The Book that Shaped How We Help People Perform Better

At Mindavation, one of the most significant shifts in how we coach people and teams to perform better came from a single book: Susan Scott’s Fierce Conversations. It didn’t just influence our thinking. It shaped a core part of our practise.

Scott’s central insight cuts through the noise: the conversation is the relationship. Not the memo. Not the cascade. Not the FAQ document on the intranet nobody reads. The real, human, sometimes uncomfortable exchange between two people.

That’s where trust is built or broken and where change actually takes hold.

We now use this thinking as a catalyst to help people have better conversations.

What we do differently
We now coach managers not just on what to communicate during change, but on how to show up in a conversation — present, honest, and willing to hear what’s really going on for their people.

Using the principles from Fierce Conversations, we help leaders and teams to:

Interrogate reality together rather than presenting a polished version of it and hoping people buy in

Come out from behind the role having genuine exchanges instead of performing a leadership script

Name the thing in the room because the issue that isn’t being spoken about is usually the one driving all the resistance

Make every conversation count whether it’s a one-on-one check-in or a high-stakes alignment session with the executive team

Where this shows up
In practice, this looks like coaching a manager to sit with a team member’s real concerns rather than deflecting to process. It looks like facilitating a leadership team to have the alignment conversation they’ve been avoiding for six months. It looks like helping a change champion find the words for a truth their sponsor needs to hear.

Scott asks a question we return to constantly in our coaching work: “What is the most important conversation you’ve been avoiding?”

Teams fail because people stop, or never start, having the conversations that matter.

At Mindavation, we believe that the human conversation at the heart of change is not a soft skill. It’s the whole game.

If your managers are struggling to bring their teams through change, the question worth asking isn’t “what should we be communicating?”

It’s “what conversation needs to happen — and why hasn’t it yet?”

We can help you have Hard Conversations. Reach out to find out how.

#ChangeManagement #Coaching #Leadership #Mindavation #FierceConversatins #ProfessionalDevelopment

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