Joseph Michelli

205: Joseph Michelli: Getting over my bad self

Intro: Welcome to the Fast Leader Podcast, where we explore convenient yet effective shortcuts that will help you get ahead and move forward faster by becoming a better leader. And now here’s your host, customer and employee engagement expert and certified emotional intelligence practitioner, Jim Rembach.

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Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader legion today I’m excited because I have somebody on the show today who have known from afar for a long time and if it isn’t have admired his work and so now I get the opportunity to share it with you. Joseph Michelli was born in Raton, New Mexico and raised in Florence, Colorado. He was going to a found in a trash can at the age of three and adopted by two loving parents he was an only child from an intact Italian blue-collar family. Joseph’s first job was on his uncle’s dairy farm after which he began a career as a radio disc jockey at age   continuing as a union musician and radio personality through college he worked as an organizational development specialist. After receiving his PhD from the University of Southern California Dr. Joseph Michelli helps leaders and business owners define and build memorable brands. 

He activates people processes and technology to consistently deliver service experiences that drive loyalty and sustain profits. He’s a Wall Street Journal, USA Today, Publishers Weekly, Nielsen BookScan and New York Times’ number one bestseller. His latest book is, Driven to Delight–Delivering World class Customer Experience the Mercedes-Benz way. Joseph’s other titles include Leading the Starbucks Way, The Zappos Experience, Prescription for Excellence, The Starbucks Experience and the New Gold Standard and When Fish Fly, not fry fly.  Having journeyed with a close family member through a six year battle with breast cancer, Dr. Michelli is committed to social causes associated with curing cancer as well as abating world hunger. He believes his greatest legacy is his two adult children’s kindness towards others and their servant hearts. Joseph currently lives in St. Petersburg, Florida. Joseph Michelli are you ready to help us get over the hump?

Joseph Michelli:     Are you kidding? Of course I am, let’s do it Jim.

Jim Rembach:    I’m glad you’re here now given my legion a little bit about you but can you tell us what your current passion is so that we can get to know you even better? 

Joseph Michelli:     It’s really pretty simple, it’s serving people who are committed to serving other people. Well, that’s tit in a nutshell I mean that’s nice and it’s a sink. However, the way that you go about doing that can be quite complex it really is I mean I think a lot of us have de-conditioned our other nests and we’re pretty focused on our self needs. From a business perspective and a personal satisfaction perspective helping people figure out how to do it and then from a business perspective what are the levers that you can pull to try to drive a greater service experience within your culture.

Now I haven’t had the opportunity to get deep into the book however I was perusing and looking over the contents just to prepare myself for our interview today and I started looking at the content and to  me it’s kind of laid out really like a road map, no pun intended we’re talking about Mercedes Benz, but I mean when you start looking at this process and talking to the CEO you had some comments about the timing and the aspects of going through this transition but what did it look like for Mercedes Benz to go through this?

Joseph Michelli:     Well, I had an incredible good fortune to be working with Mercedes Benz. The leader at Mercedes-Benz, the CEO who wanted to transform the culture authentically from a pure understanding that he didn’t manufacture the cars that was happening with decisions being made in Germany, there was certainly a plant in Vance, Alabama but he wasn’t in charge of manufacturing plant he was in charge of Mercedes-Benz USA the OEM that distributes out to the dealer community, he had an authentic commitment to try to help those dealers create greater connections produce greater business results at their dealerships and overall elevate the service experience of the brand. So, with that starting point we took his vision of what that could look like. There was a lot of time spent imagining what the gaps were between the current state and the optimal future state lots of strategic war room planning on what could we do from a people process and technology perspective that would gain parity with others in the industry actually the differentiators and compete against the best of the best service experiences outside of automotive. Go head to head with another brand clients that I’ve worked with for a book, The Ritz-Carlton it to be thought of in the same rarefied air of service experience excellence is a Ritz Carlton for example and so it really was a roadmap. This is the destination here are our gaps here’s what we need to do let’s get in the war room and figure out how we get there. 

Jim Rembach:    I would dare to say that when you start thinking about certain organizations that are in the position of say like a Mercedes Benz where they have dealerships that you’re dealing with owners of those different dealerships and so it’s not just, hey, the company and what we’re trying to do at that level but I also have to have that filter down and through all of my dealerships, how does that happen?

Joseph Michelli:     Well, that’s a great point I’ve written books about Starbucks and the Starbucks is pretty much—we make a decision at leadership and we have our managers follow it and everybody’s paid for us and gets a W2 from us. When you’re talking about dealership you’re talking about independent business owners so you’re really talking about a business to business to customer relationships. How do you help the middle B and the B to B to C to be successful? I think a lot of it is, A: showing them that there is profit to be made in greater customer care. This is just not all fluffy puppy dogs and roses kind of storytelling this is really the human beings—buy more cars if you treat them well. Employees treat people better if you treat them well. If we can show the money on the back side of that then people are willing to invest in doing it otherwise it’s a nice to have—it’s something you’d like to be known for but it’s not something you put the work into to make happen in your business. I think one of the great successes was not only selling him on the vision but to demonstrate the financial upside of doing so. And even adjusting incentives and compensation within the ecosystem so that dealers that did it well got more compensation than dealers who treated customers poorly, now I’m going to feel it in my wallet. We’re seeing it in healthcare we’re seeing in a lot of other places where value-based purchasing means that doctors not only have to produce quality outcomes but they have to also treat people like human beings while they’re doing it. The days of a Dr. House in the television show where you can be the best infectious disease specialist in the world and treat people like total crap are gone. And so we had to get to that message in the dealerships and people heard it saw it and demonstrated the financial benefits of it and it sustained in the culture. 

Jim Rembach:    Well and there’s a couple things that you mentioned that kind of stand out to me especially when you start thinking about the automotive industry as an entirety. You talk about voice of customer you talk about incentivizing and I think many of us in the North American market have either purchased a vehicle or gotten the service and then you get that pressure where it’s, hey, you’re going to be getting a survey and in order for me to take care of my family I need a ten. So, what is it going to take in order for you to give me a ten?

Joseph Michelli:     The whole customer journey in automotive has had to change. People aren’t going to dealerships to see the car for the first time all the search is happening in digital space they’re coming in already pre-determined what their choices. They don’t want a long buying experience within a dealership they want to be able to experience the test drive so they can get a tangible realization of the car that they’ve already mentally decided to buy. Now done that as quickly as possible they don’t want to negotiate or hassle there’s plenty of options online where I can have transparency in pricing let’s get through all of that let’s also do away with anything that’s going to cause me to feel like you’re baiting me or incentivizing me or your family won’t eat unless I get a ten that’s over. I think that brands that figure that out are going to be sustainable those who are holding on the legacy service delivery models that work for them but not for the consumer. In every sector of our world are going to perish ultimately \. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s a very interesting point. Last year I had the opportunity to be at a startup incubator program in Silicon Valley and there was a gentleman that was there that was in the automotive industry who talking about that whole brand and automotive experience he started talking about how even when we start thinking in context of shared rides and things like that that it’s quite possible that within the next ten years people won’t even own cars, and I’m like, really? It just seems kind of far-fetched and hard to believe. But when you start thinking about a brand that is facing that possibility of disruption how can they going to make sure that they’re on the front end of that instead of back end? 

Joseph Michelli:     There’s pretty good literature in urban environments that trend is likely to happen in the foreseeable future. I think in rural environments there’s still some suggestion that the automobile plays a very important role in ride-sharing, it’s probably not the solution yet there. That said I think in those industries you have to be very future backward thinking in the customer experience design you’re creating. It’s not enough to just look at your current customer journey, do customer journey mapping look at that journey and then identify pain points and ways to iteratively improve it. You have to think about where is the customer going to be in the future? What is technology predicting and what do we need to do given the predictions of the exponential growth of technology? Because if you don’t and you only incrementally grow your business there’s going to be a huge gap between what technology can do and what you’re growing at that gap is the disruption space and it’s really where you should be thinking. 

Specific to the automobile industry I think it’s a nightmare but I do think you have to be thinking about, well maybe we get involved in sourcing those shared companies as opposed to going direct to consumer.

Jim Rembach:    That’s an interesting point. Now I had another guest on the show, Michael Gale, he wrote the book called, The Digital Helix, and he talks about how journey mapping, and he was on the front end of the journey mapping process or being able to do all that, he talked about journey mapping being dead it’s over because of some of the things that you kind of alluded to. When we talk about the process piece and we talk about the journey sometimes I could be so involved with my process and that type of thinking that I don’t see what’s going on outside of that process component. How do you make sure that an organization doesn’t get so absorbed that they miss those things that are going on in the ecosystem?

Joseph Michelli:     I believe it’s not dead. I think if you do it by itself it may be dead but even doing it by itself is better than what a lot of organizations do right now which has never considered the perspective of the customer when they’re designing the overall flow of their business. For me journey mapping is a step up from a time when we drag our knuckles in the cave and said it’s all about us and it has nothing to do with the customer and the customer will endure our process. Stepping up to a journey mapping gets you into empathy of the customer experience which is very valuable it. It also enables your team to start iteratively making improvements particularly around pain points elevating peak moments and elevating recent experiences. If you do those things and celebrate victories you get some lift out of journey mapping. But if that’s all you do then you miss these very things that your guests so eloquently pointed out which is the future is pushing on us at a rapid rate and we need to think future backwards along with journey mapping. Literally technologies we use with clients include both persona based journey mapping for segmentation and an approach to understanding cultural trends likely disruptors and adopting some of the known customer behaviors and accelerating some of our opportunities to change the entire journey. Forget about the existing touch points build touch points that are relevant from the consumer world based on where we see the consumer going.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so as you’re talking I started thinking about what we have quite often about that inside out and outside in type of view is that to have that both.

Joseph Michelli:     Yeah, I think you have to have both. And you also have to have future backwards view as much as today and slightly better tomorrow view. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s a good point. Okay, so Steve Cannon, in the book you had mentioned something about him receiving a benefit in order to be able to go through this transition and he was talking about the work that came previously and so when you start looking at this and process give me an idea of the length of it?

Joseph Michelli:     His goal is a four year transformation they are just overachievers at Mercedes-Benz their tagline is best or nothing and when they go for something full-on they go for it full on so they go for it full on. They did  probably got two and a half years in they had done a very significant amount of this transformation and we’re just kind of riding out the coattails of what they needed to do. Prior to that he had had some benefits of a very positive employee culture. A lot of work had been done on employee engagement and he had a really beautiful physical plant. Most of the dealerships had upgraded the overall aesthetics of their dealerships. So o that was all foundational but then he had to activate people to elevate the experience to meet the level of the engineering of the cars.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so you had mentioned something about that whole forward thinking component and then you also talked about now they’re writing some of the coattails but we know they can’t do that for long that’s when you have to disrupt again.

Joseph Michelli:     Absolutely, yeah. I mean there’s plenty of curves out there that show that most companies fail to invest when they start becoming complacent if you look at the economic projection curves, I think it’s Handy’s curve is one of the big ones, so yeah, I think you often fail at your complacency moments. Success is hard but sustaining success is harder.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so I’ve gotten a couple different opinions from different folks however when you start thinking about, like we had mentioned in your bio you talk about people, process, technology all of those things what’s the most challenging of all?

Joseph Michelli:     Well, people are the ones that let you down that’s where your brand falls apart. If you look at most of complaints that customers have it’s going to be through your people. So, not sustaining your focus in selection, onboarding training that’s a big one for most companies they get that up. The other one that’s really hard to figure out which technology like of all the things I could invest in which should I invest in? Where should I double down? I think the last one I’ll say is just killing your darlings in any of those areas getting to in love with any one set of processes for example and not being willing to pivot off of them when you see the marketplace changing. 

Jim Rembach:    So when you’re talking about that I started thinking about that whole organizational structure component and what I’ve seen often times is that organization’s will thin themselves out so much that you have too many key people looking at so many different things and it goes back into that whole multitasking I can’t do all of these things component. So how have you helped organizations make sure that they are keeping different eyes on all of those things? 

Joseph Michelli:     Well, I think it does oftentimes require somebody from outside to do it. Because you can convince yourself of anything inside of the system. It does take a voice outside to ask those hard questions, are you sure? How certain are you? What would happen if? Let’s play out this wargame scenario where you get restricted in your ability to do X Y or Z, now tell me how you’re going to adapt given the current employee structure you have.  I think we can best case it all the time and reduce staff. I think you have to realistically case it and decide who do have to hold on to given the most probable scenarios that we could see in the marketplace whether that’s competitors or economic factors. 

Jim Rembach:    I think that’s really interesting point you just brought up. I was just reading something yesterday just talking about development of skill and when you start looking at getting people to invest in developing and training their skills it’s like one of the biggest chores there is for an organizations is that they get so stuck with—have got to do this I’ve got to do that and that they don’t think of I have to work on me in order for me to be able to bring that more value. 

Joseph Michelli:     Absolutely. In a Harvard Business Review claimed a term called VUCA which is volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous and it really speaks to the business environment it was applied traditionally to the war scenarios where war scenarios were all about having opponents in a volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous environment. That’s why I often refer to war games I think a lot of this is scenario running in your head to say, let’s not just assume best-case or mid case let’s be capable of that and to do that we have to train people to be very adaptive and pivot in that kind of a business environment and we have to train ourselves. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s true. Okay, so being the writer of several books and looking at the back of your room you have several books, when you let started looking all that—they say that people who write are people who read the most so I’m sure you do that. But when you start thinking about quotes, they’re very inspirational to us and I’m sure they are to you, if you had one or two that you can share what would it be?

Joseph Michelli:     Well, I think Earl Nightingale influenced me a lot when I was coming up, he had a big voice and he was on the radio and I was working in a radio station where he’d had this one-minute moments every day that we play on the radio station. I remember him saying that, our rewards in life will always be in proportion or in ratio to our service. And I think for me that has been critically important to understand the more I focus on service the more life works itself out. The more I try to figure out how to calculate my own destiny the less I’m focused on the needs of others. So Earl Nightingale’s our rewards in life are proportional or in ratio to our service. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s a good one. Okay, so when I started thinking about—just what we were talking about off mic and coming on here and looking at this whole transition and being a disc jockey at 13, how in the heck you got into the whole PhD thing from there is an interesting thing but writing several books going through and consulting and all of the things that you’ve been through I’m sure there’s a lot of humps and things that we could learn, is there a story that you can share with us? 

Joseph Michelli:     Yeah, my biggest hump is in my personal life. I kind of start really early on and I was not wanting to do much more than focus on dating when I was in my late 20s and finishing up my PhD program and I dated a woman for a year who was putting a little more pressure to say is this all there is> Are you just all about yourself and the next date? And my answer was pretty much yes, unfortunately, and she said well I’m committed to something longer term and I want somebody who’s committed to seeing a greater future for two people joined together in the power of teams. She kind of walked away from me for a while I followed her we ultimately decided to marry and we focused on what would our legacy be if we were to effectively this team and that was a hump for me to get through that time in my life. The legacy turned out to be we’re going to raise two kids that would give more to the world than they took. 

Ultimately, that particular person named Nora died of breast cancer about five years ago and at the end of her life in the very last days of her life it was my son who had to stop working in his dream job and relocated to be there with his mother who had humbled himself to learn how to be a CNA so he could take care of her in hospice time. It was my son who was toileting his mother and taking her from her toilet to her, what would ultimately be her deathbed. I can tell you that time in my life the aha moment that comes from that lesson is that we do need to get out of our own sense of the now what’s in it for me and start thinking about what can we create with other people in the service of others. And I think the more we do that the more we leave a legacy of significance. If I look at that scenario in retrospect I also realize that we don’t know how much time we have and we can spend all this time in self-indulgence. I think we want to leave a lasting mark on the planet for our time spent here. So I would say the bump that I got through was getting over my bad self and starting to think about what I could accomplish with somebody else and realizing that we don’t know how much time we have so let’s get on it. 

Jim Rembach:    I appreciate you sharing that. There’s so many things that came flooding in my mind I started thinking about me and something that I’m going through in the past day or two where I need to think a little bit beyond just the moment that it’s frustrating the heck out of me with one of my kids. 

Joseph Michelli:     I think that’s exactly—it’s natural to think about ourselves, it’s just like, okay so now what? The so what of that is so let’s do something with that and let’s try to bring some good to others through whatever we’re going through. And the more we do that the better it works out in the situation that we’re so troubled by. 

Jim Rembach:    Well, okay, when you start thinking about that and that driving that force and thinking about correlating and connecting it with customer experience and having brands bring that type of power to be able to leave a legacy, where do you kind of see things going? 

Joseph Michelli:     Working with leaders all the time about their legacy I help try to get individuals to say, okay that’s the purpose of the organization they talk about it all the time but you as a manager as a leader as a frontline person, how do you connect to that purpose? Now what’s your personal lasting goal? What do you want to be known for? What’s your lifelong brands going to be about? And how does that play into serving others and then how do you yoke that back up with the overall purpose of the organization where you find yourself today? So I think the more we can get people to say, I don’t want to be known for making this incremental increase in a net promoter score I want to be known for creating a place where people tell others about how they were cared about and I can do that and that fits with the company’s vision of X Y or Z. 

Jim Rembach:    As you’re talking I start thinking about essentially being in a conference room with all the heads of my organization and all of them have different views and viewpoints and I start thinking about vision but then I started getting into that alignment component, how well or what kind of humps, talking about getting over, that do you see organizations have to go through to get that kind of consensus? Because it really it has to be a consensus. You mentioned the word before we came on mic “all in” that Mercedes-Benz at the top level they were all into this transformation, how do you get them? 

Joseph Michelli:     Yeah, I think that you really do have to have that honest discussion about, is this who you want to be? Are you just going to do this? Because if you are not going to be this if this is not part of your essence a part of your self-purpose then really you’d be better off going to someplace where your self-purpose could be expressed. And it would be better for that organization and better for you, no hard feelings here, we celebrate we consider that great insight and will help you do it it’s a willingness to do that and a willingness to have the conversations and a willingness to say, will we see it in your behavior? You say it with your mouth? Where are your feet going to be? What are your actions going to be? 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so as you were saying and I started thinking about being proactive with it so that you can do it with dignity because if it’s not active it’s not going to be done with dignity. 

Joseph Michelli:     No it’s not about beating people up because they were in a fit and they’re not living the dream of your company and they’re not showing their passion for purpose. It’s really helping them realize that their purpose might not be aligned with yours and there’s no hard feelings there’s a lot of different places to work in America. Nike has a kind of competitive purpose I wouldn’t work well there it’s just not my thing to dominate and win. But for somebody who is they’re not probably on my team and I’m good with that. If somebody were on my team and we were having this discussion about alignment and all in and they were really wanting to take out a competitor I’d be saying, look please find that company where your soul was saying it’s not going to be here. 

Jim Rembach:    That’s a good point. Okay, we’re not going to name it but you talked about working on another book and that coming out in a few months or so…

Joseph Michelli:     I’ll tell you the company I just can’t name the book because we don’t have a title yet but if a company is Airbnb, it’s kind of the antithesis of what I did with the Ritz-Carlton where we’re talking about the premiere traditional hotel chain and then we’re going to be writing about the alternative technology disrupter and again create a branded experience through a completely uncontrolled set of hosts. 

Jim Rembach:    It’s a totally different dynamic because they own nothing. 

Joseph Michelli:     Yeah, and yet you’re trying to influence experience that holds together around belong anywhere.

Jim Rembach:    Okay, so you have that you have other consulting projects, speaking, and things like that but when you look at all the things that you have in your plate, what’s one goal? 

Joseph Michelli:     Oh, my gosh!  I think it’s really pretty simple, I want people to figure out how to improve the world of service, that’s it, it’s really simple. How do I make sure that it’s easier, better, faster or kinder more memorable than it was the last time you tried to serve a customer. 

Jim Rembach:     And the Fast Leader Legion wishes you the very best. Now before we move on let’s get a quick word from our sponsor. 

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Jim Rembach:     Alright, here we go Fast Leader Legion it’s time for the Hump day Hoedown. Okay, Joseph, the Hump day Hoedown is a part of our show where you give us good insights fast. I’m going to ask you several questions and your job is to give us robust yet rapid responses that are going to help us move onward and upward faster. Joseph Michelli, are you ready to hoedown? 

Joseph Michelli:     I am ready, let’s go. 

Jim Rembach:    What do you think is holding you back from being an even better leader today?

Joseph Michelli:     I think in general I am still thinking I need to have all the answers. 

Jim Rembach:    What is the best leadership advice you have ever received? 

Joseph Michelli:     That you don’t need to have all the answers you need to ask really smart questions. 

Jim Rembach:    What is one of your secrets that you believe contributes to your success?

Joseph Michelli:     I think that I’ve studied emotional intelligence and I believe in the power of emotional intelligence that means empathy that means my capacity to kind of try to read social situations for appropriateness it means being very realistic about my own weakness and being very self-aware and having self-discipline. 

Jim Rembach:    What do you feel is one of your best tools that helps you lead in business or life?

Joseph Michelli:     Mentors and colleagues who are so kind to be on the board of directors of my life and guide me whenever I am in doubt 

Jim Rembach:    What would be one book that you’d recommend to our legion, it could be from any genre, and of course we’re going to put a link to all of your books on your show notes page as well. 

Joseph Michelli:     Well, I read it all the time it’s, Man’s Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl, it’s my one of my favorite books. It’s a reminder that no matter how bad things get in a concentration camp there are human beings who are capable of doing amazing things on behalf of others. 

Jim Rembach:    Okay, Fast Leader legion you can find links to that and other bonus information on today’s show by going to fastleader.net/JosephMichelli. Okay, Joseph, this is my last Hump Day Hoedown question: Imagine you were given the opportunity to go back to the age of 25. And you can take the knowledge and skills back with you but you can’t take everything back you can only choose one. What skill or piece of knowledge would you take back with you and why? 

Joseph Michelli:     That it is more important to care about people than anything else in the entire planet. Caring about people is the insurance plan for your future, it really is. And caring about yourself is the insurance plan to make sure that there’s nobody there to insure you. 

Jim Rembach:    Joseph it was an honor to spend time with you today. Can you please share with the Fast Leader Legion how they can connect with you? 

Joseph Michelli:     It’s pretty simple my name is my website so josephmichelli.com. 

Jim Rembach:    Joseph Michelli, thank you for sharing your knowledge and wisdom the Fast Leader Legion honors you and thanks you for helping us get over the hump. Woot! Woot!

Thank you for joining me on the Fast Leader show today. For recaps, links from every show special offers and access to download and subscribe, if you haven’t already, head on over the fastleader.net so we can help you move onward and upward faster. 

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