Shownotes

Book Arrival: What Happens When You Are Not in the Room by Jon Berger

Anne Currie welcomes back Jon Berger for a book launch conversation about leadership, management, and strategy. This episode focuses on the hard-won lessons behind Jon’s new book, why he wrote it, and the practical models he uses to think about whether leadership is actually working.

We discuss what it means to lead well in different contexts, how to reduce the pain that poor leadership creates, and why the most important measure of success is what happens when you are not in the room.

Key topics

• Anne introduces the episode as a book launch conversation with Jon Berger, her irregular co-host and a tech veteran with 30 years of leadership experience.

• Jon shares that his book, What Happens When You Are Not In the Room, is about leadership, management, and strategy as tools, not a single magic answer.

• The conversation centers on the idea that leadership is often about pain:

  • pain experienced by leaders

  • pain experienced by teams

  • pain caused by poor management and poor delivery

• Jon explains that he wrote the book to capture lessons from his own career, including times when he led well and poorly, and to help others avoid repeating the same mistakes.

• He describes how training, coaching, and teaching leaders across his organization gave him a broader view than his own experience alone.

• Anne and Jon discuss why the book title is a question rather than an instruction:

  • success is measured by what happens when you are not in the room

  • leadership is about influencing others, not doing the work yourself

  • context matters, so a single fixed answer is rarely enough

• Jon outlines the kinds of ideas in the book:

  • stories that illustrate problems and solutions

  • questions leaders should ask

  • models for thinking more clearly about context

  • loops that help people make decisions and get unstuck

• Jon highlights the car model as a simple way to assess leadership:

  • motivation is the engine and gas

  • strategy is the steering

  • bottlenecks are often the brake

Anne points to the followability model as another useful framework, especially the distinction between:

• whether people want to follow you

• whether they are actually able to follow you right now

The discussion emphasizes that good leadership starts by recognizing where teams really are, including when they are “in a hole,” before pushing them toward a vision.

Anne closes by praising the book as practical, self-aware, and useful for anyone trying to lead teams and deliver difficult work better.

Transcript

Anne (00:01)

So, hello and welcome to episode 24 of Asynchronous and Unreliable, a weekly podcast where we discuss the most interesting ideas and concepts in tech. I'm your host, Anne Currie, co-author of Building Green Software from O'Reilly, The Cloud Native Attitude, and author of the science fiction panopticon series. And today I have the great pleasure to welcome again my irregular co-host on this podcast, Jon Berger, Tech Veteran and author of a book that comes out today. So this is a book launch episode, which is a little bit unusual for us, a little bit of a change. As a result of that, I'm going to do that as a question and answer episode where I ask Jon questions about the book, and then he tells me all about them, then I can refine those questions if I want to, but we'll see. So Jon, my first question for you is: who are you?

Jon Berger (00:51)

Well, thanks for having me back on the podcast. My name is Jon Berger, and I'm the author of What Happens When You Are Not In the Room? It comes out today; it's very exciting. I've spent 30 years in the tech industry where I've built, grown, and led lots of different teams, from tiny to hundreds of people in companies up to the scale of Microsoft. Across that time, I've worked with lots of different people. I've worked for lots of different people, I've tried lots of different approaches with different teams, different products, different product areas, all in different contexts.

And alongside leading the teams, delivering the products and services, I also developed courses for management and leadership. I coached people, I wrote a blog on leadership and management, and I used all of these different forms of communication to try out new ideas and also to refine how I communicated those ideas.

Anne (01:52)

So the book's called What Happens When You're Not in the Room, specifically what is it about?

Jon Berger (01:59)

The book is about leadership. What is leadership? How do you do it? How do you get better at it? And it's designed to help people to think about leadership, management, and strategy in a new way, right? Actually, lots of new ways, because the more the better. It's not a magic bullet, it's not a sound bite. It's a set of tools which will help people to think about how they lead, how they lead better, and how to practice that and improve.

Anne (02:35)

So that's very interesting, Jon. What you're saying is that your book is about leadership, how to lead, that leadership is a tool that anyone can use, that everyone could use, and everyone should use. But why should I use it? 

There are lots of tools that I have the permission to use, but I don't use. And I don't learn how to use because it would be really hard for me to learn how to use it. So why would I bother learning how to use leadership? And because, you know, much as I would love my listenership demographic to include the presidents of major countries or five-star generals or whatever, they probably don't. I don't think I'll probably have any listening. So why—

Jon Berger (03:19)

If they are listening and you're a president, please let us know. We can tune it straight for you.

Anne (03:24)

Okay. 

But at the moment, let me work on the assumption that this is not the majority of our listeners. If I am a junior manager, a young person, or even a middle manager or a senior manager, but not the president of the United States, why should I care about leadership, and why should I put the time and effort into learning how to do it better?

Jon Berger (03:53)

Yeah, good question. What's in it for me? 

So leadership is a tool. Why would I want to use that tool? One of the commonly used definitions of leadership is getting things done using other people. I'm not sure that's all there is to it. Sometimes I might want to lead myself, and leading oneself is a chapter in the book. I think that is important. But if you want to get things done, then leadership is a fantastic tool or set of tools that you can use to get things done. If you don't care about getting things done, sure, don't bother using leadership.

I think, if I look back at my career from when I started to want to get things done using other people, and saw all of the many and wonderful ways in which I failed to do that, I just didn't really understand what I was doing. I wasn't thinking about them. I didn't understand what was in their heads. I didn't understand the tools that I could use to make things happen and to align folks to get the value from the fact that there were a bunch of us rather than just me. Then I think there's a lot that most people can learn. And in fact, I believe there's a lot that everyone can learn because no one can be perfect at leadership.

Anne (05:29)

Yeah, so rolling back there, what you're saying is that it's a tool for if you want to be getting things done, if you want some things to be happening and they are not happening. And that doesn't—I mean, obviously your context is software engineering projects. So you're managing teams of software engineers and it isn't delivering the thing that you wanted it to deliver. So that is a signifier that maybe leadership is a tool that you should be using?

Jon Berger (05:57)

Yeah, you're not getting what you want. Or you're getting it, but you're getting it too slowly. Or you're not sure whether you're getting what you want. And if you're not achieving success, more and better leadership will help you. Thinking about that in your context is going to be important and valuable.

Anne (06:21)

Yeah, and the interesting thing is the book—although the context that you've come into this is managing and leading teams of developers to produce really difficult technical products—the tools, the techniques that you're describing are very generic. They aren't in any way specific to IT.

Jon Berger (06:43)

Yeah, absolutely. There's really nothing in the tools there that is specific to software. In fact, the great feedback we've had from early readers has backed that up from people in different industries who've said, "Yes, this is a toolbox of things that I can use to get things done, to make things happen," so we know that's true.

The other thing to say is getting things done sounds like a very top-down "I'm the boss and want to make things happen" sort of statement. That's absolutely important, and if more people make things happen successfully as a result of the book, I'll be very happy. But that's only part of what we're talking about. 

I'd love everyone to be a leader. Everyone in a team should be a leader. More leadership is a good thing. And that leadership that you can display as a team member influencing other people, influencing the rest of the team to do what you're doing better, to be better aligned, to go faster, to achieve a better result—it's true wherever you are in the organisation.

Anne (07:59)

Yeah, and I love a team where everyone's a leader. They're my favorite teams.

Jon Berger (08:05)

They're the best teams. For sure, that is the gold standard.

Anne (08:10)

Right. Next question is, you've said you have a lot of experience, you said you did a lot of training, face-to-face training, and coaching, all that kind of stuff. But why did you write it all down in a book?

Jon Berger (08:26)

Why did I write it down? In some ways, this is a book about pain. Poor leadership incurs a lot of pain. I've worked with a lot of leaders who've led in different ways. I have been led well, and I have been led poorly, but more to the point, I have led well, and I have led poorly. That poor leadership generates an enormous amount of pain in lots of different ways, both for the leader, but actually more importantly, for everyone else. Bad leadership is a challenge in so many different ways, but a really interesting one.

Having experienced both sides of that, I wanted to try something new. So I spent many years running training courses for leaders and managers throughout my organization, not just in my teams, but across the whole of the organization. That led me to have loads of different conversations with different people. I learned not just what I thought good or bad leadership was about, or where the pain points were; I learned that from lots of different people in the organization.

So I could pull all of that together into some lessons that I could learn on what I think good leadership was really about, how it worked, what worked well, what didn't work well, and how to think about that, because what worked well in one environment might not work well in a different environment. I found that the more time I spent on leadership development in other people and the more time I spent on training, the easier my job became, the less pain I personally had to experience, and the less pain other people had to experience as well.

So the book is in some ways a story of pain, but it's not a negative story. It's a positive story because although you have to acknowledge the pain—and acknowledging that pain is a good way of building trust, acknowledging where you are, and ensuring you're on the same page as other people—the goal is to get out the other side of that and be happy. The book is a positive story of how to do that and how to cure that pain.

Anne (11:04)

So, How to Alleviate Pain. 

It's actually a very good book, it's a very cheerful book, it's very funny, and it's very self-deprecating. It's all like, "Here's all the things I learned through pain and here's how I tried to avoid applying pain to my followers". It was quite clear in your book that you felt some pain, your followers felt some pain, and between you, managed to find ways of alleviating it. Then you wrote it down so that you can teach other people so that they didn't then feel the pain, but also didn't inflict the pain on the people beneath them. 

As a result, you all delivered really difficult projects and products much, much more successfully. That was the interesting thing about the work. It's a very good book; it certainly changed my view of leadership, strategy, and management.

So it's got a great name: What Happens When You're Not in the Room? with a question mark at the end. I quite like that, a question as the name of your book. Why did you choose that name?

Jon Berger (12:08)

There are a lot of great leadership books out there. I read a lot of leadership books. I like them; I find that they're a good way of getting new ideas into my head, and many of those leadership books are ones I reference in mine, so I think it's helpful for people to know about them. But I wanted to do something a little bit different. 

I don't want a set of instructions, I don't want a recipe, I don't want a single idea that you just have to apply in all scenarios. Not because they're not interesting—I like some of those books—but because the reality of leadership is that it's way harder than that. It's very much context dependent.

The difficult thing isn't the idea or the answer to the question; it's actually making sure you're asking the right question in the first place. That's the bit which grounds you where you are. So I wanted a book which covered a lot of ground because I didn't want just one thing. I didn't want "this thing works in this circumstance, but not in the normal case," because in some senses there isn't a normal case. There are just so many different possible contexts that you can be in.

So I wanted something that I would benefit from twenty-five years ago, twenty years ago, fifteen years ago, ten years ago, five years ago, in all the different contexts I've been in. 

What would have been useful to me? What would be useful to other people who are in yet again different contexts to help them think for themselves about what the right answer is, rather than just having something dictated to them? That naturally meant the title is a question, not an answer. It's not an "always do this," but it might be "this is a pretty good question to be asking yourself no matter what the context".

And if you're going to do that, your title has to be: what is the point of it all? What is the point of leadership? The point of leadership is that you're not doing the work, someone else is. Success is not measured by what you do when you are in the room. Success is what happens when you're not in the room. Leadership is how you influence the people who are in the room. 

That is why this is a book about leadership, and that's why it's a powerful question to ask. Because in any context, you should be thinking, "What really is the effect here? Am I getting what I want?"

Anne (15:00)

So obviously, the question that brings to mind is, you said that the book has lots of things in it—lots of different techniques, lots of different ideas. What kind of ideas? What kind of things will I be reading when I'm reading the book?

Jon Berger (15:19)

There are lots of different things. At a very high level, the concepts in the book include some stories just to help illustrate either a problem scenario or a solution scenario, lots of questions that people can ask, lots of ideas that might help to navigate your way forward, and thought processes, which are mostly in the form of helpful models which help you get around an idea.

I have not written a book for any one particular reader to go, "Well, this matches exactly what I'm doing today," because that's not possible. So I've got a lot of different models in there. 

I really like models as a way of helping people to think, "Okay, it is a slightly simplistic view of the world, but does it match what I'm doing now? Actually, it does. Brilliant. I can go and do that". They are ways of helping people think about their context to make positive decisions, and if you're getting stuck, they're a great way of getting unstuck. More importantly, they're a great way of helping people lead themselves.

Anne (16:47)

So what's your favorite model in the book?

Jon Berger (16:51)

Well, there are a lot of good models, and the answer to that question probably changes on a daily basis depending on which of the models feels most useful to me at the time. Today's answer to that is going to be the Car Model. I like the Car Model because it is simple, hopefully easy to explain and understand, but it's actually quite powerful.

The Car Model addresses the fact that people struggle with leadership because they're not clear on whether they're doing it or not. It's unclear to them because leadership is essentially an infinite collection of different things, all of which relate to what happens when you're not in the room. So if people want to know whether they're leading or not, the Car Model is an answer.

The Car Model is quite simple: I am leading successfully if my team is motivated to go and do anything, if they know where they're going and how to get there, and if I'm not stopping them from getting there.

So the Car Model is:

Do we have any motive power? Is my foot on the gas? Is the engine running? That's motivation.

Steering is strategy. Do the team know where they're going and how to get there?

Lastly, but really very importantly, is my foot on the brake? Because if my foot's on the brake, if I'm a bottleneck here that stops things from happening, it doesn't really matter how powerful the engine is and how good the steering is, the team's still not getting there, or they're not getting there very fast.

I like that model because if there is a problem with leadership—and almost all problems are problems of leadership at some level—then I can say, "Wait a minute, is the problem that I need to put more effort into the motivation to get the team going? Is the problem actually steering-related, that they're moving, but just not moving in the right direction? Or is the problem actually that my foot's on the brake somehow, and removing that will help us go faster?"

Anne (19:20)

Yeah, it's interesting. That is a good model. I do like that one, and I think about that one quite often. It's like: am I motivated? Do I know where I'm going? Is my foot on the brake or is somebody else's foot on the brake? Because you have a whole chapter which is about leading yourself as just another variant of leading teams and leading everybody else.

Although I like the Car Model, I think my favorite model is the Followability Model. Are you followable? Tell us a little bit about that.

Jon Berger (19:51)

Yeah, the Followability Model is another fun little model. It took me a while to realize it was actually important to ask these questions. I don't think they're common questions to ask, but they are very useful in terms of becoming a better leader.

Followability breaks down into two things:

• Does someone want to follow me?

• Are they capable of following me?

"Do they want to follow me?" is pretty easy to understand; it's a positive thing, and the more I do to encourage people to follow me, the better. But there's another part of that which people don't ask as often: "Is it possible for someone to follow me?"

The classic thing that I've seen on both sides of this, many times in my career, is that the leader might actually have positive clarity on where they're going, but what they don't have is an acknowledgement that the people they're trying to lead right now are in a hole.

It doesn't matter that they have this wonderful vision that over the horizon is everything we want—"Let's just go over there!"—while their poor team is going, "No, but how do we get out of this hole? We're not looking for the direction after we get out of the hole; we just need a ladder. Lower us a rope, do something, or acknowledge that we're in a hole so that you don't run off over the horizon and leave us here".

Followability requires asking: is it even possible for someone to go with me? What might be stopping them? I need to remove those problems that might be stopping them. The massive increase in trust that you get comes from saying, "Yeah, I see the hole you're in. This is the plan to get out of the hole, and then we're going to go over there and do that thing".

Anne (21:51)

Yeah, I really like that. As a former consultant, it's amazing how many times the first thing you had to do was work out the hole that everybody was in, and then work out how they were going to get out of that hole. It just doesn't matter what other whizzy vision senior managers have because everybody's saying, "You're not paying any attention to the fact that we're in a hole, and I don't know if you have any plan for getting us out". First, you start here.

I liked all the models; they were all very useful. So, where do we get this book? How do we get hold of it?

Jon Berger (23:13)

It is now available on Amazon. There will be a link in the show notes, or you can visit JonBergerLeadership.com, where there will be a link from there as well.

Anne (23:27)

Excellent. Well, thank you very much for being a guest and announcing your book. Hopefully, lots of other people will come on the podcast to announce theirs. You are the first book announcement episode we've done, but hopefully many more to come, because I massively approve of people writing books, especially books that codify their hard-won experience. 

And I massively approve of reading books or listening to them, however you consume them. I'm a big fan of reading on my Kindle. In a book, you get all the arguments and you get the real-life experience, and that's worth so much.

Thank you very much indeed for being on the podcast.

Jon Berger (24:20)

Thank you for having me.

Anne (24:22)

And thank you very much to all our watchers and listeners. I hope you enjoyed the episode, and I will hopefully speak to you again on next week's episode of the Asynchronous and Unreliable Podcast. Thank you very much.