Kind candor is one skill I’m still working to develop…it was part of my book Twelve and a Half, as a “half,” because it’s a vulnerability, or the biggest weakness among my strengths. Unlike some other traits like gratitude and tenacity, which were a major part of my DNA growing up, kind candor doesn’t come as naturally to me. I’m still learning to deploy it in life and business every day.
Before we can understand kind candor, we first need to define the second term in the phrase.
Candor
(noun)
The quality of being open and honest in expression; frankness.
I can tell you beyond a shadow of a doubt, my core weakness in 25 years of business has been a lack of candor. To some of you, I’m sure that comes as a surprise. Let me explain.
A lot of people see my content and my communication style and assume that candor comes easily to me. They see me ranting about the latest social media platform or strategy and they might think I’m just a know-it-all who always tells it like he sees it. The truth is that there’s a difference between “Garyvee” the brand and Gary Vaynerchuk the manager and operator. The first is good at candor; the second has struggled. Public figure me is great at candor because there’s no human on the other side. I’m speaking into truths on stage or on a podcast. Gary Vaynerchuk the CEO really struggled.
It’s easy to deploy candor when I’m on video, recording a podcast, or on stage addressing hundreds or thousands of people. It’s much harder when I’m sitting down one-on-one with an employee that I really care about, having a difficult conversation.My Relationship with Candor
I decided early on that I didn’t want to run my businesses on fear…in fact, creating fear in my companies became my greatest fear.
Part of that goes back to my childhood. My father was a very aggressive, negative candor deliverer. His candor capabilities are world renowned to me. A world of one. It’s something I admire in him, but in my youth, his candor always came in an outburst, curse-laden in the ‘80s. It took me years to realize that my dad’s negative vessel to delivering candor was what I was not fond of. The energy of the candor. I had to take years to separate the vessel from the actual thing.
Because I couldn’t separate the two, I had a visceral reaction to candor and confrontation for a long time. I thought it scared people; I thought they couldn’t handle it. My inability to separate being candid from being mean or nasty then led me to make a ton of decisions that negatively impacted me and those around me. My lack of candor caused me to withhold critical feedback and build resentment toward several employees which ultimately led to me surprise-firing people once I finally got fed up.
And here’s something that always blows people’s minds. I have enough self-awareness and accountability to know that if I didn’t have the luxury of being a CEO and a business owner, my lack of wanting to have confrontation would’ve meant I probably would have been that kind of employee. The one who thinks, it’s easier for me to move on than to address it. I see it in a lot of parts of my life. It’s why I broke up with girlfriends as a kid when it could have been addressed, but I didn’t want to address it. A lot of people leave a lot of companies, or let a seed become cancer, because they can’t have one conversation.
Basically, my inability to deploy candor when necessary was not sustainable for my success or the success and happiness of my employees…until I woke up.
Candor Has Been a Weapon
Before I tell you how I woke up, I want to explain my hypothesis on why this matters so much, because it might not be obvious.
I believe that candor has been a historical weapon of choice of managers suppressing people that are more talented than them. Let me be very clear with this: I believe over the last 70 years of corporate warfare, there have been many managers that used the disguise of candor to scare or upset employees so they would quit, because that manager knew that the person they were managing was more talented than them.
Candor on paper, like communism, looks good. But in practice, it did not show up that way.
And it’s not always deliberate. If your boss senses, even subconsciously, that you’re more talented than they are, they might start being nitpicky with candor to suppress your growth. So there’s the conscious and the subconscious. Either way, it just has not worked well in corporate environments.
The definition of candor requires sincerity, and I don’t believe sincerity has been implemented in reality. That’s why I stood up kind candor. Putting the word kind in front of it suffocates all of these people that have bothered me over the last 30 years. It gets a lot harder to do the bad version of candor when kindness is put in front of it.
Think about it this way: when you’re delivering candor, sometimes you kind of expect tears. When you deliver kind candor, tears are almost completely inappropriate. Bedside manners of a doctor.
Rebranding Candor
Years ago, I finally woke up and realized that I was making my biggest fear come true. Instead of eliminating fear, my lack of candor was creating a ton of fear at VaynerMedia because people didn’t know where they stood. I realized that if I truly wanted to maintain the “honey empire” I created for my companies, I had to find a way to address this vulnerability.
Working with my executive coach, Beth Weissenberger of Handel Group, was a big part of that wake-up. When Beth came into VaynerMedia, one of the biggest compliments in my 23 years of operating was her assessment: “You actually have a lot of good shit going on here.” But she also gave our culture a B minus, and her diagnosis was simple. It was a lot of honey and not a lot of candor. Standing up the term kind candor was the breakthrough that came out of that work, and it’s made a huge impact. We needed it bad.
So, what is kind candor? It’s a hybrid term I created to rebrand the idea of candor for myself, and hopefully for leaders everywhere. My biggest belief is in branding, and standing up kind candor as a brand allows me to scale it, inside VaynerX and across the universe. By adding kindness to candor, we can become better operators and leaders, we’ll have more secure, accountable employees, and companies will be much healthier, happier places to work.
I think kind candor is a much better target to aim for. The problem is, a lot of people use “honesty” as an excuse to be jerks. They call it being blatantly honest or being a “straight-shooter,” when in reality, far too many leaders are poisoning their workplace cultures with negativity.
Running a team or company with fear will work…but it’s not the best or most practical approach long-term. Too many people are greatly underestimating the power of kindness. Why? I think it’s because people have this idea that being nice somehow makes you weak. They’re afraid that if they don’t bring down the hammer, people won’t respect them or they’ll get taken advantage of. I want to change that idea.
Candor is not an excuse not to be nice…and being nice doesn’t prevent you from being an effective leader. Just like you can be patient and ambitious, or have both great humility and great conviction, you can be both honest and kind. The trick is in finding the right balance.
Too Much Kindness
My problem was that I used to be all kindness and no candor. I realized that kindness without candor was creating entitlement within my organization. By giving positive reinforcement again and again without critical feedback, I created delusion, which lead to entitlement.
The problem with this approach is that it’s not sustainable. As a leader, when you’re too kind and you struggle with being candid about mistakes or room for improvement, you start to build a resentment toward the people who work for you. Sometimes that resentment is subconscious, sometimes it’s conscious, but either way, it’s toxic. Mistakes continue to be made and employees can fall into a trap of complacency because there’s a lack of candor from you and a lack of accountability from themselves.
Too Much Candor
On the other hand, just telling your employees that they suck is cruel. Have you taken the time to understand the context behind the mistake that was made? Have you been curious and empathetic to what might be going on in their lives that’s affecting their performance, or are you just rushing to judgment with zero information? Too much candor without kindness only creates more problems. When you come in too “hot” with your criticism, the person on the other end is only gonna react “hot” in return.
Beth put it perfectly when we talked about the people who “shoot it straight” and keep getting in trouble for it: you’re missing empathy. You’re missing the kindness side. You can’t hit somebody upside the head with a brick with no heart. You’ll leave them bloody. Even though your message might be accurate, if you deliver it with a punch, with no kindness and no caring about the human, you kind of deserved the smack.
And by the way, this goes both ways. This isn’t just for bosses and leaders. Bricks still make bosses bleed too. If you’re a junior employee with something on your mind, the answer isn’t disrespect or coming in hot. It’s finding a way to let them know what isn’t working for you, from your heart, so they can hear you.
How You Deliver the Medicine Matters
Kindness
Candor. It’s not about either-or, it’s about “and .” You should be able to speak candidly with your employees about performance, but you should also be able to do so without humiliation or aggression. Just like you have expectations of them, they have to be able to expect a safe culture and environment when they come to work every day.
There’s a reason why I added the word kind in front of candor. How you deliver the medicine matters.
Just like a good doctor has good bedside manner, a good leader knows how to handle hard conversations with care. Compassionate communication heals everything, and it’s when you’re the most upset that you have to deploy the most kindness and compassion to the person on the other side.
Getting Your Candor Up
The kindness came natural to me. The candor didn’t. So I think about it as getting my candor up. But I’m in the small 5% over here. For the other 95%, it comes up by getting their kindness up when they walk in a room.
And I’ve watched it work, black and white, for some of my less empathetic but quite kind leaders. The framework has made them better at having a little sugar with the medicine.
That circles down to a happier company and better retention. It’s very practical. If people are still here in two years, we’re cooking better together because we have all the context.
As a leader, finding that balance between kindness and candor is a really important play, and it’s something that I’ve stood up in my own life and within VaynerX. This is not easy, though, so please be patient with yourself. Keep going.
By Gary Vee, Founder and CEO of Vayner Media and Vayner X
