Feedback that motivates, not deflates.
Six steps for saying the hard thing well, and for hearing it. The CANDOR Method gives managers and executives one shared way to speak plainly, stay steady, and ask for what they need.
The method is the key. The implementations are endless.
Six steps. One conversation.
CANDOR is a sequence, not a script. Each step does one job, and the order matters: you settle yourself, you name what went well, and only then do you describe what you saw, how it landed, what you need, and what you are asking for.
It works in a two-minute hallway conversation and in a two-hour leadership offsite. It works when you are the one speaking and when you are the one listening.
- CCalm
Settle yourself before you speak. The method starts with your own state, not the other person's behavior.
01 - AAppreciate
Name something that went well. Specific, true, and said first.
02 - NNotice
Describe what you observed, without judgment or interpretation. What a camera would have recorded.
03 - DDisclose
Say how it landed. One feeling, owned as yours.
04 - OOwn
Name the need underneath the feeling. This is what the conversation is actually about.
05 - RRequest
Ask for something specific and doable. A request, not a demand.
06
One method. Two ways in.
The same six steps, built for two very different rooms. Managers need a method that survives a shift change. Executives need one that survives a board meeting.
For High Performance Managers
For the supervisors and managers who run the day-to-day. Learn to give feedback that people can actually hear, and to receive it without flinching.
Explore the Managers programFor Executives
For executive and senior leadership teams that need to level with each other, and with the people they lead. The same method, built for the conversations that shape a company.
Explore the Executives programMost feedback training teaches the words. This one teaches the state.
Most organizations do not struggle because their people lack intelligence, commitment, or technical skill. They struggle because human interactions under pressure break down: a difficult conversation avoided, feedback that lands as blame, stress that turns into reactivity or withdrawal.
The hard part of honest feedback is rarely finding the right sentence. It is being calm enough to say it, fair enough to be believed, and clear enough to be acted on. CANDOR builds that in.
Strong back, soft front.The posture the method trains: steady enough to say, open enough to hear. After Roshi Joan Halifax.
Regulation before candor
Most feedback models teach the sentence. CANDOR starts with the state you have to be in to say it. Calm and Appreciate come before anything hard is said.
A method for listening, too
Reversed, the same six steps become a way to hear someone out: draw out what they noticed, felt, need, and want. One method, both directions.
Candor as originally defined
Candor once meant openness without malice, not bluntness. The method earns that older meaning by making fairness part of the structure.
This is not a workshop. It is a method designed to become part of how an organization operates over time.
Master Trainers in the CANDOR Method
The method scales through people, not slide decks. Master Trainers are certified by Compassion 2.0 to bring CANDOR to organizations, implement the Executives program, and train an organization's own team members as Certified Facilitators. It is how the method outlasts the workshop.
About the Master Trainer credentialPart of the Compassion 2.0 Ecosystem
The CANDOR Method is part of Compassion 2.0, a consulting and technology ecosystem designing the next generation of organizations in the age of AI.
Compassion 2.0 develops the broader organizational design, field intelligence, neuroscience-informed intervention, and ROI of Care frameworks.
The CANDOR Method applies that work through a single, teachable practice: honest feedback that strengthens relationships instead of straining them, from the front line to the leadership team.
The organizations that win in the next decade won't just have better strategy. They'll have better conversations.
Six steps.
Two programs.
Measured through the ROI of Care.