Ep7 – The Human Engagement Edition Michelle Mills-Porter

James Nathan: 00:53 Hello and welcome to the only one business show with me, your host, James Nathan, and this week I have got the most fantastic guests for you and I’m sure you’re going to really enjoy the conversation. She’s an international speaker, author, and trainer who specializes in motivation and collaboration. What led her on this path though, was an unlikely event. She got caught up in the boxing day tsunami and it was in the aftermath of this catastrophic disaster that she learned the most amazing lessons about humanity. And it’s these lessons that have been distilled and transferred into tangible strategies for us to use now business. She’s created a suite of analyses to help people to understand themselves and each other on a deeper level to achieve peak performance and unleash our potential. The most innovative is the People Reader, which is an online analysis that you can use or perform on somebody that you want to build rapport with without any input from them.

 

James Nathan: 01:48 The result is an eight page report that shows you how to engage with that person, how to write to them, and how to convert them into a client in the most effective way. She’s won multiple awards as a business owner and for networking, presenting and recently stand up comedy. Please welcome Michelle Mills-Porter. Hi Michelle, how are you?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 02:08 Hi, I’m fabulous. Thanks James. How are you?

 

James Nathan: 02:11 I’m wonderful, thank you. And it’s lovely to have you on. It’s nice having someone on the show that I also call a friend as well as a guest. So it’s a lovely way to spend the time.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 02:20 I suppose a bit of, put you on my Christmas card list and haven’t I?

 

James Nathan: 02:23 [Laughs] If you want. Okay. That’s be nice, I guess. But how are things with you? Are you keeping busy?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 02:35 Yeah, it’s been an incredibly busy year, but it’s been busy in a different way. I’ve been developing lots of these analyses and so my head’s been done and I kind of chair shaped at the moment. I have to go to the gym three times a week just to stop being chair shaped.

 

James Nathan: 02:52 Well that’s a terrible thing. Your back….. But it’s good to be busy, that’s for sure. I’m fascinated by the People Reader Michelle, how does it work? How can I analyze someone I’ve never met?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 03:03 Well, it’s a bit, yes, it’s a little bit cheeky, isn’t it? It is literally….. You have to, okay. Let’s put you in this scenario. Let’s imagine that you and I had met each other a couple of times. We really got on well and you said to me over the shower, what you do sounds brilliant. Why don’t you send me a proposal. That’s the point in time that I would go and use a People Reader analysis? So I literally have to answer just 18 questions about you. But it will ask me things about whether you’re like, how are you going to greet me or you’re going to give me a kiss on the cheek? Are you going to shake my hand? How do you end the meeting? So it was a little bit about body language and your appearance and then it asks questions about your written language.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 03:50 So, how’d you sign your emails off? That’s a really good way for people to be able to understand your behavior and therefore how to build rapport with you. And then it will also ask questions about your general kind of communication. But there’s just 18 of these questions. The result is that I get an immediate eight page report that maps out exactly how to build rapport with you. So that covers, you know, the face to face stuff. It covers the written language, how to write your proposal, how tightly to follow up the sales process or you know, all of those things about building deep rapport.

 

James Nathan: 04:28 That sounds a bit spooky. Is it? Or am I just reading into that a bit?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 04:32 It’s ever so easy. This is the thing about human communication. We are animals and this stuff is second nature to us. So nobody’s gonna think this is rocket science, you know? We’ll actually look at the details, it’s just simple animal instincts. The problem is James, that we are making our skills more dormant. I’m not using them. And, I firmly blame technology for all of that.

 

James Nathan: 05:02 How does, how does technology affect that?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 05:04 Well, I think that what we tend to do in this day and age, when you look at the way that we automate all of our processes and everyone’s into automation, they want to stick you in the Lazy River and keep bombarding you with marketing materials and all that kind of stuff. And they’re just stripping away the human element of communication. Which is the most important part.

 

James Nathan: 05:26 So it’s the data stuff that people are using and thinking’s so clever. But actually it’s diluting our natural abilities, I guess

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 05:35 Literally blunting our communication tools. And I find it really frustrating. The most frustrating thing I find when people have got their heads buried in their phone and all that kind of stuff that you see on a regular basis. If people are not looking in the whites of each other’s eyes, they’re not understanding body language, facial expressions, micro facial expressions. They’re not reading the signs. And so therefore they’re becoming weak communicators. And if we carry on going down this route, then we’re going to have some pretty serious consequences to suffer in terms of communication.

 

James Nathan: 06:12 Do you know, it fascinates me and it also worries me. I look at my children who are eight and, I could do them a disservice, they are 10 and 12. You know, and their entire life is online. Well, it’s not it yet. A lot of it is online. And I do worry, I must say that I look at them and think, you know, wouldn’t it be quicker and easier just for you to pick up the phone and speak to that person. But actually my son’s cottoned onto that and he’s….. I’ve seen him recently when he’s trying to organize someone to go down to the skate park with or whatever it might be. He’s actually phoning, which I think is brilliant because it’s such a nice, normal way to do things rather than tapping away on a screen.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 06:50 Yeah. I’m, my first book was called Phone Genius, The Art of Non Visual Communication. So you’ll hear me harping on about this stuff all the time. But I just think it’s, you know, we need to be really careful that we’re not losing the tools that we were born with, the gifts that we were born with. Because they’re our most valuable asset and in fact the things that will future proof us.

 

James Nathan: 07:14 Can we just step back in time a little bit? Cause you were caught up in the boxing day tsunami, which must’ve been absolutely horrific. How did that awful experience turn into the kind of stuff you’re doing in business now?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 07:30 Do you know? It took a long time, James. There’s the truth of it. It wasn’t an automatic thing. It took me 10 years to kind of distill what it is the I learned in those lessons, and turn into something that is as powerful and valuable as it is today. So, you know, with hindsight, you know, you look back and you think, oh well that’s what happened. There’s the timeline. This is what I do now. But actually it’s years of learning and understanding. I’ll give you an example. So during the tsunami, it was horrific, you’re right, but it was also the most enlightening time of my life because I saw stuff, I saw straight to the heart of people. I saw straight through people right to their core. What I found most fascinating was that we are all magnificent. We all have this inherent goodness, which is just incredible.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 08:29 And you only see it in a life or death situation where people will put their life on the mind for somebody else, for a total stranger. And it’s, it’s a beautiful thing to behold. When I came back, I realized that I was out of line with my values as a human being. My company had been so successful winning all these awards and everything, and the time that I stepped inside my boardroom, when I made it back from the tsunami, I just felt physically sick because I didn’t see anything there that felt real. I just thought, this is narcissistic. It’s showy offy, you know, what’s the point? What’s the point of all of this? And what had happened is during tsunami, I’d been shaken up. And immediately reconnected with my core values as a human being. Which is all about consideration for the people ethics and morals self-development, all of those things. And it took me years to be able to understand that. At the time I just thought, great, I thought I knew about people. In fact, I don’t, what do I know about people? So I literally threw myself into learning everything we could about behaviour and eventually got onto the subject of values.

 

James Nathan: 09:49 And do you look back at the previous Michelle and think, I don’t really like you or was it not as, as kind of, not as great a contrast as that?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 09:58 It’s, no, I think that’s a really difficult question to answer, isn’t it? There are elements of me, that I couldn’t stand, you knowI look back and I mean, I look back and I just think why where you like that? Why was it so important for you to get this recognition? But actually there’s part of me that understands that young woman and forgives her because she didn’t know any better. I think as long as we’re on the right track, as long as we are doing what we feel we’ve been put on this planet to do, then we can forgive the mistakes we’ve made on the way.

 

James Nathan: 10:38 I obviously I appreciate it was a slightly unfair question because, you know, people change over time and the way we remember things through the eyes of that moment are different to the way we might view them in the future. Yeah. We look back at ourselves and think, why did I, or how did I, but actually we were doing probably the best we could at the time. We don’t need to go through tsunamis. I do. We don’t have to go through those kinds of massive life changing processes to get some clarity on our values.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 11:06 No, but it’s a really great example, a polar example of how behaviour works and how connected we are to have values. And a really good example to use when I’m in organizations helping them with their people. Because what we do is we water down all of the lessons that I learned and apply them to the organization. And there are remarkable similarities, you know you just need to kind of blow it up out of proportion to get the tsunami effect.

 

James Nathan: 11:41 So with the businesses you work with, what kind of changes are you looking to help them to achieve?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 11:48 Wow. If I think of a couple of examples, there was one company that bought me in because they had a dysfunctional team. It was a very important team to them, to the business. The director just wasn’t engaging with the team vice versa. So I went in there and we started off with you know, a couple of workshop days and then we did some one to one stuff. And what happened was they, the CEO told me that there was 180 degree turnaround in that team. It is still three years later on, it is still the best performing team in the organization.

 

James Nathan: 12:28 Wow.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 12:30 Yeah, I know it’s astonishing. It is so easy for me cause I see it right from with a bird’s eye view. It’s so easy for me to go in and say this, you know, what to do. There’s another situation where it premiership football club. Basically, I work with their commercial team. I help them just to understand other people to understand their perspective clients. They told me that they hit target for the first time in club history across the board following my training.

 

James Nathan: 13:02 Ever. Wow. That’s a hell of a result.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 13:06 It is. You know, I just, I think it’s remarkable because what I’m doing is I’m helping people to unleash their own magnificence, I’m giving them the tools, but you know, I’m going to tell you a secret. The thing is that organizations think, but I’m going in to help them and of course I am, but I get the biggest kick when I’m doing some one-on-one work with a member of that team and they have one of those incredible moments when they go, oh my gosh, I get it, I get me. I owned it and now I know why I’m having a conflict with that person. Now I know why love that person so much. Now I know why I can’t do that particular role. Why it drives me insane. I love those little realization moments because you just see this, you suddenly take the blockage out of the situation and watch them get completely in flow. And that gives me the biggest kick out of everything.

 

James Nathan: 14:06 I can imagine, I mean, I know that our worlds are different in that we, although we both worked with businesses and that, you know, often it’s easy to see the issues from outside so you can go in and you can pick these things very quickly, but the people in the business need to want to do something with them, don’t they? And I guess the skill is to help them to see rather than just to pointing out.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 14:32 Yeah, no, absolutely. I mean, I think the biggest results that I get are when people just completely adopt this stuff and live and breathe it and just assimilate it. And they become, you know, as big a fan of all of this understanding about the subculture of building rapport as I am. I just love that. And when it becomes a passion.

 

James Nathan: 14:55 And how they then use that to improve the service in their business. Obviously I’m on very keen on, on service and service excellence. How does that understanding impact that part of the business?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 15:07 Well, I think in my experience, because you know, I complain a lot. I complain a lot because when my business, when my first business is very young, I’ve won a plethora of awards and one of them was for customer service company of the year. I only found out after I’d received the award that we nearly were disqualified for the category because one of the judges thought that we weren’t a service industry company. And therefore we shouldn’t be applying for that award. It was argued that actually our service levels were far above and beyond any of the other organizations. And it didn’t matter whether we fit it into their category, so to speak, and we went on to win the award. I don’t know whether it’s because of that, that I have higher expectations. But if something goes wrong, I think that if I was the person in charge of that company, I would want to know because how can we put it better if you don’t know?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 16:06 My experience, however, is that from the majority of complaints that I make, it’s handled by people that really don’t care. They’re going through the motions and it seems that they have these systems set up that are there to placate you or to field you away. Or to buy you off by throwing some money at it when they’re really not understanding what that person wants. So here’s the issue, I think. In customer care, people do not understand what the person complaining wants or needs, and they’re not making any attempt to find out what that person wants or needs. And that’s the biggest crime. If you understand what that person wants and needs, you’ll probably find that it’s much, much easier to be able to make, you know, an effective change to actually make that person turn into a fan rather than going off leaving something that is unsolved, which is then gonna force the opinion of the brand to spread in a negative way. That’s no good for any organization.

 

James Nathan: 17:21 Those complaints…. I mean, I look at complaints, I don’t know if you’d agree with me that, you know, complaints are an opportunity to make a really great friend. And if we treat those people in the way that we would like to be treated ourselves, that’s a really good starting point because most people who complain don’t want anything they want to be heard. And you know, those brush off kind of processes: put on hold, made to wait, so you calm down, all that sort of old fashion stuff. It just, majority of us mad. I know you had a problem with an airline recently, didn’t you? Where you needed to have your voice heard?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 17:59 I did. I think it’s….I won’t go into details about the actual complaint. But you’re the expert on this James. You know exactly what you’re talking about. And, I completely agree. The problem that I have with this airline is that when I, when I made…. it wasn’t actually complaint. It was, you know, a suggestion to not treat your passengers like this again. I just wanted to reply. But they just put me into that….. again, it’s an automated system. They put me into this automated system where I get standard email back and you, you can literally….when I said, this is not good enough. I want a proper answer. You can see where they’ve copied and pasted the same kind of content. And, it’s so annoying. That’s the thing that upsets us when we know that we’ve been treated like a number. When we know that we’re being automated, when we know that we’ve been put into a system and not listened to. So you’re absolutely right. We need to be listened to. We need to know that somebody heard somebody digested it and taken it on board. That’s what I want this airline just thought they could just throw a hundred euros at me right at the first step in the hope that I’d go away. And I thought, this is not the point. I didn’t do this because I won’t compensation I did this because you are hurting your brand.

 

James Nathan: 19:21 It upsets me when I hear these things because I can’t believe that a business, and obviously we’re not naming the airline, but airlines are not small concerns and I can’t believe that they don’t want to improve because if there’s, if it’s a one off problem, then they can fix it. But if it’s a systematic problem, if it’s something that occurs on more than one occasion, then it’s something that needs delving into a bit more deeply. And it’s never…. there’s always a root cause to these things. There’s always a reason why something’s not working the right way, and it may well be that that person wasn’t trained in the right way or that, or something else has gone on. But you know, a decent business, a good business in my kind of definition of a good business would, would want to understand that. And what concerns me is throwing a hundred euros at somebody must work or at least must take those problems away. And all it’s doing is extrapolating, you know, exaggerating the problem for next time.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 20:19 I think there’s an example there of the culture that we’ve created for ourselves and I think there is an element of complaints that actually are that just for compensation. But you know, in this case I just felt the whole thing was so sterile. But it really upset me. The fact that they told me, we will go back, we will feed this back to the crew, we will tell them where they went wrong. We will tell them what they did wrong so it doesn’t happen to somebody else. And I knew that that was a lie. Do you know how I know that was a lie? Because not once did they ask me what flight I was on. How could they possibly go back to the people that did this to me if they have no idea about which flight I was on or, you know, who I was talking about. So it’s very transparent when people are lying and trying to to just field you away. And it just makes situation worse, and worse doesn’t it?

 

James Nathan: 21:30 It does because in this situation, there was the opportunity for them to make a raving fan. And I think any opportunity where you get to make raving fans in our business, particularly in a world where, well, if you look at you know, tourism, almost everybody complains or rejoices on TripAdvisor about things like this. Well, a rejoicing comment is a far nicer thing to field than the complaining one. And, I think in all our businesses, we need to look at where the opportunities are to make things better, where the opportunities are to improve things, but also where the opportunities are to just make people happy, to delight people who come near us so that they go away and say, do you know what? There was a problem on that flight. This was what happened. But actually the way they handled that was magnificent and I couldn’t thank them enough.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 22:21 You’re absolutely right. And I started off the whole process by saying I was a fan. I gave them the opportunity to correct that relationship. Because I was a fat, I never had anything bad to say about them. I used to say how wonderful this particular airline was. And now, you know, I’m left in a situation where I’m contemplating how I take it further. How is that use to anyone? You know, they’ve completely destroyed the relationship.

 

James Nathan: 22:52 It’s not at all. I was on a flight recently to to Lithuania on Wizz Air, which is, you know, extremely cheap airline. And there are a couple of people on that flight complaining about something and the woman next to me said, well, you know, what do they expect for what they paid? And I think in my head I’m thinking, yeah, it’s really cheap. I mean, less than 20 quid to fly halfway across Europe is an enormous…. you know stupid, stupidly cheap. However, it doesn’t matter what the price paid was. The service that you expect is the service you expect. And you know, you can’t get away with saying, well, you didn’t pay much, so you don’t deserve very much. I think that the bigger airlines, you know, can learn from the mistakes of others. You mentioned culture before you, you touched on that very briefly. How do we go about instilling the correct value levels in business cultures? How can we change those? Or how can we make sure we’re getting the right people in the first place?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 23:52 Well, I think everyone’s the right person and that’s something from my behaviour background. I think it’s a dangerous scenario when an organization comes to me and says, Michelle, we want to hire these people with these profiles. That’s very, very dangerous route. Everyone has valuable things to bring to the party. We just need to be able to expose their prominent qualities. So it’s not about hiring people with the right behaviours. I think the most important thing is making sure that you’re engaging with them. Because if you think about it, let’s think of a scenario, going into a retail environment, going into your local shop. Now I remember going into my local shop, young as a younger person and being really in awe of the customer care that you got. You know, how the salespeople would handle you, how they saw you. How they saw the whole opportunity about you making a purchase that you’re going to be proud of and all the rest of it. Nowadays, you walk into a shop and people are just standing there twiddling their thumbs. They completely disengaged. They’re not interested in you. It’s, you know, everything is too much bother. It doesn’t matter whether you want to try something on or whether you want to look at a demonstration. It’s all huffing and puffing. And I understand why people are driven to buy things online, because it’s not a pleasurable experience to walk into a shop and buy something anymore. But I think it starts with making sure that the organization is engaging with their people, making them feel that they are respected and wanted and not disenfranchised.

James Nathan: 25:35 Can I pick back to a point you just made there? That everybody is the right person? Are they really, because it always strikes me that if I go into a shop and, and that the staff, they’re totally disengaged. My first thought is how are they being treated by the management? How are they being trained? How are they being hired and are these people being hired into the right roles? You know, we all need to work and you know, it’d be lovely world where everyone had everything they needed without having to earn it. But that’s not the case. So for some people, yes they just have to go to work. But if you’re in a role which doesn’t work for you, then the business has an obligation, I think to look at that and say, right, well where would this person be best off in our business. If we’ve hired them? If we’ve taken them on, if we’ve given them, you know, the opportunity to work in our, in our world, why are we putting them in places where they’re not happy or how are we helping them to enjoy where they are?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 26:27 No, you’re absolutely right. And, you know, I don’t want it to come across as me saying everyone is the only person for you and ufor that particular role. Cause that’s not necessarily what I mean. What I mean is that we shouldn’t discriminate against certain behaviors and that kind of thing. But you are absolutely spot on. I have a particular tool in one of my analyses that shows how aligned someone’s values are to the role that they are doing. And it can highlight the things that particular prominent qualities that are required for that position. And whether they share those prominent qualities or not. When people come to me and say, well, Michelle, this person isn’t fitting into the role, my answer is not, we’ll get rid of them and find someone who will. My answer is let’s find a way to make them fit into a role that is in line with their values and therefore will produce a much better performance rates. Because if someone is in line with their values, then their behaviors will be in line as well and their performance will go through the roof. It’s when somebody’s working with something that’s against their boundaries and against their natural prominent qualities, that’s when we start to find blockages. That’s where we start to find, you know, a lack of energy. And that’s where we start to see performance dipping and nose dive.

 

James Nathan: 27:49 And that, that means that the business needs to truly understand their core value to start with, doesn’t it?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 27:55 Yes. It doesn’t have to be that the business core values are…. the people are aligned to the business school values. The business values are usually something that you see on a wall somewhere displayed for everyone to see. And it’s just an ideal really, what we’re talking about is the values of your people. And making sure that they’re doing a job that allows them to be in line with those values. And, that’s understanding what they really enjoy doing. And it sounds really complicated but actually it’s not if you use an analysis or some kind of tool that will help you to understand what makes that person motivated, then it’s very easy to find the role that is best gonna fit them.

 

James Nathan: 28:38 Back to that. The values on a wall thing. Cause I see that all the time and I, I talk about it a lot. In fact, I was speaking to someone this morning about that. If those values don’t actually fit with the true style of the business, then it’s just lip services isn’t it.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 28:56 Well it is and that’s the problem. Most people just put it up there because it looks good or they think they’ve done a good job and they’ve ticked the list. But there again, those are people that are not engaged. So you can have a lack of engagement at director level, at managerial level, you know, on the shop floor, on all levels. They can be a disengagement. I’m a fan of authenticity and I think in the culture that we live in, authenticity is key. Why on earth would we be so interested in things like, you know, reality TV and all that kinds of stuff. It’s, our culture. It’s the way that we’re heading. So authenticity is absolutely key and what we need to do is really sit down and you know, belly button gaze about what it is that we’re doing this for and what are our real values as an organization and just stand by them.

 

James Nathan: 29:49 When we started this conversation, you mentioned old-fashioned businesses, and I remember very clearly going into the grocers with my grandmother in Melbourne and you know, her buying tomatoes and what have you, whatever it was that she was, she needed that day. And the grocer knew her. He knew what she liked, he knew that she liked her apricot’s a little bit more green than orange, you know, that kind of stuff. And there was a level of personalization that came with it, but also you mentioned care and they really did truly care about their client base. If we can get back to something like that, then I think we build amazing business. We just have to get the understanding right.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 30:30 Yeah. And I think it’s a really difficult thing if you are scaling your business up, it’s very difficult to go back to that one on one care. So whats when things like behaviour, understanding behaviour can really help. I know as a speaker, if I put my speaker hat on, I know that when I’m going to speak to an organization full of lawyers, then I have to deliver it in a different way to the way I would if I was going to speak to a room full of charity workers. There are differences in behaviour and if we can talk in their language, then we can build rapport on a subconscious level. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be one-on-one understanding. It can be a general understanding in terms of what those kinds of people want. How do they want to be communicated with? What are their likes and dislikes? And those are very easy patterns to see in human behaviour. Very, very easy patterns to see.

 

James Nathan: 31:33 As long as you have the right guide, I guess.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 31:35 Yeah. It’s just, again, it’s just being reconnected with the values we were given. Let’s face it, James, if we were dogs, you know, we could go to each other, have a little sniff, and we could work out immediately, whether we’re going to get on with each other or not. That is a gift that, you know, we have and you know, as part of the animal kingdom we forget all of those things that are natural, that are natural abilities in terms of getting on with each other. You know, we need to reconnect with some of those things.

 

James Nathan: 32:10 Michelle, you’ve given us so much to think about. Thank you so, so much. How do people get in touch with you if they’d like to?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 32:17 Oh, link in, LinkedIn is by far the easiest way isn’t it? Just link in with me. And the only thing I would suggest is if people link in with me, please put a personalized message because I get so many people trying to link with me without a personal message. I never know whether we’ve met, whether we’ve got something in common. So it really helps to put a personal message. If you just say, oh, I heard your interview, we’d like to connect, I’d be thrilled to accept.

 

James Nathan: 32:45 Lovely. And Michelle, just before we go, cause I’m conscious of your time as well and thank you so much for all the time and thoughts you’ve given us. What’s the one thing, what’s the golden nugget you’d like to leave with people to think about that can help them make their businesses better today?

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 32:59 Oh, it’s easy, it’s just a be more human. Stop trying to automate everything. Stop trying to feel things away and put people into boxes. Just being more human. Listen more, respond personally, and just be more human. That’s it.

 

James Nathan: 33:16 Michelle. That’s fantastic. Thank you so, so much.

 

Michelle Mills-Porter: 33:20 It’s my absolute pleasure.