Building teamship through leadership

Leadership is often thought of as a reward. Something to be championed. A title to celebrate. However, leadership isn’t always about titles, it’s about how you handle everyday moments. It about the role you play in bringing your team together. During this week’s episode of Pave It Black, we chat with Adam Tarnow, a former accountant turned leadership coach to discuss the key qualities a successful leader must hold.

Adam has helped hundreds of professionals navigate tough decisions, build stronger teams, and show up as better leaders. He highlights the importance of being realistically optimistic when faced with challenges and how developing a personal brand can support your leadership aspirations. Tune in to learn how you can apply these key qualities to lead your team, project, and company to be more success.

Here’s a peek into our conversation with Adam. Listen to the full episode to explore how to grow your leadership capabilities. Listen now.

Could you elaborate on some of the early experiences that shaped your leadership skills and helped you develop the qualities you rely on today?

Yeah, absolutely. You know, I never really thought about leadership until I got out of college and started my first job. Even then, I wouldn’t have called it “leadership” per se—I think at that point it was just, who are your bosses? Early on in public accounting, I started to connect a few dots that leadership was a thing. Some of the dots I was connecting were there were certain jobs I would work on that were a ton of fun. Fun may be a stretch of the imagination a little bit there, but they were interesting. I would drive home at night feeling energized. I wouldn’t wake up the next morning dreading, going into work. And then there were other projects I would work on, there was a complete opposite. Days were filled with tension. I would drive home, anxious, have trouble sleeping that night, waking up the next morning, not feeling excited to go in to work. And as I started to think about it, and I mean, this is me in my early twenties using limited vocabulary and limited ideas, but I started to recognize that this was the difference between the days when I went home feeling energized and the days I went home feeling discouraged was largely due to the boss, the manager that I was working for at the time.

And so that really started my journey of learning. I thought to myself, ‘If I ever get the chance to be a boss, I don’t want to be like that boss. I want to be like this boss’’ So I started piecing some things together to try to figure out what are those characteristics? What are those skills? What are those habits? This word, I know we’re going to talk about, what are those styles, that I found helpful as an employee and how can I replicate some of those when it’s my chance to be the boss or to be the leader?

What are some of the main pieces of advice that come from your book that would help listeners develop themselves and stand out?

The book is called The EDGE and the EDGE is an acronym stands for energy, diligence, growth, and endurance. And we just said ‘Hey, this is the simple way for a young professional to stand out in a noisy world’ right? Employee engagement statistics are low. What bosses are looking for nowadays is not just skills, they’re looking for emotional commitment. So, what does that mean? That means show up with energy, be diligent towards your work, have that growth mindset, always be looking to grow, and then develop endurance because life throws you curve balls. There’s good days and bad days, and you’ve got to be able to develop endurance there. That’s some of what we’re trying to teach people there with that.

Is there a particular book or mentor or even a quote, that you feel had a significant impact on your leadership journey?

My personal journey of trying to become a more optimistic leader has been very transformative for me. As I went through all that, I studied and thought about if I can answer this question or what is the answer to this question: is it possible to be optimistic without faking it? Because I don’t want to be that bury your head in the sand, ruinous, optimism. I don’t think is helpful. I ended up coming up with this term called realistic optimism that I think better talks about the target of where I’m going. I was greatly influenced by Churchill’s quote, and I’ll probably butcher it, but the difference between the optimist and the pessimist is that the pessimist finds difficulty in the midst of every opportunity, but the optimist finds the opportunity.