“I couldn’t believe what I was seeing,” said Eddie Backler. “One night on top of the mountain we were sitting in a circle trying to keep warm by a small fire. Just then our Sherpa, Jangbhu, scooped up hot coals in his hands to bring them closer to each of us to keep us warm.”

Eddie Backler, CEO of the Charles White Company, a property development company in Edinburgh, Scotland, was on a climb of the Mera Peak in 2009. At 19,000 feet, in the shadow of Mount Everest, Eddie and three other climbers put their faith in the hands of Jangbhu Sherpa who had summited Everest nine times before. Jangbhu quickly captured their respect as they were testing their limits like never before. “We knew he had the wherewithal to get us up the mountain, because the Sherpa was the key to our success,” said Eddie. He goes on to share his experience: “Jangbhu knew what we needed before we did. He knew how to be ahead of us and when to be behind us. It is a real skill. He could read our team and get us to work together without us knowing it. He was assessing us constantly because he had to get us ready for the next levels. And while he could be quite stern, we totally knew he was for us.”

Eddie went on to share how Jangbhu Sherpa was so intentional with resourcing the team with the proper food and gear and had a clear plan of attack to climb the mountain. Jangbhu created the trust that all four of them could summit and would do so.

Eddie went on to share, “Jangbhu wasn’t a servant we had hired, but rather a fighter for our best. He brought challenge with support. He showed us how to climb the ice cliffs and he pushed us to do things we didn’t think we could do on our own. He would say, ‘you do your bit and I will do mine.’ He would carry our bags when we needed it and would push us to do it ourselves when we needed it. Our Sherpa understood when to push us and when to help us, which was key. And because of that balance and his consistency we trusted him and respected him for who he was.”

The Sherpa help people do what they don’t believe they can do. Their secret to helping climbers lies in their ability to provide challenge commensurate to their support.

More Support or More Challenge?

Leading people well, consistently, over time, is one of the most difficult things to do in life. Leading people well in difficult circumstances is significantly more difficult. Especially when you know they need to get to a higher level but they cannot yet see it themselves.

Leading ourselves well, consistently, over time, can be just as difficult as leading others, especially with the numerous obligations that come with life and work. Family obligations, demanding roles, friendships, busy schedules, and on and on.

To become a person worth following is a balancing act, part science, part art. It is the calibration of managing support and challenge consistently with those you lead as well as with yourself. Most leaders default to their natural tendency of oversupport or too much challenge because they tend to live accidentally or out of habit. The Sherpa understands the objective and helps guide people using both support and challenge based on the needs of the moment to get their people to the next level.

Leadership is the calibration of support and challenge in order to help those you lead achieve their objectives or tasks that help the team or organization to win.

Ronald Heifetz, a professor at Harvard University, discusses the realities of overly challenging leadership in his work on adaptive leadership: “It’s often thought that leaders are dominant within an organization and want to use their strong personalities to impose their will. This hierarchical top-down leadership style hasn’t worked for a long time. It hinders the flow of information in companies, undermining cooperation and unity between teams and departments.”¹

A Sherpa understands that to maximize influence, you must practice both support and challenge and then learn how to calibrate these with each different person on your team. The same is true with any person or leader. Learning to manage your own personality tendencies and adapt to other people’s patterns is a key to leadership success.

Support means to provide the appropriate help others need to do their jobs well: to equip people, serve them, and provide the resources needed for those you lead. Support looks different for different people, but at its purest form it means to equip and resource them for the journey ahead.

Challenge, on the other hand, means to motivate people by holding them accountable to what they could do if they had the resources. Challenge is the push needed to get people to move to be the best they can be, either as a team or as an individual. For instance, challenge can be direct with words or indirect with action, but the overall purpose of challenge is to help get people to levels that they never imagined they could get to.

How about you? Which do you find more natural, support or challenge, and which one have you had to learn? Which one would those you lead (whether at work or at home) say that you tend to do more?

The 100X-leader journey starts at base camp, where you must understand what your tendencies of support and challenge are by being honest with yourself. This is the first step to getting to 100% health in the way you lead. If you tend to provide high challenge but little support, then own it. Or if you naturally give high support with low challenge, then own that. This is the stage of conscious incompetence (realizing exactly where you are coming up short) and the key to becoming someone people want to follow, rather than have to follow.

Start with Support

To become a person worth following it is vital that you first establish support with those you lead before you challenge them. Starting with support allows for trust to be established relationally so that challenge can be more easily accepted.

John was a vocal leader who expected a lot from his people, and everyone knew it. As general manager, he shared his challenge openly and often. “You know what needs to happen,” he would say. “We are down 4% and the big boss won’t put up with it. Let’s get going!” He would continue to cajole people to execute and “make it happen,” on a daily basis.

He was actually quite good at motivating people, and most of the employees did what he asked so they wouldn’t get on his “bad side.” However, over time John’s expectations became unrealistic while the fear of disappointing him or the “big boss” lessened. Although John could overly challenge, his support was earned simply through driving results. In time, the people began to wonder if John truly cared for them or their success. This is where the grumbling and complaining began—to anyone but John.

His team would ask for help on some equipment innovations of this manufacturing company to no avail. “You guys always want something, don’t you?” John would say. “No more excuses, let’s go. Make it happen.” Although they asked for a specific type of machinery to do what he needed them to do, John didn’t listen. Over time his team would avoid going to John directly to ask him for anything, because they were always told, “that is what we pay you for—figure it out!”

The harsh challenges to his team became even less effective, and his people did just enough to keep their jobs, but little more. The “big boss” grew more and more frustrated, but because John’s team didn’t receive the resources they needed, they struggled to hit their quotas.

John became more and more agitated. He eventually went “nuclear” with the ultimate threat of layoffs. His challenge became more and more blatant and threatening as he started to say things like, “Maybe I should just clean house, the whole lot—just start over.” He made some layoffs: “That will scare ‘em,” thought John. However, it only made things worse.

The employees and his team, desperate to save their jobs, started to protect each other against John and the “big boss.” Eventually, the employees had enough and began to leave for lateral jobs where they had a better boss. This exodus of employees, coupled with the continued layoffs, turned the culture of the company toxic as the employees told all those looking for employment there to stay away.

The “big boss” started to consider moving the manufacturing plant because, according to John, the workers in this city were “scarce, lazy, and spoiled.” Eventually, the company was sold to another private equity group who had more specialism in handling companies that need to be turned around in this sector.

In came the new management team with a similar message: “We know how to turn companies like this around. If you want to keep your jobs then you need to keep your head down, work hard, and do what your leaders say.” One midmanager from the manufacturing floor was sent in to ask management for the new equipment to enable them to work smarter. He was quickly told to return to the floor, with the usual response, “That is why we pay you; figure it out.”

Unfortunately, there was not a happy ending to this story. The long-term overchallenge and lack of support created a culture rift that affected their market share and their reputation.

If you want to create success with your people or your organization then you must calibrate support before challenge.

The art of leadership, then, is the appropriate calibration of support and challenge at a specific moment, in a specific context for a specific person. When you are trying to establish healthy communication and relational trust it always requires the investment of time. From this perspective support is not soft, it’s a strategic decision a leader makes because they understand the long-term return on their investment.

The Support-Challenge Matrix

Years ago, we started to unpack the 100X concepts of support and challenge that was written about in my (Jeremie’s) first book, Making Your Leadership Come Alive (Leadership is Dead). We were playing with the liberating/dominating constructs of the book when Steve added two other components, protecting and abdicating, around the four-box matrix he had seen from some work from his friends at DDA Consulting. We then devised a more helpful version of the Support-Challenge Matrix to create a scalable visual tool.

The matrix is simple, but powerful (see Figure 3.1). There are two axes. The y (vertical) axis is support, with high support at the top and low support at the bottom. The x (horizontal) axis is the challenge axis, with low challenge on the left and high challenge on the right. We then created a standard of leadership behavior and the culture that leadership behavior creates in each quadrant.

The best leaders in the world operate in the top right quadrant—they liberate. These leaders have learned how to function by liberating more often each day in every part of their lives and thus have earned the distinction of becoming people worth following.

It is important for you to understand that most of us will visit each quadrant on most days. None of us are perfect. However, the more time we spend in the top right quadrant, the more effective we become. But it doesn’t come naturally! Here is how Nick Green, a British executive of a major corporation, reacted:

I have been somewhat aware of the fact that I dominate in some situations and abdicate in others, but I’ve not had the tools to understand what’s going on. I was a protector, abdicator, dominator and sometimes liberator—but always subconsciously and never intentionally.

For me the Support-Challenge Matrix was like having cataracts in my eyes fixed. Finally, I could see what was going on and I understood what I was doing and the impact I was having on other people. Initially I applied this new found learning to myself at work, which helped enormously; I realized I could challenge people without it being confrontational!

Then once I’d cracked that and started to do more things intentionally each day, I turned my thoughts to all the other versions of me: the husband, dad, mate in the pub and bloke on the committee.

Seeing my life through the lens of the Support-Challenge Matrix has helped me—and those around me—hugely. I still have to think about what I’m doing—but at least I’m thinking now!

That is our hope for you—we hope you begin to intentionally think about who you are and how you are leading others and in doing so that you might experiencing the fulfillment of being the leader that you have always wanted to be.

Let’s look at each of the four quadrants.

Support Challenge Test

Several years ago, we were helping a manager of a company work through their team culture and specifically his style of leadership. As the Support-Challenge Matrix was drawn on a white board in front of his team, we asked this leader if it was okay to take the support challenge test by getting the team to plot his reality on the matrix. He agreed, but I could tell that his team was nervous about plotting their leader in front of him. I asked the leader to step out of the room and then, one by one, his people came to plot him on the board.

The results were not as the leader expected—the average plot put him square in the dominating category.

As he returned, he tried to make a joke of it, saying, “Come on guys, really? You threw me under the bus in front of him?” When I asked this leader where he would plot himself, he said, “right in the middle” of the liberate quadrant.

The journey from dominating to liberating would be his 100X journey. During the break he confided that he didn’t understand it but he wanted to improve, which is the best response when people realize they are consciously incompetent. All leaders with a default tendency toward dominating want to win and want to become more competent. They may just need to be helped to see this reality.

His question was, “How do I bring more support when I thought I already was bringing support?” The answer was, “Ask your team.” We then took the next 30 minutes to ask his team what support would look like for them. Here are their surprising answers:

• “It would be nice if you could say hi to us in the morning instead of asking for something from the day before.”
• “You are so intense at times that it feels like I have done something wrong. I don’t know if you are truly for me.”
• “I am thinking about things too, but at times it feels like you don’t listen to my ideas and so I kind of just shut down.”
• “Ask me how my weekend was.”

These are not massive issues, or even difficult things to do, but they all add up to big things long term. Most leaders arrive before their people and have already begun thinking about their days. Oftentimes the leader will begin peppering people about situations or barking orders before their teammates are warmed up. Just remember, little things add up to become big things in the long term, and ultimately your reputation is based on how you make people feel.

A few years later we had another session with this leader and his team. When we did the same exercise, they let us know that he had made it across the liberate line, which quickly led to a smile and a “high-five.”

This leader decided to go on the extremely difficult journey of becoming a liberating leader. He has been climbing the mountain, learning tools along the way to become a leader worth following, not just someone that people have to work for. He has been transitioning from a dominating tendency to liberating, both at work and at home.

Your Intent

People are smart. They can smell the leader’s intent from a mile away. They tend to know if the leader is for them, for themselves, or against their teams or people.

Are you for people or for yourself?

Most people are not necessarily bad people, they are just living accidental lives and not realizing that they are living incongruently with who they truly want to be. It can be different! Change can happen if you want to become someone worth following.

The questions you need to ask yourself are:

1. Am I truly for my people, or am I for myself?
2. Do they know it? If so, how do they know it?
3. If not, what am I going to do about it?

A Sherpa liberates others only after they have liberated themselves. They then focus on helping others get to the higher levels that they have experienced. When they do, their influence and reputation grows with them.