Member since December 2025
Adam W. Barney is a Transition Leadership Coach and speaker who works with founders, executives, and leadership teams navigating high-stakes growth and transition.
Today’s leaders aren’t struggling because they lack ambition, intelligence, or effort. They’re struggling because the systems they’re using no longer hold under pressure. As organizations scale, roles expand, and complexity accelerates, decision-making slows, energy erodes, and execution becomes reactive.
Adam works with leaders at these inflection points (when the old playbook stops working) to help them redesign how they lead when it matters most. His work focuses on installing operating rhythms that hold under pressure, enabling clearer decisions, steadier leadership presence, and sustainable forward momentum.
Adam is the author of Make Your Own Glass Half Full and the host of the podcast Is Anything Real?, where he explores what actually holds up under pressure, and what’s just noise. He has coached 300+ leaders through programs like Comcast RISE and previously led teams at Microsoft, Akamai, and Digitas.
Creating spaces where leaders feel seen, steadied, and re-energized - where pressure doesn’t disappear, but it becomes workable. I care deeply about helping people reconnect to what drives them, think more clearly under stress, and lead with both conviction and humanity. Levity matters. Real connection matters. And people do their best work when they feel grounded, not performative.
I often share the throughline between being laid off twice during my corporate career, losing my mother to ALS, and writing Make Your Own Glass Half Full. Each experience taught me the same lesson: pressure is unavoidable, but burnout is not. What fails most often isn’t the person—it’s the system they’re operating inside.
Those moments reshaped how I think about leadership, resilience, and energy. They’re why I focus on helping leaders build operating rhythms that support who they are and what they’re carrying, so they can lead with clarity and heart even when the stakes are high.
After more than a decade leading teams inside global organizations like Microsoft, Akamai, and Digitas, I saw the same pattern repeat: as responsibility increased, leaders were expected to “handle more” without better systems to support how decisions, energy, and execution actually work under pressure.
I didn’t set out to become a coach - I set out to solve the problem I kept watching capable leaders struggle with. That work evolved into a practice focused on helping leaders install operating rhythms that hold up in real conditions, not ideal ones.
In a world dominated by external pressures and expectations, Make Your Own Glass Half Full: The Path To Empowered Optimism and Autonomy offers a transformative alternative.
Buy Now
Is Anything Real? is reality-first leadership for founders and operators who are done with business theater. Each episode delivers a fast Reality Check, a Proof Stack (inputs → actions → outcomes), and one move you can run this week.
Listen NowI often share the throughline between being laid off twice during my corporate career, losing my mother to ALS, and writing Make Your Own Glass Half Full. Each experience taught me the same lesson: pressure is unavoidable, but burnout is not. What fails most often isn’t the person—it’s the system they’re operating inside.
Those moments reshaped how I think about leadership, resilience, and energy. They’re why I focus on helping leaders build operating rhythms that support who they are and what they’re carrying, so they can lead with clarity and heart even when the stakes are high.
After more than a decade leading teams inside global organizations like Microsoft, Akamai, and Digitas, I saw the same pattern repeat: as responsibility increased, leaders were expected to “handle more” without better systems to support how decisions, energy, and execution actually work under pressure.
I didn’t set out to become a coach - I set out to solve the problem I kept watching capable leaders struggle with. That work evolved into a practice focused on helping leaders install operating rhythms that hold up in real conditions, not ideal ones.
