Fostering a High-Candor Culture

Through commitment, courage, and thoughtful design, HR leaders can build a working environment focused on trust, honesty, continuous improvement, and mutual accountability. 

By Valentina Gissin

“Candor” has increasingly become a buzzword in leadership circles. In search of new ways to boost performance, more companies are considering how honesty and accountability can impact their bottom line. Having scaled high-candor cultures and navigated feedback-rich environments, it’s clear that the practice can be done incredibly well. Still, these remain the exceptions. In some cases, candor can be weaponized as an excuse for a CEO to tell their employees how dumb they are. 

Despite its inherent challenges, dismissing candor would be a mistake. True courageous communication—built on trust and a shared commitment to improvement—can be a core differentiator between organizations that will succeed and those that are already failing silently. As with so many trade-offs in the HR space, the benefits of cracking how to do the hard thing well far outweigh the pain saved along the path of least resistance.  

When organizations implement real candor, everything speeds up. Individuals receive specific and consistent feedback on both their strengths and their growth areas, which consequently fast-tracks their development. Issues are resolved while they’re still manageable, before they metastasize into more intractable problems (the kind that slowly and quietly kill companies). And decisions happen faster when people clearly understand what’s expected of them. 

Ironically, the teams that trust each other often have more healthy debate—the kind needed to succeed and grow. Low-candor environments foster unresolved issues that can delay decision-making, thwart collaboration, and throttle performance. The simple truth is that teams cannot achieve their highest potential in the absence of pervasive honesty. 

Designing for High Candor 

Such an environment must be designed deliberately around a few key pillars, including standards, modeling, and systems. 

Constructive honesty needs to be more than some generic goal; what does it look like within the specific context of your company’s mission and values? Each organization’s leaders should define the behaviors they expect for themselves while emphasizing the connection between these behaviors and achieving their organizational goals. Above all, they must prioritize the foundational importance of empathy and positive intent. The purpose of candor is to make each other better, right?  

Even more than standards, candor requires leadership buy-in and modeling from the absolute top down. Beyond showing their ability to give direct feedback, leaders must demonstrate the capacity to receive feedback from anyone with gratitude—especially when it’s uncomfortable. 

When such leaders actively solicit constructive criticism and then acknowledge and act on it in a positive, growth-oriented manner, they create the kind of environment necessary for others to speak up. Regardless of whether you agree with it, a rewarding voice sends a powerful and positive message. And nothing encourages people to speak up more than a C-suite leader standing in front of their company to say, “I messed up, and it’s going to be okay, because here’s what I learned.” 

High-candor environments must extend beyond managers’ and leaders’ willingness to be honest and be woven into the systems on which their organizations run. At such companies, candor is part of management rhythms like feedback requests sent out after new programs are announced, performance reviews may become more transparent, moving beyond closed-door evaluations to processes where peer and upward feedback is shared broadly and freely. And the more upward feedback is integrated into ongoing processes like one-on-ones and team check-ins, the more continuous the cycle of candor and reward becomes, which inherently helps contextualize and normalize it. 

All this requires clear guidance on feedback expectations, both for managers to create conditions where all voices can be heard, and for individuals who may feel less comfortable speaking up. It also takes practice, and training should move beyond basic concepts to encompass more complex real-life scenarios.  

The Core of Empathy 

Such feedback, in fact, is sustainable only in an environment with empathy at its core. Without genuine care and trust, the assumption of positive intent becomes hard to sustain, and candor has the potential to turn threatening. 

The responsibility is on organizations to ensure that their people always feel valued and supported. They do this by investing in relationship-building, coaching managers on empathetic communication, and ensuring that even the toughest feedback is delivered constructively. And in remote or hybrid settings, creating connection and providing affirmation demands even more intentionality. 

The Mandate 

It takes commitment, courage, and thoughtful design for HR leaders to nurture honesty in their organizations. People leaders must lean into building the systems and trainings that make candor work. And their own programs and practices must embed candor into their companies’ culture—and never dilute it. 

This mandate extends to hiring, as it requires selecting individuals who possess the resilience, self-awareness, compassion, and backbone to thrive in a high-feedback environment. It also requires consistent reinforcement once those individuals have joined the culture, as well as continual modeling and coaching. Additionally, HR executives must work with business leaders to address potential misuse and correct those instances where candor might be weaponized. 

More than anything, HR must operate as true business partners with their organization’s leadership team, using their expertise to guide their efforts in building candid environments in their departments. The path may be challenging, and at times uncomfortable, but the expected outcomes—trust, rapid improvement, and mutual accountability—will only make organizations stronger and more successful. 

Valentina Gissin is chief people officer at Garner Health.