308: 4 Secrets to Growing Leaders with Adam Joseph
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Adam Joseph, entrepreneur, 5-time PE-funded CEO, two-time Fortune 100 executive, and Summit OS Guide™, shares how developing people through ownership, mentorship, and trust drives leadership growth and organizational success.
We explore Adam’s journey from first-time founder to leading multiple private equity–backed companies, and how his Leadership Growth Framework—Identify Talent, Launch Careers, Mentor, and Allow Them Room to Fail—has helped him build empowered, high-performing teams. Adam explains why potential matters more than experience, why CEOs must coach forward instead of managing backward, and how giving people space to fail builds resilience and confidence.
He also discusses the “Burn the Boats” mindset—what it means to go all in as a leader—and shares how to balance ambition with purpose, family, and fulfillment.
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4 Secrets to Growing Leaders with Adam Joseph
Good day. Dear listeners. Steve Preda here with the Management Blueprint podcast, and my guest today is Adam Joseph, who’s an entrepreneur, a five time private equity funded CEO. A two time Fortune 100 executive and the Summit OS Guide. Adam, welcome to the show,
Steve. Thank you. It’s been a long wait. I’m thrilled to be a part of blueprint.
It’s good to have you here on the show and, you know, let’s dig in. I always ask guests about their personal why and how they manifest it in their professional life, in their business, in the practice. So what is yours?
So, I know this sounds cliche, but you know me a little bit, so I think you can validate that. I really try to live life to its fullest when it comes to my career. I love to fill my days with people that share my passion for building. When I come home, I wanna be with people I love, and when I have time off, I want to enjoy the adrenaline sports that give me energy, whether it’s skiing or biking or hiking. Or climbing, whether it’s with other experts or newcomers who wanna learn. For me, that’s what energizes me. And I have found in my career that it’s possible to do this in business as well. I can remember as a young entrepreneur, building my first company, trying to get my very small team to be as productive as possible and to work as hard as possible. And part of the magic with that was to get the most out of them. I bought two cheap hockey goals at a Costco, and every day at lunch we play a little roller blade hockey. Not only did it make them more fit, but they, we really got to know one another and, and enjoy one another aside from sling and code. And I, not only rewarded them with a little bit of fitness, but we were fortunate to get a trade sale just a few years later.
Wow.
I truly believe in all things you need to savor the journey, not grind to the finish line. It’s true in a bike race, it’s true over dinner, and it’s certainly true with a business.
Yeah, I like to say also that it’s so hard to make a business successful if you don’t at least enjoy the ride and you don’t have fun along the way.
Absolutely. I mean, and there was absolutely times in my business career where it was nearly impossible for me to come up with that right balance and it impacted my family, it impacted my personal wellbeing. I would argue that many of the management skills I developed as an operator were so that I could make the time to recover that balance between work and everything else.
So what does it take to create the time? What does it take to have this balanced life as a top executive? It’s not something that CEOs brag about, that they are having balanced lives.
Well. A lot of it is being part of or building a great team.
To me, the best thing you can do is have people that you know and trust, that you can not only delegate things to, but know that they'll be done as well or better than you can.
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‘Cause quite honestly, particularly as a growth stage, CEO, a lot of your time is spent either doing other people’s jobs that you may not do nearly as well as they do or worrying about how well they’re doing it and, and sometimes sticking your nose in places where it’s just not helpful and oftentimes counterproductive.
So what does it take to be at a team, such a team around you? How, how do you attract these people?
Great question. So important and rewarding. One of the things I’m most proud of in my career, you know, are some of the people that I brought along the way and certainly appreciate others doing the same for me,
the first piece, and again, this is one of the parts I also really enjoy, is identifying talent.
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If you’re in a bigger company, finding people in the organization, if you’re not looking in your network, your friend’s network, right? Good people stand out and I strongly advise to select for potential, what they could be, not their performance in their last job. I assure you, your top seller does not often make the best chief sales officer, I’ve made that mistake.
Sorry Adam. So how do you know who has potential? How does it show up?
So some of it is just, you know, understanding what drives them, understand how they interact with you, how they interact with others that, you know, get, oftentimes you’re finding out about them because of a reputation, because of something they’ve done. Peel under the covers, understand, you know, where they want to go with this, how they got these skills, et cetera, and so forth. And in many cases, it’s giving them a test drive, taking people that have never managed anyone in their lives and saying, today you’re not gonna manage people. You’re gonna manage a project, a blueprint, what have you. And maybe that becomes a business and you get to read it or lead it, or maybe it doesn’t. That the main thing to me, whether you’re developing a leader or an individual contributor, is work with them on an idea that they can own with plenty of wiggle room for them to grow and innovate within that idea, right?
The concept of a business within a business or an entrepreneur, working for an entrepreneur makes absolute sense and really gets you to exploit the best of that person, the things that they're passionate about.
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I like what you said about ownership. You mentioned, you used the word ownership. You’re looking for people who are willing to own their function. What do you mean exactly by owning their function?
Owning their function. So again, it begins with you as their leader, giving them lots of rope saying, we have a problem. Right? We’re trying to, I can look at my, think back to my experience with Dan Grom at Concur. Dan was a star collections manager at Concur. He was collecting millions of dollars from some stingy CFOs who didn’t want to pay us. He came to me and said, I want to be part of your customer success organization. I wanna touch customers on the positive side not take their money after they’re already onboarded. So we came up with some ideas on things he could help me with on a fledgling business that was auditing customer expense reports. I said, Dan, figure out a way to do this less expensively and more effectively than we do today. It took months and months just to come up with the scheme, eventually resulting in us creating a thousand person global operation that Dan, who managed, you know, five collection agents when he joined me, was overseeing and generating over a hundred million in revenue. We applied his ability to connect with people. The idea that we could automate a service that we were previously doing with people to create a business that represented roughly 10% of our company’s revenue before we sold it.
Okay. So, that’s ownership. He had an idea and you let him run with it. And he created a business within the business, kind of an entrepreneur type of situation. So, when you identify the talent, what’s the next step? What do you need to do with the talent that you identified? You give them ow
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