What it is: Susan Scott’s Fierce Leadership – A Bold Alternative to the Worst “Best” Practices of Business Today

What it’s about: A leadership approach that turns some of business’s best practices on its head by tweaking the focus and execution of the “best practice.”

Rating: 4 stars

The Good: Provides managers with a new “fierce leadership” model and identifies six best practices that have good intentions, but go wrong in the execution and results. Scott provides alternate approaches to these management practices using her “fierce leadership” model.

The Bad: At times, this leadership concept feels trendy, but only due to the phrase “fierce leadership.” Yet, Scott’s leadership model appears to be an effective alternative to conventional leadership styles by identifying “fierce practices” that offer a realistic approach to conventional best practices that we’ve been taught.

Action Item: Leaders and managers should buy this book to learn two things: (1) a new leadership state of mind to augment or improve their existing approach; and (2) review their existing best practices to determine if improved results can be achieved, using Scott’s alternative practices.

Using Fierce Leadership

Susan Scott is committed to effective leadership. She’s bold and passionate. She freely admits, “Frankly, I prefer that you adapt to me, not the other way around.” Finally, a kindred spirit, who writes what she’s really thinking and feeling about the subject. Scott grabs your attention when she proclaims that fierce leadership is an anti-venom. An anti-venom? What?!?!

Yes, an anti-venom to the conventional business-as-usual leadership style that most of us loath. The self-serving agendas, directing and telling, and the excessive use of business jargon come under attack in Scott’s book. Her fierce leadership state of mind is bold, direct, passionate, transparent, courageous, and enthusiastic. It means using a “squid eye” or the ability see things that others cannot and do not see.

While there will always be a place for having your leadership building blocks based on conventional thought leaders like Warren Bennis, Scott’s fierce leadership approach is a refreshing alternative to the academic leadership models we’ve learned over time.

Bold Alternatives to 360-Degree Anonymous Feedback & Legislated Optimism

How many of you love 360-Degree feedback in your performance review? What? No hands? I’m shocked. If you’re like me, you’ve probably figured out that this anonymous approach feels flawed. Scott explains to us exactly why’s it’s flawed and how leaders and managers can remedy that problem with Face-to-Face Feedback.

Her fierce best practice involves being open, having honest, face-to-face conversations, 365 days of the year. Scott provides leaders and managers with a useful five-step business practice and worksheets to help you evolve from the 360-Degree Anonymous Feedback practice to honest face-to-face conversations.

Are you encountering what feels to be a lack of honesty by your company’s leadership? Are you seeing and hearing distorted reality, a rosy version of a current disaster? This is what Scott’s calls “legislated optimism,” and she’s indignant about it for all of us. She offers a radical transparency model, based on truth, even if it’s ugly, unpleasant, and not what we wish it to be. The basic rules include:

• Giving employees all relevant financial information
• Give employees training to understand the financial information
• Give employees responsibility for the numbers under their control
• Give employees a financial stake in how the company performs

To learn how to do this, buy the book. Scott’s alternative leadership approach should be the norm after the leadership failure the nation has experienced after the Wall Street meltdown.

Taking on Four Best Practices with Word Play

Think of some of the best practices you’ve heard of repeatedly like hiring for smarts, holding people accountable, employee engagement, and customer centricity. Now play with the words, changing the order or emphasis. This is what I pictured Scott doing when she wrote the outline for this book. In my mind, I see Scott with a bunch of Scrabble tiles, moving around the tiles to form words, and then coming up with better words to identify what the outdated best practice should be emphasizing.

After tweaking the words to make her changes in these best practices, she’s come up with practical alternatives that change the focus of each best practice, departing from the business as usual approach:

• From Hiring for Smarts to Hiring for Smart + Heart
• From Holding People Accountable to Modeling Accountability and Holding People Able
• From Employee Engagement Programs to Actually Engaging Employees
• From Customer Centricity to Customer Connectivity

Based on Scott’s experience in training global companies, clearly she saw flaws in those best practices. Again, her fierce leadership approach is a refreshing departure from the tired and conventional best practices that we’ve seen day in and day out. If you’re a leader and manager that needs to implement change or need better company results, then check out Scott’s book for bold alternatives to your business practices.

Conclusion

Scott’s book is refreshing. Her alternative business practices may not be implementable by every leader and manager. I do recommend that leaders and managers read this book if they want to continue to improve their skills or expose themselves to Scott’s bolder and fiercer business practices. What’s the worst that could happen? These leaders and managers might actually identify squid that they didn’t want to know existed and feel compelled to do something about it. If that happens, it sounds like fierce leadership may be in order.

About Susan Scott

Susan Scott is the founder of Fierce, Inc., a global training company whose clients include Yahoo!, Starbucks, Cisco, BP, General Dynamics, New York Life, Four Seasons Hotel and Resorts, LEGO, Best Buy, Coca-Cola, and Ernst & Young. She’s also the author of the 2002 best-selling business book, Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work & in Life, One Conversation at a Time.

Additional Resources:

• Fierce Leadership: A Bold Alternative to the Worst “Best” Practices of Business Today
• Fierce Conversations: Achieving Success at Work and in Life One Conversation at a Time
• Susan’s company, Fierce, Inc.’s website
• Fierce Inc.’s blog
• Fierce Inc.’s newsletter
• Fierce Inc. on Facebook
• Fierce Inc. on Twitter
• Fierce Inc. on LinkedIn

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