In his book, Radical Trust, Joe Healey suggests that humility and candour are hallmarks of Communication Trust. He says that candour is the capacity to tell it like it is which means you are willing to risk some short term discomfort in exchange for long term gain.

Why will there be short term discomfort? Simply because we are not accustomed to telling it like it is! We are happier to “beat around the bush”, give hints and leave it to the other person’s common sense to understand -- all of which avoids telling it like it is.

Telling it like it is, is different from “socking it to them”, which is a rather destructive communication behaviour. When you “sock it” to someone, you are in fact indulging in one way communication. You are telling them how it is to you, without necessarily giving the other person a chance to explain or clarify the situation.

When you are candid, you can state your case quite clearly, simply and briefly, and then allow the other party to comment. When you get really good at being candid, you will in fact, ask the other person to explain what you are unable to see or accept. In other words, not give your point of view first, but allow the other person to state his/her case.

In the fifth of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People, Stephen Covey suggests that you should “seek first to understand before being understood”.

Giving Candid Feedback

It is in giving feedback that it is very important to be candid. We recently suggested that the giving of praise was a communication skill not practiced anything like enough! Yet, it is one of the easiest skills to master. Giving feedback about performance problems is much harder, but once it is mastered as a skill, it will deepen communication trust significantly.

One of the reasons why managers often don’t provide candid feedback about performances is that what is desired performance is often not clear -- a problem resulting from the common approach to writing job descriptions.

Look at your job description now -- I hope you have one! You will probably find that it lists responsibilities, each of which begins with an action word. In other words, your job description defines what you have to do. What it doesn’t define is how well you are supposed to do it. It also more than likely uses quite general terms.

So if you are a manager, it tells you what you must manage, but it doesn’t tell you how your managerial performance will be measured. I respectfully suggest that this is a serious weakness!

It is difficult to give candid feedback on actions. It is much easier to give candid performance on results.

Say you are in finance and are managing a group of people whose jobs are to process invoices. How do you know that your staffs are doing a good job? You need to know that if you want to maximise their performance -- which is one of the things you are paid to do. And without defined results, it is difficult to identify who is working above par and who below, and more importantly, whose par is moving up and whose, down.

You need to know both of these things: the first, to be able to congratulate and reward, and the second, to be able to give candid feedback.

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