A Sherpa on Mount Everest has authority. Climbers listen to their Sherpas intently and respond to their instructions. Why? Because they have been to the top—the Sherpa know the mountain like the back of their hands, and the respect they have earned gains them influence. With this influence, the Sherpa responsibly and diligently guides their climbers, who are grateful, for without the Sherpa their chances of success are much smaller. The Sherpa are rightly revered and effectively lead people to make the right decisions in very challenging circumstances.

Climbers trust the competency of their Sherpa—their very lives are in their hands. Climbers trust their integrity, and they know it’s not an ego issue. Because Sherpa have no personal agenda or need to win for their own glory, they are free to help people fulfill their potential and stay alive on the mountain.

We all need Sherpas in different times of our lives to help us get to the higher levels in our leadership journey. We need leaders who will not shirk from calling us up, nor will they abdicate when we need to climb harder. A few of us have been blessed to have a Sherpa at times in our lives, but most of us haven’t, which is why we need more of the right kind of leaders in our world.

Sherpas are a prime example of leaders worth following. We simply need more examples—more people committed to fighting for the highest possible good of others.

Healthy cultures require this.

High performing teams thrive on it.

People desire it.

They desire the leadership that is hardly ever provided, only dreamed about. People want to follow people that are worth it. If you choose to be a 100X leader, then you are choosing to be someone worth following in the way that people want to follow someone they trust up the mountain. People want to follow someone who is secure, confident, and humble—someone who is leading others in the right direction.

On May 10–11, 1996, eight people died on Mount Everest in a violent storm. This disaster, which was captured in the New York Times bestseller Into Thin Air by Jon Krakauer, highlights leaders worth following and the relationships between the Sherpa, guides, and climbers.¹ To understand this in more depth, we reflected on Kate O’Keefe’s work on the Sherpa mindset in her 2016 thesis, “The Mental Strategies of Elite Climbing Sherpas”:²

Leadership was a strong recurring theme that highlighted the role of the Sherpa climbers whilst on expedition. In Kayes’ (2004) study on organization disaster on Mt. Everest, documenting the 1996 disaster, a strong link was uncovered between leadership and learning. It was found that a direct leadership approach can both inhibit a team’s learning but also be the element that determines life or death on Everest. In opposition to this study however, far from the narcissist is the Sherpa, and therefore climbing for personal glory and self-indulgence is not applicable. The 1996 Mt. Everest disaster was led by non-Sherpa Western climbers and therefore cannot compare to the Sherpas, and one can establish a clear link between the overpowering narcissistic doom that was placed on the expedition teams that day when their leaders were unable to make effective and life-saving decisions fogged by the temptation to reach the summit. In this study, the Sherpas highlighted that they are constantly checking the weather conditions, reassessing their goals and ultimately determining whether or not they will proceed. They also note however, that they work together as a team and without positive group rapport and effective teamwork, failure is imminent.

In Everest, the movie based on the incident, we see in more detail how leadership played a key role in this fateful 1996 disaster, as two different styles of guides worked feverishly to manage the different leadership styles of other teams on a crowded mountain in the worst of atmospheric environments.³ Trust had not been established between the differing teams and the results were fateful for many. This lack of good leadership caused drama and chaos in the midst of high stress.

Climbing takes a coordinated effort of time, strategy, and resources. For the Sherpa, the responsibility of leading other people up a mountain while keeping their own stamina is understandably great. To guide others to summit requires outstanding levels of leadership and people skills.

Though our work places are not the summit of Mount Everest and it is most certain that 10% of your teammates will not perish on the leadership journey, it is evident that many adults do perish emotionally and mentally in their jobs, some languishing in the pit of despair for their whole career. As a 100X leader, your job is to create the environment where those you lead go far beyond anything they thought possible both as individuals and as a team.

Anyone who has led anyone understands the difficulties that come from asking a group of humans, with their own ideas of where they think the team should go, to join forces together and allow themselves to be led to accomplish something greater than they could do individually.

So, what is it like to be working for you? Are you easy to follow or difficult? Do you want to become someone who others willingly choose to follow? If so, that means first that you must establish both credibility and integrity.

Credibility Gap

Credibility is the quality of being trusted and believed in. What a gift it is to be truly believed in. This is primarily seen in competency. The more you prove your competency over time the more credible your opinions and influence will be. People trust what you say and value your insights and wisdom. They believe that what you say reflects reality.

Having credibility is one of the key components to establishing influence with others. It is possible to like a person without finding their views or insights credible!

To become someone worth following is to be trustworthy. But what happens when a leader loses credibility? How can that happen? Leaders are granted a certain measure of credibility with their team until they lose it. In essence, it is theirs to lose.

Leaders start to lose credibility when a gap appears between what they are describing and what the people listening to them know to be true. The CEO, speaking at the whole company meeting, is the ultimate acid test. When he or she describes company values—what they think the company stands for—you can see in the faces of those present whether there is a credibility gap.

Everyone knows the leader is a good person and truly believes what he or she is saying. However, the leader’s experience doesn’t relate to the reality the majority of the company is experiencing. It’s obvious he or she doesn’t know what it’s really like for those on the front lines of the business. The employees know the CEO is sincere and means well, but they start to filter everything the CEO says through the credibility filter. They don’t trust what the leader is saying to be actually true, and over time this undermines the CEO’s influence.

This is when you hear phrases like, “Nice guy but he has no real idea of what is really happening on the front lines,” or “If she would ever leave her ivory tower she might just learn a thing or two.”

Here are some real-world examples of the loss of credibility:

An out-of-touch leader

The leader of a mid-sized company is highly charismatic. He loves the stage and grabs every opportunity to be on one. This particular CEO also loves to talk to clients and at industry conventions whenever possible. On one particular occasion, a group of employees was traveling with their leader to a trade show when they heard him say a few things about their company that caused them to be perplexed—he was talking about the company in a way that didn’t match with their reality.

After the first comment, the employees just looked at each other with a shrug of the shoulders. After the third comment, they then started to roll their eyes. The CEO was exaggerating the size of their company and then some of their accomplishments. It caused the employees to wonder if he was lying or truly didn’t know. In his defense they thought he really believed the information he was sharing was true.

The CEO lost some luster that day. A credibility gap began to open as his employees realized that he didn’t actually know what was happening within the company.

A leader with a lack of attention

Susan had been overseeing the committee working on a special project for her company. She was a very busy executive and had built a strong team to work on this project. The problem was that because of her busyness she didn’t spend the time or effort to obtain all the facts before she presented to the executive team. Her team would grow nervous because her lack of competency in reviewing the facts and making the case was causing a credibility gap. In the beginning, everyone knew of Susan’s competency—she had a great reputation inside the company. However, that all changed when they began to work together, and they saw that her lack of attention to detail made the team look bad. The team liked Susan personally, but her lack of diligence caused a nervousness and a lack of trust that was well-founded once Susan presented to the executives. Because of this, Susan began to erode her credibility as a competent leader even though she was a likeable person.

All talk, no action

John and Linda were good parents to their three kids. They provided for their kids and had a good relationship with each of them. As their kids got a little older though, a gap started to open. John and Linda began to talk about things they would like to do with their kids. The problem was that they didn’t do anything, they only ever talked about it. Their provisional ideas were seen as promises to their kids but when they didn’t follow through, they were seen as broken promises.

Though the kids know their parents are genuine in their desire to do exciting things with them, they no longer believe they will ever happen. They may say, “Yes, sounds like a great idea Mom, we’d love to do that,” but inside they have been let down before, so they have little expectation that it will actually happen. The credibility gap grows until the kids eventually filter everything their parents say through the lens of past disappointments. They know the parents mean well but the kids have limited or resigned expectations of follow through. A wide credibility gap can eventually lead to more distant relational dynamics, and the parents have no clue how it all started.

At the extreme end of the credibility gap is irrelevance. People begin to distrust the competence of a leader and therefore the leader’s opinions and perspectives have little if any influence on decision-making.

When a credibility gap starts to occur, it is usually done unconsciously. Leaders rarely, if ever, know they have a credibility gap. It’s not intentional. If it was, it would be an integrity issue and that’s a completely different matter. You can rebuild credibility over time, but rebuilding integrity is significantly more complicated.

Losing credibility is one thing, losing integrity is even worse.

Integrity Gap

Integrity is the state of being whole and undivided. While credibility is hard to get back, integrity is almost impossible to recover once lost.

Losing integrity gets into character issues, whereas losing credibility touches on competency. Here are a few examples that can create integrity gaps and cause the plumb line of moral character to be affected.

At the end of every talk the speaker would wind himself up for a grand finale that included tears. His team would watch this occur at virtually every event. The crescendo and the tears definitely impacted the merchandise table—books would fly off the table with strong sales. At the end of the talk the speaker would say the same things as at the previous event. It sounded so convincing. The employees would eventually ask, “are those tears real? Is he a total fraud?” They questioned whether the well-timed tears were just manipulation to sell more books.

The Integrity Gap occurs when people believe someone is deliberately manipulating words and/or emotions to achieve their personal objective. Integrity is fundamentally about trust and intent.

The owner of a small business had a demanding presence. He had pushed the employees to grow the company at a record pace. As the company grew, so did the leader’s appetite for finer things. The problem was that the owner was constantly saying that the business was struggling, and he began to ask his employees to accept pay cuts and salary freezes in order for the company to survive.

The employees began to look at the leader’s lifestyle and started to question whether what he was saying was a deliberate attempt to make them work harder and accept lower pay or if the company was really in trouble. The integrity gap widened as the employees watched the owner buy a luxury car and a larger home at the same time that they were laying people off. Thoughts then became, “I don’t trust you, I think you are lying so that you can maximize your profits for yourself.” Ultimately, the owner’s words didn’t match reality and integrity was lost.

With a credibility gap, the leader and their opinions increasingly become irrelevant, because it is primarily a competency issue.

With an integrity gap, people don’t trust what the leader is saying and why they are saying it, because it is fundamentally a character issue.

Credibility. Integrity. These are the areas where you want no gaps in your life.

It is hard enough to influence as it is. Leading is not easy in and of itself. Add in credibility or integrity gaps and it’s impossible to become someone worth following.

The Everyday

Becoming a leader worth following is an everyday reality. It is the 365 days, 24/7 lifestyle at work and at home that must occur. It is not something that can be turned off or on like a light switch or something you just decide not to do one day. Everyone that you live and work with is observing your leadership every day.

These people are aware of who you are and the role that you play. They are looking for guides who are healthy themselves. They want people who add value to their lives, who take them to higher places and develop them. This is not an activity but, rather, it is the life they are living out.

This means that a 100X leader is an everyday lifestyle. Are you who you say you are? Are you really who people see you to be? It is the congruence of your words and your actions, not only in your team or inside the organization, but inside every circle—self, family, team, organization, and community. And, is that happening every day?

To be a 100X leader is a marathon, not a sprint. It takes a lifetime to build a reputation, but just minutes to destroy it! Every Sherpa, every guide, knows that being consistent is the key to safe climbing. The consistency of a Sherpa leads to trust.

Some of you are consistently excellent at leading in one circle. That might be the team or organization circle. The question is can you be the liberating leader in every circle, every day?

What would it look like for you to wake up in the morning and provide the proper support and challenge for yourself? This would mean that you are becoming a liberator to yourself.

What would your family and/or friends do if you were consistent, every day, within your family relationships or your key friendships?

The goal here is to begin to integrate support and challenge in every circle and to make sure your leadership in your team and work are as consistent as your leadership to your family and to yourself.

Eliminating the Gap

Every one of us has a chance to right our wrongs, to turn around and start to become someone worth following. It begins again at the start of each week—of each day.

We want to challenge you to constantly work on your “gaps.” We are calling you to be intentional in every area of your lives and not allow your default tendencies or patterns to become harmful actions. This is incredibly hard to do, and we will all have moments where old patterns return, usually when we are tired or under some form of pressure.

Consistency over time is foundational to the 100X leader’s influence; being honest and responsive when we get things wrong actually increases influence with others. Great leaders don’t have days off where they become accidental because the stakes are too high.

It starts at home with the view of your family and/or friends.

It carries to your work, in every meeting you have.

You must eliminate gaps with every teammate and with every decision you make. It is the intentionality of your leadership that keeps you from credibility and integrity gaps.

Take a moment and think about the credibility gaps that you may have. Ask one of your trusted team members to tell you what gaps they see in you. Write them down and count this your opportunity to get to a higher level.

People Worth Following Bring Liberation

Being a liberator doesn’t mean you’re a perfect leader. We are human and will often be imperfect in our leadership attempts. Aiming for liberation, however, empowers you to hold up the mirror, take a hard look, and understand what it is like to be on the other side of your imperfections. How do others experience and view your leadership?

Using the Support-Challenge Matrix gives you a practical tool and a map to fight for empowerment and opportunity for those you lead and to give them the right support or challenge in the right situation at the right time. This leader in Canton, Ohio shares her experience:

After a season of reflection, I realize how much I have been losing credibility in my tendency to Protect inside my organization. The team I led was composed of both paid staff members and also an army of highly skilled volunteer leaders. After learning and applying the ideas from the Support-Challenge Matrix I realized that with the paid staff I led I was more capable of liberating leadership because I felt it reasonable to give them clear directives and expectations because they were being paid for particular roles. However, my tendency with our unpaid, but highly motivated and skilled volunteers was to protect them. I did a lot of the work for them, was passive in how I communicated expectations and offered much more support than was needed. The result was frustration for some people who weren’t feeling useful enough and a few actually left my team to join other more exciting volunteer opportunities. In essence, I lost credibility because I over protected them, which was perplexing to realize.

When I became intentional in trying to become someone worth following, I began to deal with my tendencies and I started by communicating clearer roles with set expectations and deadlines for projects within the teams. I had held onto responsibilities myself simply because I didn’t want to burden anyone else with menial tasks that I was perfectly capable of doing myself. Once I handed these off, my team felt empowered, trusted and motivated to work harder and go after a bigger vision of what could be. Instead of me coaching all our 100 + volunteer leaders, we established a team of seven coaches who led teams in their areas of expertise. We were able to increase the effectiveness of our training, apprenticing, and multiplying of our leaders because I wasn’t the one doing everything. It also freed up my time as the Team Leader to spend more time looking ahead to a bigger vision instead of micromanaging details. My credibility started to increase, where I had been losing it.

— Suzi Lantz, Rivertree, Canton, Ohio

As Suzi shares her story, we bet many can relate to the tendencies she has shared. We have seen her change her mindset and style firsthand because people now really want to follow her, whereas, in the past, they may have done so just out of duty.

This was the story of work; however, Suzi is married with a family. Listen to her share from her personal life and how the 100X Tools and processes of GiANT have made a difference:

Within our marriage I realized that I was again a protector in every sense of the word. My husband has a demanding people-oriented job and even though my job is no less important, for some reason I’ve always felt compelled to bear most of the burden at home. I wanted to “protect” Jason from feeling too much stress and strain within our marriage, with the kids and our home maintenance so I adopted an “It’s Fine” attitude. No matter what, I just dealt with it and said, “it’s fine.” Over time this developed over into a lack of any expectation for him to do anything at home and he began to abdicate simply because I was doing it all. I was resentful that he wasn’t spontaneously helping me or proactively fixing things around the house. He’s always been really involved with the kids, but as far as schoolwork, activities, transportation, etc., I had kept him out of the loop thinking I was protecting him from the stress of it all. Liberating leadership in my home has meant communicating much more clearly and establishing expectations and offering both support and challenge when things go undone. Simply giving my husband a blanket “pass” for not engaging in our household was very isolating to him and he actually developed resentment toward me because of it. Once we applied the Support-Challenge Matrix to this area of our lives and began to intentionally take steps to move in that direction our family life got so much better. We are going on regular dates together, taking weekends away, spending more time at family dinners and meaningful experiences with our kids, sharing the load of household responsibilities and really working as a team more effectively. It’s been, in a word . . . liberating!”

This is the transformation that we desire for you. We want you to become someone worth following. We want you to build leaders worth following as you learn to multiply what you have learned, and we want you to lead teams and organizations that stand for liberation. We believe you can because we have seen so many people become 100X leaders and experience the liberation that we speak of here.

Why You’re Never Quite Done Growing

Self-awareness, like climbing, is difficult.

Learning to hold up the mirror in front of ourselves and be brutally honest with what we see does not come naturally to most people. It is a necessary path however.

It will take time to walk through the process of self-discovery and self-awareness to help you see the potholes in your leadership and life that need to be addressed. We all have these issues—tendencies that lead to patterns of action that we face over and over again. We find ourselves saying things like, “Why do I always react that way?” and, “Why can’t I ever seem to handle those situations better?”

Venturing into territory that we’re not accustomed to is a new process of learning and trail blazing. We’re not sure exactly where we are headed, or the precise path that will take us there, but we are determined to push through, nonetheless.

As we work through our tendencies and keep returning to the healthier path, a trail begins to appear under our feet, wearing a path that others around us can begin to see. Those ruts that we create over time are the tendencies that affect who we are and how we lead, for good or ill. Our lives are the sum total of the actions we take, most of which are based on the tendencies within us. Where we ultimately find ourselves can be traced back to the steps we took along the way.

Wouldn’t it be great to be able to spot those tendencies ahead of time and catch and correct them before they result in negative actions? It’s not a one-and-done exercise. Those tendencies/patterns are engrained in us due to who we are and the lives we’ve lived up to this point. Our paths as leaders are less about eliminating tendencies as much as recognizing and accounting for them.

We are never quite done with growing. This process of knowing and leading ourselves is a lifelong pursuit. We don’t wake up one morning to finally realize, “I’m there! I don’t have anything left to learn.” There is always room for growth and improvement.

The journey is worth it, and the destination of a life-long pursuit of intentional growth is better than a life of accidental wandering. Every person who summits Mount Everest starts from base camp with an intentional goal. If you’re not already walking, step onto the trail today and begin walking the path of becoming someone worth following.

The next and final chapter allows you to do a deep dive into who you really are. We lay out a step-by-step process that you can use consistently as you begin the process that can get you to 100X.