Getting Naked — A Top of the Page Review
November 2022
A former employee recommended this book to me. She thought I would like it based on how I think about serving my clients and my team. And she was right!
This book is approached very differently than most business books, which makes for a fun and quick read. I started and finished it in one night — a Friday night, no less. It was so quick and compelling that I never even made my cocktail!
Lencioni, Patrick. 2010. Getting Naked: A Business Fable About Shedding the Three Fears that Sabotage Client Loyalty. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass
Quick Summary
Getting Naked takes the model of expertise, sales-first oriented engagements and flips it on its head. The author argues that professional service providers unwittingly undermine trust and loyalty based on their own fears. He offers a philosophy of personal and professional vulnerability to make real connections and drive customer loyalty. By telling the story of a fictionalized consultant whose world is shaken by an alternative paradigm for doing business, the author introduces us to a model of overcoming the three fears he sees as holding professional service providers back.
A short section at the end of the story outlines the three fears and recommendations for overcoming them.
Fear #1 — Losing the business
Strategies to overcome the fear of losing the business
- Always consult instead of sell
- Give away the business
- Tell the kind truth
- Enter the danger
Fear #2 — Being embarrassed
Strategies to overcome the fear of being embarrassed
- Ask dumb questions
- Make dumb suggestions
- Celebrate your mistakes (Full transparency — I have a really hard time with this one! Not so much the other two.)
Fear #3— Feeling inferior
Strategies to overcome the fear of feeling inferior
- Take a bullet for the client
- Make everything about the client
- Honor the client’s work
- Do the dirty work
Key Takeaways
Leadership
Although this book is written for consultants and professional services, the same principles can easily be applied by anyone in leadership. I truly believe that a leader’s primary responsibility is to serve their team. From this perspective, every one of the tenets in the book dovetail into the best standards of servant leadership. Because humility, selflessness, and transparency are so very hard, they are incredibly powerful and desirable qualities in those who seek to lead. These qualities often fly in the face of our cultural wiring and professional models making them rare and valuable.
The fear of being embarrassed and the fear of feeling inferior easily and obviously transfer from a client context to a leadership context where our “followers” act in the role of client. The fear of losing the business may not be so obvious so I would like to spend a little time on how I see it transferring. When we reflect on this concept internally and look at how leaders interact with their team, we find many leaders are too busy “selling” to truly consult with their team to solve problems or clear obstacles. Their effort goes into persuading their team to go all in on a task or policy they have prioritized based on their own needs. Or they’re spending all of their time chasing a promotion or growing their business or looking for new opportunities. They have no space left over to truly listen to the issues their team is facing or offer help in any meaningful way. When looked at through this prism, a willingness to lose the business is about doing what is best for the team even if it means the leader does not benefit personally.
Process Design
An underlying struggle in Getting Naked is the protagonist’s attraction to the philosophy of vulnerability but his inability to execute it in his operating environment. Although Lencioni does not delve into the implications for process design, I think it is worth exploring.
Leaders are not the only ones who have fears about vulnerability. How many people worry about losing business, being embarrassed, or feeling inferior within their operating environment because they feel as if they have little or no authority? A leaders’ responsibility to serve their team extends naturally to designing processes that give them courage to be vulnerable.
Good design supports and protects space to ask dumb questions and make dumb suggestions. It celebrates mistakes as evidence of learning. Good process design builds in mechanisms to tell the kind truth so that employees are not left weighing the risks to their career or reputation for having hard conversations with senior leaders about poor decisions. People centric processes reward the kind of feedback that is hard to give and to take but that is necessary to move the business forward. At the end of the day, people’s fears are either alleviated or deepened by the processes that run the business.
Good process design at every functional level gives people cover to be authentic and human. Process design proves whether business leaders have their people’s backs.
Memorable Quotes
1️⃣
“[The naked approach] applies to anyone who provides ongoing, relationship-based advice, counsel, or expertise to a customer, inside or outside of a company.”
2️⃣
“At its core, naked service boils down to the ability of a service provider to be vulnerable — to embrace uncommon levels of humility, selflessness, and transparency for the good of a client.”
Final Thoughts
The key takeaway from Getting Naked is that success comes from connecting with people. Business is always, always about people. When we strip away all of the outer trappings, we are left with people helping people. This book reminds leaders that if our fears or insecurities are getting in the way of fulfilling our responsibility to help our people then we are failing. Being vulnerable — getting naked — is an act of courage. It’s absolute proof that we are committed to serving our team, no matter what.
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Thanks for reading! I am a self professed nerd who loves reading and learning. To me every book is a conversation. By the end of the conversation, I always have new ideas that I want to try. What are you reading?
