The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Michael Ward

**SPEAKER_2** (0:03)
The Bliss Business Podcast, the show about empathy, connection and consciousness in business. Today's episode is brought to you by Zero Company, your paid search, social media, and programmatic ad experts.

**Stephen Sakach** (0:17)
Well, welcome back to the show everyone, where we explore empathy, connection, and purpose and how they transform your business from the inside out. I'm Stephen with my co-host, Mike.
Today, we're going to talk with Michael Ward, who Mike will introduce here in a second. Research shows that 90 percent of top performers have high emotional intelligence, yet only 36 percent of people can identify their emotions as they happen. In today's fast-changing business world, that EQ is no longer a soft skill, it's a leadership superpower. Mike, introduce our guest who we're talking to today.

**Mike Liwski** (0:56)
Yeah, I'm not sure. This is the first time this has happened, Steve. We had another Michael on the show. What are we, like 204 episodes in now?

**Stephen Sakach** (1:05)
Something like that.

**Mike Liwski** (1:07)
Our guest today is none other than Michael Ward. He's the founder and the CEO of Paminga, which you can find at paminga.com. It's a modern marketing automation platform that's built really as an alternative to tools that many of our guests and followers will be familiar with, Marketo, Marketing Cloud, Eloqua, and even HubSpot. What really sets Paminga apart, though, is its massively lower learning curve, which we know is critical when it comes to the use of this technology. It's clean. It has a modern design and legendary customer support, which we know in terms of lifetime value and supporting your customers is critical. As well, the setup and migration is measured really in days, not months, as I'm sure many of us have experienced. Michael brings a unique background with him. His background reflects that same blend of versatility and customer focus. He's worked as a database architect, a UX designer, a front and back-end coder. He's really led sales and marketing teams as well. As a leader, he's highly particular about customer support and believes that software should empower rather than really fight back. As well as outside of his work, Michael is a father of twins, a former geologist, believe it or not, and an avid mountain biker, rock climber, skier, and even a rock band singer, which I don't know, maybe Michael sing a few lines for us, living there in Colorado. Welcome to the show, Michael. We're so happy to have you.

**Michael Ward** (2:57)
Thanks for having me, guys.

**Stephen Sakach** (2:59)
Michael, as mentioned there, your career has spanned a bunch of different areas, technology, leadership, entrepreneurship. What first revealed to you that emotional intelligence is kind of a defining factor in effective leadership?

**Michael Ward** (3:20)
Not so much a revelation for me, more of a slow realization that everyone, everything I do is about people, right? I mean, I write code sometimes, not so much these days, but I write code for people and everyone on my teams are people, all my customers are people, all my partners are people. And the connection that, you know, it's just to me, it's the most basic thing there is, is to treat people as the humans that they are. And slowly learned my leadership style evolved to more and more embrace that, that authenticity and connection help achieve the results that I'm after.

**Stephen Sakach** (4:03)
Yeah, for sure. I almost think sometimes, what's the point if you're not, you know, being authentic and being human in the process, instead of having like those two different roles you play as like leader.

**Mike Liwski** (4:15)
Yeah, for sure. I mean, it's just so natural to you, right? And we have, we have a mouth in order to be able to communicate ears, in order to be able to hear each other. So they're obviously there, you know, for a reason. So, Michael, maybe we all love to learn from examples, right? And examples, I'm sure you've got tons. You know, many leaders as well today, they kind of see EQ as, you know, sort of a personal trait, rather than what it really should be as a business strategy. So I'm kind of curious, you know, can you share maybe a few examples of how you've seen emotional intelligence, perhaps even, you know, come into play and shift outcomes either for yourself or, you know, the companies that you work for?

**Michael Ward** (4:58)
Sure. I've seen it again and again in live conversation with prospects doing, you know, demos with potential partners, where something that I hear commonly is that personally, I come across as straightforwardly authentic, like obviously authentic. And that just builds trust so quickly when people, when you're perceived as authentic, it was obvious that you are authentic. You know, trust is built much more quickly. You can move forward in other parts of conversation with much more ease when, you know, I don't know, it's your typical sales situation where somebody's selling, it's not an authentic process. And there's so much of that, you know, there's a fair amount of that in the world. And I just have been not that way for decades. And I've just watched it repeatedly, you know, working agreements with partners, and building relationships with people around the world, which is one of the benefits of my business. So the examples, they're just beyond numerous. It's every day.