First of all, let me say this is not a different website than you are used to visiting. The title of this post is about the book Getting Naked which talks about the importance of vulnerability with customer service. While I suppose there may be some customers who prefer the literal sense of this title, I can assure you that this book has nothing to do with the literal getting naked with your customers. If that bothers you, I understand if you click away now…
Still here? Awesome!
Then let’s dig into this book a little. Similar to my other book discussions here, I won’t be going over the content in the book completely. If you want that (which I hope you do!), your best source for that would be to find a copy of the book on Amazon or at your public library and read it yourself. This article will focus on how this book made me feel and key lessons or concepts I may have taken from it outside of the main model.
To begin, please take a look at the video below from author Patrick Lencioni’s YouTube page where he very briefly discusses what this model is (very brief = 48 seconds).
Welcome back! Now, the first thing that jumped out to me was how emotional I ended up getting over the ending of the fictional part of the story. I won’t spoil it, but there is a happy ending that really brings everything together for all parties involved. I think the part I appreciated the most was that the main character was able to do work that he believed in and felt added significant value.
I think most people largely aspire for this to be their goal when they think of getting a new job. Personally, I want to be acknowledged as someone who makes a difference. I want to know that people think my work is valuable and that I’m able to enhance or improve things for my team, my customers, or the business. This is discussed in detail in the book The Three Signs of a Miserable Job. It was easy to see that the main character in Getting Naked was not fulfilled by the work, and you see him internalize this multiple times as he became aware of it. The ending addresses this gap and made me feel happy, even a bit jealous if I am being honest.
The second point in this book that hit me hard was how much leaders place greater value in the advice and insight of consultants and outsiders than they do on those within the company. I have worked in management for over a decade at multiple companies. In my experience, whenever we look at what is going wrong or ways to improve, I find there is often immediate resistance and blatant defensiveness about what is being identified as issues. There is almost a “how dare you” attitude at times. As the main character experiences this towards the end of the book, I couldn’t help but relate. And this all goes back to trust.
Let me explain. In one of my early roles as an analyst, I was tasked with reporting on data metrics across business teams that had never been reported. We looked at trends in the market like turnover metrics, but also showed these data compared against the company as a whole. For existing, how is our sales team performing in comparison to the rest of the company in overall headcount, salary spend, and turnover? When this data was ultimately presented to our company leaders, you would have thought I insulted someone’s mother. I was challenged personally during that presentation. How can this be? This data can’t be correct. Where did you get this from? Has someone on my team validated these numbers? Who are you again? It was a rough one.
Over the next few months, I worked with each leader to provide the details behind each report and provided a refreshed version on the first of each month. Eventually, this became the norm, and it drove business discussions to identify what was working and what might need to be addressed operationally. But the first time this was discussed, it was very painful.
It would have been easy for me to look to my Vice President to answer the questions since he directed me to work on this project in the first place. It would have been easy to place blame or be defensive as the attacks were coming. Instead, I accepted all of the feedback, took copious notes, and let each person know I would look into it and get back to them if I couldn’t explain something in the moment. And I followed through! It didn’t take me long to get back to them, and I worked with some of them for one or two weeks to iron out the details of their questions.
I enjoyed this book very much. I could relate to much of it, even though I’ve never worked in consulting. I’ve worked with consultants many times. I’ve experienced bad customer service so many times, that I should probably write my own book on that one topic. But in the end, if you provide a product or service to someone else whether it’s a customer who paid for it or an internal co-worker, they are your client. We should all strive to provide excellent client service. This book is a fantastic model for how to do just that!
