reasons that move thee to change, and do not think to steal it.

   Francis Bacon, Essays
   ESSAYS.; XI.—OF GREAT PLACE.129

   Bacon asks a person in office to make a change and its reasons visible. Quietly altering the terms leaves other people to infer what happened.

6. But if Aquilius's definition is correct, pretence and concealment should be done away with in all departments of our daily life.

   Marcus Tullius Cicero, De Officiis
   BOOK III THE CONFLICT BETWEEN THE RIGHT AND THE EXPEDIENT; section 61

   Cicero extends his discussion of fraudulent bargaining into ordinary conduct. Polished announcements deserve the same scrutiny as formal agreements when their wording invites a false impression.

7. for wishing rather to persuade by the force of my arguments, than dazzle by the elegance of my language, I shall not waste my time in rounding periods, nor in fabricating the turgid bombast of artificial feelings, which, coming from the head, never reach the heart.

   Mary Wollstonecraft, A Vindication of the Rights of Woman
   INTRODUCTION.

   Wollstonecraft explains why she favors the force of an argument over decorative feeling. A polished announcement still owes its reader the actual change.

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