Transformational Leadership with Joseph Michelli

Speaker, author and organizational consultant Joseph A. Michelli encourages leaders and frontline workers to grow and invest passionately in all aspects of their lives. He stopped by the podcast to discuss leadership strategies from some of his bestselling books and business practices that develop joyful and productive workplaces.

Transcript

[00:00:00.190] - Speaker 1
I love this whole mindset of goodness, kindness. The world just needs it. I mean, we are craving and in pain with all the ugly and evil, and it gets the headlines. And I just hope more and more kindness is the force that we embrace because it does change the world.

[00:00:28.890] - Speaker 2
Good day and welcome to the Leading With Nice Interview Series podcast. My name is Mathieu Yuill, and today we have a guest I'm super excited about. It's author, speaker, customer service expert Joseph Michelli. Welcome to the show.

[00:00:44.840] - Speaker 1
Hey, Mathieu, thank you for having me. It's an honour to be here.

[00:00:47.700] - Speaker 2
All right. So for those of you who aren't familiar, you've authored close to a dozen best sellers, typically around customer service excellence. I'm thinking, of course, the book that drew me in first was The Starbucks Experience, followed by the New Gold Standard and The Zappos Way. And more recently, we're going to get to those in a few minutes. But what I really want to investigate first is when I read your work, I can't help but feel almost like you are reverse engineering customer service excellence. And I'm curious. I know you described writing as your side gig, like your consulting practices, your main gig. So what drew you into wanting to reverse engineer, write about it and teach others what's the attraction for you?

[00:01:33.620] - Speaker 1
So I was working in Seattle, Washington, for a Pike Place fish market, a little seafood market there in the Pike Place area. And I've been consulting for them. There had been some stories that have been shared out in the media and some books written about them. And I thought, well, I was working with Johnny. Why weren't we telling the story? So we told Johnny's story from Johnny's voice. And from there, having told his story, I was looking out over at Starbucks, and it was just a block away, the original Starbucks store. And I thought, well, I haven't really seen the story told by about them other than the CEO, Howard Schultz had his book, Pour Your Heart into it. Yes. I thought, well, maybe I can get inside there and I can start looking around. As an outsider with a PhD in organizational development, it made sense that I would analyze these things and then try to call out the Nuggets that we could all get access to.

[00:02:26.200] - Speaker 2
And my next question is, your books are a who's who of Fortune 500 companies. And you're like one, dude, how do you get now, actually, I know that recently you divulge that you're working with Godiva Chocolates, which, by the way, I need to see Godiva in a book about not necessarily about customer service. Just I want to read about chocolate. So you put that on your to do list. I appreciate it. But how do you get access? Because they pull back the curtains for you.

[00:02:57.890] - Speaker 1
Well, early it wasn't easy. I mean, to be honest with you, it was kind of ridiculous. And I remember looking at the back of my Starbucks card for the 800 number for customer service. I called and I said, I want to do a book about you. And I shopped it around forever throughout their phone trees to try to get to somebody who could talk to me. And then I did talk to somebody who then vetted it to the senior leadership team. They had read the Pike Place Fish Market book and were influenced by the Pike Place Fish Market and some of the things they did. And before you know it, I was in. But once in there it was a battle to get inside of the Ritz Carlton where they have lots and lots of gravitas and they don't want anybody messing with the brand. And then at some point it just starts taking off. Right. If somebody hasn't written these kinds of books and they contact a brand, most of the time, the brands are going to be very polite in their standard email. Fortunately, now the people that I used to write about at Starbucks have since gone to Google.

[00:03:55.820] - Speaker 1
And so when we do a book about Google, because I have many of the same people that I worked with there, it's a lovely problem right now that I have in my life, but it wasn't always.

[00:04:05.020] - Speaker 2
So we talk often leading with nice, both internally in our company and with clients about the starting. And there's a quote, I think it's from a cartoon. The first step at being great at something is sucking at it really bad.

[00:04:20.910] - Speaker 1
And that's about the second and the third and the 50th.

[00:04:24.720] - Speaker 2
I just love that you called the 1800 number when I was doing auto journalism. My first car review I got because I called the GM 1800 number and they put me through to like their media fleet operator. And that's how I got into doing car reviews back in the day. I don't do that any longer.

[00:04:39.170] - Speaker 1
But I think it is a bit of courage and stupidity all together put into that. You don't know that you shouldn't do it or you just kind of do it because it seems like the most logical thing to do and you're fearless and willing to look stupid.

[00:04:51.960] - Speaker 2
Fair enough. If you are driving and listening to this podcast, I want to encourage you. I'm an Audible subscriber and I've both read and listened to Joseph's books. I'm going to talk about the Starbucks experience in leading the Starbucks way now. And if in this moment you're thinking, I want to check those out, definitely if you're driving, Audible is a great way to listen to books, and Joseph typically narrates them himself as well. So you get a bit more of the heart and soul behind the parts that require that level. But yeah, speaking of those two books, so you wrote The Starbucks Experience in 2006. I was working at a College at the time and I actually went out on ebay and I bought about 100 green apron books because I wanted to share with my departments. Now I don't think they actually do the green apron book anymore, or if they do it's different or it's embedded in a different way and they don't do the black aprons anymore. And then you went and wrote another book about leading the Starbucks way in 2013. So obviously, we don't expect Starbucks to stay the same over seven years.

[00:05:54.980] - Speaker 2
But what led you to do that company twice?

[00:05:58.950] - Speaker 1
Yeah. Well, first off, the book was incredibly successful. The brand has such cachet, and it's a global phenomenon. So it was worthy of a revisit. I think clearly things have changed badly for a period there. Right after the kind of the downturn of the economy, Starbucks was seeing a real drop off in volume. Howard Schultz, who I'd worked with in the first book, had left the helm. He was the chief global strategist. He had to come back and take back over from Jim Donald, who was the CEO at the time. And it seemed like here's a rebirth of a brand relaunching and reinventing itself. And it was the right time for me to try to capture what that looks like.

[00:06:39.550] - Speaker 2
And looking back at now, eight, nine years removed from that, is there anything that surprised you revisiting Starbucks those years later that still stick in your mind?

[00:06:51.020] - Speaker 1
Yeah. I think that leaders had the capacity to recreate the brand, because if you look at it other than Michael Dell did it really pretty well. At one point in the history of Dell, lots of times, the people who start up great brands are not the people to turn it back around somewhere down the road, because it's not just the same formula over in the case of Starbucks, it was a lot about digitalizing, the connection. It was about realizing that it wasn't the third place anymore. It was about creating inspiring experiences wherever customers were. And I think that was a wonderful ability to see leaders really take a pause and say, what got us here won't get us there to kind of take a phrase from a great book title.

[00:07:32.950] - Speaker 2
I was going to say, I think I read that book as well. I forget who wrote it, though. Oh, man. It's on my bookcase behind me. I'll go check out again. If you're in a bookstore, the cover has a ladder that's disconnected. So if you're looking for that book, check it out. So one of the things I found absolutely fascinating is, again, the new gold standard. I shared that far and wide with my friends, my colleagues, etc. And I'm going to Blank now, Hans, I think his name was the CEO for Ritz Carlton.

[00:08:03.750] - Speaker 1
Hans Schultz. Yeah.

[00:08:05.370] - Speaker 2
I saw him on this leadership speaker series. Lots. He had lots of great things to say. And then we see the evolution of the hotel industry. And I wonder, was the Airbnb way. Kind of like an unofficial connection in the same way you had the Starbucks or was that just unintentional? It happened to be a nice thing.

[00:08:23.330] - Speaker 1
No, it was very intentional. And quite frankly, in 2008, I think it's about when I was writing the new gold standard just to date us all again, and I was sitting with the CEO and we were debating issues like, can we serve a beer in a bottle at Ritz Carlton? Or must it always be elegantly presented in a glass? And we were having these debates about the customer experience and relevance. In 2008 when we were doing that, there are two guys in San Francisco who got some air mattresses and a bunch of Pop Tarts and created the air bed and breakfast with the Pop Tarts and the air mattresses. And they were subletting out their place in San Francisco. Fast forward ten years, 15 years later, and suddenly the net worth of a brand that owns nothing is greater than the net worth of the entire Marriott family which absorbed Ritz Carlton. So I think it was time to tell a story of an evolving travel world and what it takes to be relevant. And some of that had to do with the subletting of properties and the gig economy. But a lot of it, I think, had to do with how do we create some Warp in a hospitality experience, something local, something quirky, as opposed to something that was just the same everywhere.

[00:09:41.340] - Speaker 1
And I woke up in another Marriott and didn't know what city I was in, and it looked a lot like the Marriott I was in the night before. I think there was something about that that I wanted to tell. And I really enjoyed working on that book because Chip Conley was kind enough to take some time with me and he had been a big consultant in the Airbnb space. And Chip has written some fabulous books himself, like Peak. So anyway, it just was a wonderful journey and it was time to tell a different side of hospitality.

[00:10:08.890] - Speaker 2
Dude, I want to be in your book club because we all read the same books.

[00:10:11.460] - Speaker 1
I love it.

[00:10:12.690] - Speaker 2
I was in Phoenix in 2020, January, just before the start of COVID. I think it came home to basically Toronto starting to lock down and the Airbnb I stayed in was the front part of this widowed elderly lady's house. And I showed up and there was like bagels and butter in the fridge for me, which I didn't ask for. She just said, I thought you might appreciate this. And on the last day she wrote me a thank you card and she gave me a bookmark with pressed flowers from her garden. And I was like, what? First of all, I haven't seen a pressed flower bookmark in like 30 years. So that was crazy. But I was like, this is what I expect from Airbnb and I want to juxtapose that against Toronto during Covet, whole condos were empty because they were pretty much 90% Airbnb properties. And there's no question of this, just more thoughts on maybe some trends you might be seeing because Airbnb, when you wrote that book, probably had a certain thing. Yeah.

[00:11:11.830] - Speaker 1
That was the worst timing I think I could have ever written a book. It released to the end of 2019. How great Airbnb was. Now nobody can actually stay anywhere or travel anywhere. It was not a good scene. Just for a quick aside, in stronger third version, which was my last book, I did talk to the folks at Airbnb, and I did a nice, I think, juxtaposition of how Airbnb tried to handle being in the middle of the transaction between the buyer and the seller versus how Ticketmaster StubHub, I think, tried to do it. And I think what you saw really was a lot of brands struggling to figure out what was right for consumers in the context of the pandemic. And when you are the platform in the marketplace, how do you treat both the buyers and sellers with some dignity? So refunds were handled and processed appropriately. It was a terrible time to write a book about Airbnb. By the way, Marshall Goldsmith is the author of the book. What Got you Here won't Get you there, just for the record.

[00:12:07.880] - Speaker 2
Yeah. And again, definitely check it out. There's like so many great lessons to be learned, even in 2022. So let's just talk a bit more. Like, I know that your evening gig is writing books, you consult, and you do keynote speaking. So what other trends are you seeing in your work that are blanket enough could apply to somebody who owns like, a small flower shop versus somebody who's leading the Department at a software company?

[00:12:34.840] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So, I mean, I hop a plane tomorrow and stand on a stage with 2000 people out there in the audience, and it's a group of dentists, and we'll be talking about kind of the new realities around consumer perceptions of security and safety. They've always been there in the consumer mind space, but they've always been in the recesses. They're now more pronounced. Will they stay? We're seeing, obviously, the trend toward convenience make it easier for me. If I were running a dry cleaner or a flower shop or whatever it might be, I would be thinking about how do I make this easier for my consumer each and every single day? What can I do to automate as many touch points as possible for people who want to opt to convenience of automation? How do I make sure that I have people available who are warm, loving and extremely knowledgeable when either the technology fails or in cases where people opt human? Those are just some of the trends that I think we're seeing with great frequency. The days of cash are probably gone, and digital pay and QR codes will forever be part of our landscape.

[00:13:36.940] - Speaker 2
Qr code is the greatest comeback Zappos experience.

[00:13:40.960] - Speaker 1
We put QR Corey throughout the book because the company is really a quirky company and we wanted to show a lot of the videos. And when you actually had to open a QR app in order to use them, the utilization was nothing. Now the technology makes it super easy.

[00:13:55.510] - Speaker 2
It's amazing. Also, I think you've coined, like, opt human.

[00:13:58.740] - Speaker 1
Yeah, I love that phrase. I love to opt human. I love the idea that we are human powered and technology aided that's it we should try to drive experiences that are uniquely human but are aided by the magic of technology.

[00:14:13.350] - Speaker 2
Do you find it hard to walk around a mall and be a consumer and just knowing what you know, your strategies is that difficult for you?

[00:14:23.700] - Speaker 1
Yeah. There's two things I don't do well. I don't watch other speakers on stage very well because I'm always watching the stagecraft and I seldom really get the message. So I got really bad at that. And then in customer experience world, sometimes I delight so much in it. And other times I just anguish that people don't get an idea that every moment in their life they have the opportunity to give something powerful and get something back for it. But they're so self absorbed and so annoyed and so crispy that they failed to see the magic of the moment.

[00:14:58.910] - Speaker 2
So let's talk about one you've experienced recently.

[00:15:01.830] - Speaker 1
For me, just a very simple moment. It was at a big box store. So again, not the place you would think of. And there was this little kid who was kind of looking at something, and this team member came up to them and said, Tell me a little bit about what you're imagining with that. It was just about asking this child to not tell why buy it. There was no sales pitch. It was just like, tell me what you're imagining as you look at that. And it's a lot of what the Lego store was trying to do. Some of their technology allows you to see actually the things in the boxes put together in three dimensional some of the technology interfaces, but it was just trying to activate her imaginary world so that she could dream something. Right.

[00:15:48.860] - Speaker 2
I don't know.

[00:15:49.280] - Speaker 1
To me, that touched me.

[00:15:51.120] - Speaker 2
Yeah. I was actually thinking about I have a friend who was a Lego store employee, and he didn't need to work. He actually had written software that was purchased by a large company, and he was made for life, but led a very humble existence. And he loved Lego. So he hadn't worked in Lego, and he went and worked there at the store because the manager told him his job is to make people love Lego. And he personally didn't have sales target numbers. And so it really just allowed him to talk to the kids, the parent, whoever. I just thought that was a really great approach. Really. It's a paradigm more than anything. Yeah.

[00:16:26.180] - Speaker 1
And I think that the whole notion is that engage people right in their dreams, in their family and their occupation and their recreational interests, have a relationship based on things that are important to the other person, at least start one. And I saw that happening sparked by that little bit of a moment. Very cool.

[00:16:46.000] - Speaker 2
Okay. All right. Well, I want to ask you now, of course, about your newest book, Stronger Through Adversity. And you interviewed I think the number was 141 or somewhere up there. And you want to understand how they navigate challenges brought on by the pandemic. And what I really appreciated about this book was that you read I could go on HBO or LinkedIn and read a gazillion articles by one person in their opinion on how to navigate the pandemic. And I worked for somebody at one time who would tell me the plural of anecdote is not evidence. And so I just keep that front of mine that I can read your one experience but does not mean this is the way forward. So you talked to all these people. What did you learn about successful leadership through writing your previous books that gave you a sense of how leaders could navigate successfully? Obviously, you would have had a sense that I'm going to ask these leaders this question, and hopefully they can give me good answers. So what was it that gave you that sense?

[00:17:42.240] - Speaker 1
Yeah. So I think when I did this, just the ideology of the book is relevant. I was trying to help brands who are in immediate crisis figure out how are we going to take care of our customers, given that everything was uncertain. And as I was in those task forces with all these executives and all these companies that I work with, I was realizing the leadership was so varied. Like, some people were very dogmatic and directive and very confident, and others were constantly resetting the clock every 24 hours and trying to figure out what was real. All I knew was that no one knew what they were doing. None of us had been through this kind of thing before. And so I just started asking. And my background is as a clinical psychologist by training. And so it was not unusual for me to ask a lot of questions, and they seem to really want to talk. And I think what I really enjoyed was how vulnerable people were in this crisis. Not that I would want this crisis on anyone, but that they were becoming increasingly transparent. They were becoming more of that Brene Brown complete, vulnerable, authentic leader.

[00:18:49.750] - Speaker 1
And I got some really wonderful insights about how people were approaching the chaos that I didn't used to get in. Most of the work that I had done, people just had a little bit too much fear that the shareholders would find out that there was a chink in the armor. So, no, this was a lovely, lovely time to see people more vulnerable and it was attractive to their team members. We saw really high levels of employee engagement for the most vulnerable and transparent of leaders.

[00:19:20.070] - Speaker 2
How do you first get interested in asking questions, applying that knowledge, and helping others? Where was it nurture nature?

[00:19:31.230] - Speaker 1
I was definitely nurtured by my parents. Right? My mom, every time we go to someone's house, it seems like she would just ask them a million questions. And I remember as a kid saying, mom, why are you so nosy? Right. And my classic salt down and said, well, you could think about it as nosy or you could think about it as interested. And she goes, I'm not particularly interesting except for the level to which I'm interested. And I think the rest of my life has been that. I mean, look at this show. You're interesting to your listeners because you take such a deep interest in people. This authentic, nice interest in people. Right. And I think that just causes people to say, wow, I want more of that. We're crave people who take an interest. And I think my mom had taught me that pretty well. And throughout my life it's gotten me out of a lot of trouble because the Corey questions I asked, the less likely I'm going to say something extremely stupid.

[00:20:28.970] - Speaker 2
Yeah, I know. I've enjoyed quoting authors with you. I'll quote another one. Molly Fletcher, who was a sports agent in Atlanta and now has a consulting company, says curiosity is the essence of a hungry leader. Trade defensiveness for curiosity. And I think that is the great words to live by. So I wanted to give you a chance to speak about the McKelley experience that I think is newer to what you're doing and part of your offering. Can you tell us a little bit about what this is? And like people that listen to this podcast are typically executive directors of nonprofits, sales folks, business leaders. We have some educators, some faith based leaders as well. So just to understand who might be listening to you right now.

[00:21:15.050] - Speaker 1
Sure. So I think we're evolving. Hopefully everyone else is. A lot of what we do is consulting. So we go into companies and we try to help them elevate their service level. We've certainly done that in churches and helping them create experiential offerings that are really embracing and welcoming and create belonging as an example in the faith based arena. But beyond consulting, we do plenty of keynotes where we'll talk about authentic leadership or servant leadership and how service serves us, how serving others enables us to fulfill our mission and empowers us to do more. I think in transition we're doing more board positions and looking at areas that are particularly close to my heart. I'm currently about to step onto a board now that's all about digital wellness and helping kids. You're not going to avoid the Internet. These devices are extremely addictive. The question is, how do we create digital fitness? So that's a part of what we're looking at now from a social perspective, maybe helping some kids who are otherwise in trouble based on their online behavior. So, yeah, I think it's a mixed bag of things. And as I get older and I think less about money and think more about significance, I think we're getting into more and more things where we believe we can have a greater impact.

[00:22:33.930] - Speaker 2
Yeah. Just for context, around Leading With Nice. That's the name of our agency as well, not just a podcast. And in 2018, the company I did mostly comms work. I called it Coleraine Communications. My wife was born in this Northern Ireland town called Coal Rain, and a mentor of mine said, Mathieu, I love the name that you honor, your wife, your business, but really, you just preach gratitude and empathy and trust and generosity and service. You always talk about leading with nice. And so that's why we called the company back in 2018. And I remember thinking, who wants a company? Like, I know people believe in us, but who wants to work with the company? But now, man, what you're talking about? I can't get over how many people are drawn to us because they want more of that, like the empathetic leader through Covet. It's just those people have risen to the top.

[00:23:24.690] - Speaker 1
Yeah, well, I had a flirtation with and we had the website for a while. I think I have the URL of surprisingly kind, and I was just wanting to get stories of it. And my thinking behind it was I didn't want random acts of kindness, right? To me, I wanted it to be intentional and I didn't want it to be kindness. That was just expected because my boss was nice to because he's there. My boss. I'll be kind, intentionally kind, but I wanted to be surprisingly kind doing the extra things of kindness, that one plus kindness. So we definitely try to get kind stories and ran that for a while. This was a whole separate business enterprise. I figure I'll rely on it when I fully retire. But I love this whole mindset of goodness, kindness. The world just needs it. We are craving in pain with all the ugly and evil, and it gets the headlines. And I just hope more and more kindness is the force that we embrace because it does change the world.

[00:24:28.200] - Speaker 2
Okay, last question. I wanted to speak to this employer right now. I heard a story this week of friends of a friend who had to make sure their mouse moved every five minutes for their employer satisfaction. And they are, of course, looking for a new job. What is your message to employers of that mindset right now?

[00:24:49.430] - Speaker 1
Yeah, it was a good old days mindset. It's management philosophy of tailoring where you put people in a box and you manage them in the box and you watch for performance in the box. And it's cubicle culture. And there's been so many variations of I got to see you in order to know if you're performing or not. Let's manage performance. Let's not manage physical space. Let's not manage mouse clicks. You've lost yourself in all of that. Let's manage impact and the key performance indicators that suggest we're having impact. And if you don't in the great reset that people have often called the great resignation, not only their mouse need to move, their mouse is going to move to another employer. That's where their mouse is going to go. It's understandable. It's just kind of old Schott thinking.

[00:25:40.830] - Speaker 2
Okay, well, Joseph, you and I had a conversation today. Thanks to many people. I know you have a colleague that helped arrange this. Naomi Grossman is R EA. At least she arranged this. Helped research some questions. Amber Tompkins. As I was doing work, I saw a slack channel blowing up as she was taking care of stuff. If you saw this on social media, Jamie Hunter, our content manager, he made sure all of this happened. Austin Pomeroy made it sound great. He's the audio editor. Jeff Anhorn did all the videos. So if you saw the video on social or YouTube. Thank you, Jeff Anhorn. And of course, I mentioned before we started recording, my dog was making noise and my wife came and got him and made sure he was being taken care of so there wouldn't be barks in the background. So thank you.

[00:26:21.910] - Speaker 1
How come we didn't hear your wife's name or your dog's name? They should be cited.

[00:26:27.430] - Speaker 2
Allison is my wife and Boomer is my dog. I know I had to trust why Allison was my wife and Boomer was my dog. I get that. Yeah.

[00:26:33.440] - Speaker 1
I would have never guessed that. It would not be really clear.

[00:26:38.110] - Speaker 2
That was well done. You made my day. All right, dude, listen. Thank you, sir, so much. Your website, josephmichelli.com. Definitely check out stronger through adversity. You can get it on Amazon. Audible if you go to bookstores, it's there, too. Have a great day.

[00:26:51.210] - Speaker 1
Thank you, Mathieu. It was an honor to be here. It's.