An Interview With Chad Silverstein
It goes back, again, to being reprimanded for driving positive change by ‘breaking the rules’ during the early part of my career in retail. Today, the organization that envisions reality beyond “best practices” is able to seize unforeseen opportunities and respond more quickly to new challenges. Best practices don’t need to be abandoned, but they also should not be used as a straight-jacket that stifles creativity and alternate paths to the goals and desired outcomes of the business. Too many corporate cultures follow a “heritage mindset” that discourages a diversity of ideas, opinions, experiences, and arguments. They’re reliant on scope and power to succeed, but their scope and power are finite. We embrace a mindset of “change leadership,” that is constantly looking to improve and grow, and never gets complacent.
In the world of business and within every industry, there are forward-thinking leaders who go against the status quo and find success. Their courage to take risks, embrace innovation, and inspire collaboration separates them from the competition. Until 2002, Apple’s famous slogan was “Think Different”. This attitude likely helped them become one of the most successful organizations in history. This interview series aims to showcase visionary leaders and their “status quo-breaking” approach to doing business. As part of this series, I had the pleasure of interviewing Will Adams.
Will Adams works directly with Tarkenton’s partners to identify and understand their organizational needs. He then assembles a cross-functional team to develop and deliver the solutions to meet the needs of the partner. Since joining Tarkenton in 2010, Will has helped develop new partnerships, plan strategic growth initiatives, and mentor organizational leaders. Will is also the co-founder of a successful Software as a Service (SaaS) business that currently serves small museums and family offices throughout North America. In addition to his business interests, Will serves on the board of Atlanta Children’s Foundation, connecting individuals, organizations, and resources to meet the needs of children in foster care.
Thank you so much for doing this with us! Our readers would love to get to know you a bit better. What’s your “origin story”? How have you come to be the person you are today?
A few years into my post-college career with a big-box retailer, I was promoted into an overnight leadership position and immediately tasked with taking on one of the lowest performing locations in the entire chain. I was put there to turn things around, in particular, the way the location went about logistics and inventory replenishment.
Over the course of eighteen months, I led my team in taking the location from the very bottom, to the very top, in every measurable KPI. This prompted a visit — at 2am, mind you — by a group of executives from corporate who wanted to find out what had driven the performance turnaround. This brand was — and still is — “best practice driven.” You didn’t, regardless of the circumstances, deviate from best practices — but I did, and that’s how we went from the bottom to the top. I wasn’t necessarily discarding them, but I was trying to improve them — doing things in a way the brand hadn’t thought of before. So there I was, walking these executives through the store and explaining what we had done. They asked great questions, took notes and pictures, and continually conveyed how pleased they were with our performance results.
However, as the group began to walk ahead to the next area of operations, my senior market leader grabbed the back of my shirt collar, pulled me back to his personal space, and said, “Will, we pay you to f…ing execute, not to f…ing think.” In his mind, I had done the unthinkable. By iterating, innovating, and improving the brand’s sacred best practices, I had embarrassed him in front of leadership by seemingly deviating from the status quo; the same status quo that he was responsible for upholding. For me, it was a wake-up call.
In so much of life, we’re asked to follow someone else’s instructions and adhere to someone else’s blueprint. Most people, I think, aren’t empowered to think differently, challenge the status quo, or deviate from what someone else has decided is the best way to do something. For eighteen months, I had put in a tremendous amount of work — and innovation — to drive positive change for the brand; change that was replicable and that delivered extraordinary results. Those results, however great they were for the company, were not positively received by some, because it represented change, a new way to think, and a deviation from the same best practices that failed the company.
At that moment, I knew it was time for me to do something else, to shape a culture of innovation and change leadership, to be part of an environment where I’d be encouraged — not reprimanded — for thinking differently, and to build and develop teams to do the same.
Who has had the most influence on your journey? And what insights have you taken from them?
There have been many, but if we’re going to use the word “most,” without question it’s Fran Tarkenton. He’s made me see, foremost, that the mission of business is to help people. If you’re obsessed with helping the people you serve, and those who are helping you serve them, the byproduct is that you’re going to run a great, profitable, and beloved company. Most of the cancerous and even fatal business issues we see, read about, or heaven forbid, experience firsthand, can almost always be traced back to a decision, or a series of decisions, that were not first and foremost focused on helping people. It’s when you lose sight of that mission that things go south for your customers, employees, vendors, partners, or shareholders.
Another of his insights that I’ve taken to heart is that you learn more from failure than you do from success. In short, failing is learning. The way we embrace failure — not necessarily viewing “failure” as something negative — has given me the confidence to make decisions and experiment without the fear of what most of us typically associate with trying something new or different. Lastly, he’s also made me realize that if you don’t tell people the good news, they won’t know, because they won’t ask. Today, positivity doesn’t garner much attention, so when we’ve done something that’s of great benefit to our customers, employees, or partners, we let them know.
Talk about a failure early on in your career and what did you learn from it?
I’d say it’s an overarching period in my career versus a specific, defining moment. In my first few years at Tarkenton, I subscribed to the belief that, “If you want something done right, do it yourself.” Afterall, this approach provided great dividends early in my career — or so I thought — when I was the hired gun, asked to carry out a very specific mission. When I assumed the reins in my new role, I failed to realize that my success, and that of the organization, wasn’t based on any one performer, yet that of a collaborative, mission driven, well coached and developed team. In hindsight, that seems obvious, but when you’re irrationally confident in your personal ability to drive change and performance, you often fail to see and respond to the obvious. I sure did.
Stuck, burned out, and with very little support around me, I found myself reflecting on the irony of it all. I left a company because they didn’t want me to think, only execute; and there I was, now being asked to think but unable to do so because I was so involved trying to execute everything on my own. I realized I had quite a bit to learn.
The first thing I incorporated into my decision making process was a question: “Is this the absolute best use of my time and talent?” The second thing I embraced was the team and people development model of ‘Right Person, Right Place, and Right Time.’ Both of which I still use to great effect today.
Being a leader and having to deal with people, you talked about having to make hard decisions — can you talk more about this?
I’d say the “hard decisions” are “people decisions.” It’s inevitable. The changing landscape of business often requires us to alter the makeup of the company. It’s excruciating, having to separate employment with someone, not because of something they did or didn’t do, but because the viability of the business requires us to do so. This is one reason why I tell prospective employees upfront, during the interview process, that the team will always be more important than any one individual on it.
Being a successful “rule-breaker” — why did you decide this — early on, did you identify a specific problem in most other orgs? — how’d you address it?
It goes back, again, to being reprimanded for driving positive change by ‘breaking the rules’ during the early part of my career in retail. Today, the organization that envisions reality beyond “best practices” is able to seize unforeseen opportunities and respond more quickly to new challenges. Best practices don’t need to be abandoned, but they also should not be used as a straight-jacket that stifles creativity and alternate paths to the goals and desired outcomes of the business. Too many corporate cultures follow a “heritage mindset” that discourages a diversity of ideas, opinions, experiences, and arguments. They’re reliant on scope and power to succeed, but their scope and power are finite. We embrace a mindset of “change leadership,” that is constantly looking to improve and grow, and never gets complacent.
How do you decide when to adhere to industry norms — and when to forge your own path?
If you can believe it, we do, in fact, have processes here at Tarkenton! I’m not here to disrupt every process and practice that I encounter, but only those with precedence over what reality is telling us.
I’m reminded of one of the most fascinating, yet maddening, experiences that illustrates this very well. Following a contentious meeting with my business partner, whom I was working with on a co-funded business initiative, called me afterwards to share her perspective on where the conversation went off-track.
“Inside this company,” she said, “people will defend a best practice with their life, even when they know it’s the wrong thing to do for the current situation.” If it fails, she explained, they can’t be held accountable for the failure, because they followed best practice. So what ended up happening? It should come as no surprise that a multi-million-dollar business opportunity failed spectacularly. In company cultures that don’t encourage — or even tolerate — failure, people are encouraged to blindly follow the wrong path, even when every sign and business indicator tells them they’re off course.
Think back about decisions you’ve made to get your company to where it is now — how’d you make it happen?
I think, foremost, it’s the emphasis we’ve put on people. Afterall, a company is made up of people, people create and shape culture, and culture ultimately defines a company’s output and delivers it. We’ve built a roadmap to ensure we’re creating an effective culture, called “Right Person, Right Place, Right Time” and its counterpart “10 Steps to Accountability.” They include effective communication, performance evaluation, data assessment, and the relentless pursuit of improvement. The first step in walking this path is a change of mindset, a new climate where you as a leader instill a sense of ownership among your people. When your company runs deep with people who can communicate clearly and consistently, take appropriate action without supervision, and work to innovate, reform, and improve, it becomes something more resembling a movement. It’s one that allows you as a leader to lift yourself up out of operations and into the sort of “visionary work” you need to be doing.
I also made the decision to pursue everything I do with “relentless urgency.” The speed and urgency with which you lead absolutely permeates throughout the company. Lastly, I’d point again to “embracing failure,” that is, “embracing learning.” For as long as I’ve been here at Tarkenton, I have kept, archived, and regularly reviewed the email conversations I’ve had with prospective partners; partnerships that ultimately didn’t materialize into anything substantive. With partnerships, as you can imagine, it takes quite a bit of searching, exploration, and experimentation to find those that truly work, and I’ve found it useful to remind myself of that and to learn from those experiences.
As a leader, how do you rally others to align to your vision?
I’d say, again, following the “right person, right place, right time” and “10 steps to accountability” models. There is a particular part of “right person, right place, right time” that’s relevant here: “Follow destination plans — don’t just fill jobs.” In the heat of a crisis, it can be tempting to fill open positions with whomever you can find, and worry about the long-term later. But that can lead to heartache down the road, especially with culture, mission, and vision. Think about where you’re going as an organization, and how each person, whether current employees or prospective hires, fits into that future. As you map out your expectations, look for people with the right mix of proven skills, stated interests, and growth mindset.
What needs to happen over the next two years for you to be happy with progress?
The easy answer is more revenue, more profitability. But how do we get there? For us, it’s through partnerships. Teams win. You have to talk with a hundred people to find five who are interested, three willing to do the work, two willing to go to war with you, and one that ends up helping you win. That’s what I’d like to see: more of those partners who are truly willing to put in the work with us. I’d want the work to be about solving meaningful problems, as not every problem is worthy of our time, talent, and dollars to go and solve.
Through all of this, I want to be able to look back and see that our people have become better in ways meaningful to them and, in addition, challenged us as a company to become better in ways meaningful to us. If we’ve managed these things — the people, problems, and partners — tthe byproduct, as I see it, is revenue and profitability.
As a person of influence, if you could inspire a movement that’d bring the most amount of good to the most amount of people — what would it be?
Without a doubt, an obsession with talent. Throughout the history of business, there has always been an arms race to eliminate people and talent, to automate. I understand it. I think we should always consider different ways to promote efficiency. At the same time however, if we’re considering automation, we should, to an equal or greater degree, be considering how it is we can cultivate the talents of our people and find other roles they can play in our organization or elsewhere in the community. Efficiency should be about creating new opportunities, not simply adding more margin to the bottom line.
Thank you so much for sharing all of these insights. We wish you continued success and good health!
About the Interviewer: Chad Silverstein is an accomplished entrepreneur and visionary leader. He started his first company, Choice Recovery, Inc., while attending Ohio State University and grew it to become an industry outlier before selling the business after 25 successful years. With the launch of his second venture, [re]start, a career development platform, Chad aimed to help people find meaningful career opportunities. Under his leadership, his team was recognized as a “Top Workplace” award winner for over a decade, twice being ranked the #1 small and medium-sized business to work for in Central Ohio. Chad sold [re]start in 2023, enabling him to focus on building an online community of high-performing leaders and continuing to make a positive impact in people’s lives.