The Power of Emotional Intelligence in Business with Kelly Roddy

**SPEAKER_1** (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** (0:16)
Well, welcome back to the show, everyone. I'm Stephen Sakach here with my co-host, Mike Liwski, as always, and our special guest today, who we'll introduce here in a second.
Studies show leaders with high emotional intelligence see about a 30 percent increase in employee engagement and a 40 percent boost in team performance compared to their peers. The message is clear, emotional intelligence is not a soft, nice to have. It is a core driver of how people perform, stay, and grow at work, and the most resilient companies are led by people who can make the hard decision but still lead with empathy, clarity, and care. Today, we are exploring what the power of emotional intelligence in business really looks like in practice, especially inside a multi-brand restaurant platform that is trying to make healthy eating both accessible and profitable. Mike, introduce our guest today.

**Mike Liwski** (1:14)
Absolutely delighted to you, Stephen. Our guest today is Kelly Roddy. He is the CEO of WOWorks, which is the parent company actually of six good for you restaurant brands, including, for example, Salad Works, Fruitables, Garbanzo Mediterranean Fresh, The Simple Greek, Barberitos and Zeats. So under Kelly's leadership, really, WOWorks has accelerated its expansion really across the United States and Canada, and is now really on a mission to help guests live healthier lives through nutritious, flavorful meals and exceptional hospitality.
The vow to WOW, I hope that comes up in our conversation today. In fact, as well, Kelly's career in the restaurant industry is marked as a transformative leader. As president of Schlotzky's, he repositioned the brand and doubled average unit sales. And then in 2019, he took over Salad Works and guided it through the challenges of the COVID-19 pandemic. And then further, in 2020, he became the CEO of WOWorks, leading the growth really of a portfolio of better for you brands. And he also brings more than two decades of executive experience from HEB, Scholastic and Walmart. So with that, Kelly, welcome to The Bliss Business Podcast.

**Kelly Roddy** (2:42)
Well, hey, thanks for having me, Michael and Stephen. I love what you guys are doing with the podcast and what it stands for. And I think what we do at WOWorks very much aligns with what you're doing. We're trying to lead with our heart and with passion and motivate those around us to live their best lives.

**Mike Liwski** (3:11)
We love that. Yep, certainly trying to do more good in the world through our business. So in terms of the topic today, Kelly, is there a personal connection, would you say, perhaps with the topic of emotional intelligence? Or why is it so important to make sure that we're discussing this today?

**Kelly Roddy** (3:28)
Yeah, so I mean, it is, to me, it's crucial, right? And so, you know, I've been really fortunate to work in some great places where, you know, you see a great culture that's focused on people.
And it's not just the people who work in the organization, but particularly the people that work in the organization, the team members, but it's our guest as well. And in our case, we have franchisees, and we want to make sure that, you know, franchisees, they sometimes they put their entire life savings into a business that they're betting on, they're betting on themselves, and they're owning their own business, but they're buying into, you know, our dream as well, which is, you know, a brand that we're passionate about, and they become passionate about it. But then they're like self-employed, so who motivates them, right? And so they need us to help motivate them as well. And lead with empathy and lead with passion alongside of them. And so, you know, I think what we've discovered is that there's really no great companies out there that don't have a really strong set of at least shared values, right? And so, you know, we, and that's how we lead. We basically, it's, and it's not platitudes on a wall. It's not like a poster and like, oh, here's the things that we said that one day, you know, four years ago at that offsite that we were going to do. We talk about it every day and we, we recognize people around it. And so if someone shows one of our values, we give, we give an award for every single one of our values every day. Who lived that value the best? And it's really hard because everyone lives the values. And the reason they do is because we talk about it all the time. It's very, very much ingrained in our culture. And so as a matter of fact, we don't have a poster. There's no poster. We just, we talk about it. And we, in our monthly, all like all team meetings, we pick out one of the values and do a deep dive and give examples and talk about it and let people talk about, you know, how, how we'll give people an opportunity to talk about how they're using the values every single, every single month. But, you know, the, the, the, the focus on empathy, you know, it really, you know, strengthens relationships that we have with our, our team. And that we have this sort of agreed upon set of values, sort of a clear sense of purpose, right? We want to make the lives of those around us better. And how do we do that? And how do we lead people, whether it's our team members in our restaurants or our franchisees, how do we lead them with empathy, particularly in challenging times? This is, this has not been the easiest year for restaurants.