Ashley Adamson and Yogi Roth: Unleashing Power Through Team Connection

Advisory teams continue to grow in importance and size . Among the Top 250 private wealth management teams ranked by Barron’s this year, the total assets managed by the top 50 teams more than tripled from $331 billion in 2020 to $1.1 trillion in this year’s ranking.

Assembling a team is easy. Assembling a team that succeeds, shares a common purpose, and genuinely cares about fellow team members is far harder. To better understand the hallmarks of successful teams, I interviewed Ashley Adamson and Yogi Roth, who have spent their careers chronicling what the best sports teams do and don’t do.

Adamson is a three-time Emmy Award-winning broadcaster, Big Ten Network football host, and co-founder of Tamber, an audio legacy storytelling company. Roth is a Big Ten Network College football analyst, filmmaker, author, and podcast host. They met 13 years ago in Los Angeles when both were hired as broadcasters by Pac-12 Networks where they worked together for more than a decade. What resonates is their shared passion for storytelling and conviction that meaningful personal connection can be transformative and help teams thrive.

In 2015, Roth released a personal film about his father titled Life in a Walk, in which they walked along the Camino de Santiago in Spain with Roth asking question after question to his father, who was battling prostate cancer. As Roth said, he didn’t want to say “I wish I’d spent more time with my dad.” Roth is also a former Pittsburgh Panthers wide receiver and USC coach who co-authored the New York Times best-seller Win Forever with Pete Carroll.

Adamson, who has interviewed hundreds of people in the sports world, says that the most memorable interview that she ever conducted was with her mother in 2022 on a picnic blanket in Paris. The interview inspired Adamson to interview her entire family to hear their stories. Soon after, she co-founded Tamber, which is dedicated to preserving personal histories. “We believe in the power of the human voice,” its website states. “There’s a kind of emotional truth that lives in tone, cadence, and breath—something text alone can’t capture.”

In April, at the Barron’s Advisor Teams Summit in Los Angeles, Adamson and Roth delivered the keynote presentation, which focused on successful teams and the power of connection. While there, I interviewed the pair for The Way Forward podcast to further explore the topic.

On the podcast, they emphasize that strong connections are crucial for creating successful teams and that team members should genuinely listen to others, be curious about their life stories, and create an environment where people are seen and heard. They also recommend that team members learn about the history of their team and organization to better understand how their individual stories fit into a larger narrative.

Below are highlights from our conversation, which have been edited for clarity. (You can listen to the podcast and read the full transcript here .)

Successful teams are ‘super-connected.’ “The really good teams are super connected,” Adamson said. “They know each other’s story. They understand where the guy or the gal sitting next to them came from. There’s a deeper level of understanding. That is a beautiful thing about curiosity. I think it’s both innate and a learned skill. When you can learn to be genuinely curious about other people, I think it’s a total gift and to me that is ultimately what breeds connection. Every great team I’ve been on, that has been the common thread.”

Stay grounded and close to team members. “You talk to players in the locker rooms,” says Roth. “That’s when all the walls are broken down. You can just sit back and be like, ‘where are you from, man? Tell me a little bit about your story. How’d you overcome some adversity?’ There’s a beautiful connection there. I think when it comes to leadership and organizations or the hierarchy of a team, the higher you go, the less you are willing to sit on the proverbial locker room floor…If I could urge any CEO or leader, the higher you go, compete to be able to get to that place or you will lose the team.”

Vulnerability increases confidence and strengthens bonds. “ This is sort of the inverse of how people think,” says Adamson, “but I think you have true confidence when you can be vulnerable. I think it’s the willingness to be able to say, ‘hey, I don’t know how to do this or I’m not comfortable with this.’ That’s how you’re going to get help and grow.”

Engendering loyalty . “When you are trying to retain talent there’s always going to be somebody that’s going to be able to pay somebody a little bit more,” says Adamson. “There’s always going to be something shiny somewhere else, but you’ll have loyalty when people feel like they matter to you and you need to make sure that they do matter.” A Barron’s blast from the past. “I grew up in the middle of Pennsylvania,” says Roth. “We had a massive barn in our backyard. My dad was a stockbroker in his second career. He was a social worker and a stockbroker, 17 years apiece. Upstairs in the attic of this barn he had stacks of Barron’s newspapers. So, to your earlier point, would the kid in you be like, ‘yeah, you’re going to be at this Barron’s conference on the Barron’s podcast,’ there’s no chance I would ever think that. So, the young nine-year-old in the attic of a barn in the middle of Pennsylvania says ‘Thank you.’”