We call the move from doing the work to managing the people who do it a promotion — as though there were only one direction worth travelling. Jarrod Myers took that step, ran it for a year, read the results honestly, and stepped back down. This is a conversation about what he learned in the year he held the title, and why giving it back was an act of judgement rather than a failure of nerve.

Jarrod now runs his own venture, Off Script Ventures. Before that he spent more than a decade in enterprise technology sales; before technology, the better part of a decade in social work and international development; and before that, representative Australian football to the edge of the professional game. The line running through those very different lives is the subject of the episode.

Takeaways

1. Why the ascent up an organisation so often selects for the wrong people — and why the honest are frequently the ones weeded out.
2. How a high need for achievement, the very thing that makes an outstanding individual contributor, can make an ineffective manager.
3. What leadership actually consists of once you have deliberately declined authority over anyone.
4. Why management is not a side hustle, and why performing it badly in the margins serves no one.
5. What a decade in the slums of Bangkok and the housing estates of western Sydney does to a person's sense of proportion about corporate life.

Chapters

[00:00] Introduction & Welcome
[04:41] Sport, Effort, and the Ceiling
[10:00] An Unlikely Arc: From Aid Work to Sales
[21:43] Perspective: The Slum, the Estate, and the Fridge
[30:54] Disconnected From the Consequences
[39:05] The Year He Ran Sales
[46:19] Drive, Discipline, and Leadership Without a Title
[56:33] What a Manager Is Actually For
[1:00:46] A Marriage, Not a Date
[1:09:16] Lightning Round

Guest Links & References

• Jarrod Myers

About the Show

On the Subject of Leadership is a long-form interview series on governance, organisational culture, and the realities of decision-making — without slogans or motivational gloss.

Hosted by Dr Robert N. Winter.

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Credits

Recorded remotely via Riverside

Music: The Hidden Thread by Roberto Prado / Artlist