Dynamic Duos: Decision Design’s Tara Ness and Leanne Rosamilia
In this week's Dynamic Duos, Decision Design's managing director, Tara Ness, and director, Leanne Rosamilia, reflect on their 14 years of friendship, and how they 'mirror' each other, personally and professionally.
Tara Ness:
Leanne and I first crossed paths almost 14 years ago when we were both in our early 20s and starting out our consulting careers. Little did we know this was the beginning of an incredibly strong professional relationship – where we would both go on to lead numerous programmatic partnerships with top ASX brands – as well as an incredibly strong friendship.
Leanne and I relate to each other on a lot of levels. We’re in sync and like-minded – both having a strong drive to build our career as working mothers. In fact, not through any deliberate coordination, Leanne and I tend to mirror each other’s lives. Whatever one of us does, the other one seems to follow close behind. When I joined Decision Design, a specialist behaviour change team, in 2018, Leanne was not far behind. We also found a way to time our weddings only one week apart, use the same contractors for renovating, live in the same suburb, and even ended up both having children at similar times, (down to the same order of genders).
Over the years, it has become clear that we both share the same values as colleagues and friends. When you’ve known someone for so long (both professionally and personally), you end up experiencing a lot together. When I reflect, it is clear that our professional relationship is so strongly grounded in our shared idea of what it takes to be a great commercial consultant and leader.
Leanne Rosamilia:
I met Tara when I was fresh out of university, starting my career in commercial consulting (holy moly, that’s almost 14 years ago!). She was also early in her professional journey, but already had that special spark about her – a natural born leader. She was someone that I naturally gravitated towards, even though we never directly worked together until about 6 years in. I’ve always had tremendous respect for Tara – her laser sharp consulting nous, the way she carries herself professionally and personally, and her genuine care about her clients and team.
The core to our relationship (professionally and personally) are our shared values. We share the same ideals of success, which means we mirror each other in work ethic, style, approach, and more generally our view on life. We have a deep, mutual trust – I know that she’s got my back and I’ve always got hers. We constantly challenge the status quo, and identify ways of doing things better, smarter and delivering greater ROI to our clients.
When Tara started at Decision Design, I knew this place was special and incredibly unique – working at the intersection of behavioural science, insights and design – which aligned to my aspirations. I wanted to support clients with execution and generate aligned and measurable consumer, commercial and social outcomes. So naturally I chased it down and have never looked back!
Tara on Leanne:
Most memorable moment with Leanne: Hard to look past the weddings, baby showers and Christmas parties. But let me share a professional one…
In the height of COVID wave one we were able to deliver a critically important program for a top ASX brand that had a significant responsibility to protect their customers and employees. Long story short, we had a few days to build a set of behaviourally optimised interventions that would drive positive health behaviours – as the world was shutting down around us. This was the ultimate consulting challenge.
It was incredibly impressive the way Leanne led our specialist team to diagnose the problem, develop a bullet proof intervention roadmap, and drive the interventions through to execution, all at pace and under immense pressure. Leanne has this innate ability to deliver high quality output at commercial speed, whilst keeping her team and clients highly engaged. Simply said, her intelligence combined with her energy and positivity are infectious. With Leanne’s leadership, we rallied together to produce an incredible output which went straight to Exec level, with interventions launched within days. A huge milestone for our business and proved to us both once again that our teamwork is unbeatable.
Over the course of your career, it’s moments like these, where you “win” together and support each other, that life long professional and personal friendships are formed. You create a bond that is anchored in trust in one another. I am incredibly to lucky to work every day with someone like Leanne. I have complete trust in her – which we why she is by my side leading our business and developing the next generation of behavioural scientists at Decision Design.
Describe Leanne in one word: Eternal optimist
Leanne’s most annoying habit or endearing behaviour: Leanne is always so positive and sees the best in everyone and every situation. Her positivity radiates through her career, personal life, and our friendship – Leanne is someone who will always see the glass half full. I wish I could be more like Leanne.
It just means sometimes I have to take my venting elsewhere. I just can’t seem to bring her down to my level…
Leanne on Tara:
Most memorable moment with Tara: It would have to be Tara’s baby shower.
This was when I realised I knew Tara better than her closest family members! We were playing a game where we had to guess the size of her belly, by cutting a piece of string to the length we thought.
And of course, I guessed correctly, right down to the exact millimeter!
Best word to describe Tara: Empathetic-power-woman
Tara’s most annoying habit or endearing behaviour: Hmmm, I’ll say the fact that Tara is SO punctual, that she starts meetings 9-minutes early, making me feel incredibly late even though I’m still 2-minutes early…!
If you and a colleague would like to submit your story to Dynamic Duos, please email lmcnamara@mumbrella.com.au.
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Lauren McNamara is a journalist at Mumbrella, covering the creative and PR beat. She joined in November 2022 as editorial assistant, after completing a Bachelor of Communications (Journalism) at UTS.
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