Sherpa Leadership Podcast
Welcome to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, where we help you climb higher in life and leadership. Whether you’re an entrepreneur, business owner, or leading a team, this podcast is designed to give you practical leadership tools, frameworks, and real-world insights to help you grow.
Sherpa Leadership Podcast
Episode 0 - Welcome to the Climb
Leadership is one of the most influential forces in any organization. It determines culture, performance, and long-term success. But great leadership doesn’t happen by accident—it’s built through intentional growth, skill development, and a commitment to serving others.
We created this podcast because we know leadership can feel isolating. Whether you’re leading a business, a real estate team, or an entire organization, the weight of leadership is real—but you don’t have to carry it alone. This podcast is your guide to navigating the challenges, seizing opportunities, and climbing higher in your leadership journey.
Each episode will focus on practical leadership lessons, real-life stories, and tools you can implement right away. Some episodes will be short leadership insights, while others will feature interviews with top leaders, exploring how they’ve climbed higher in their own leadership journey.
We’ll talk about:
✅ Leading with vision and purpose
✅ Building high-performance teams
✅ Navigating change and uncertainty
✅ Scaling your business without burning out
✅ Becoming a leader people WANT to follow
If you’re serious about leadership, this podcast is for you.
Leadership is a journey, and we’re here to walk it with you. So hit subscribe, share this podcast with a fellow leader, and let’s start climbing together.
Welcome to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast—let’s climb higher.
Welcome to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, where we're here to help you climb higher in life and leadership. Whether you're an entrepreneur, business owner or leading a team, this podcast is designed to give you practical leadership tools, frameworks and real-world insights to help you grow.
Speaker 2:Welcome to Episode 0 of the Sherpa Leadership Podcast, where we help you climb higher in life and leadership. I'm here with my good friend Reed Moore and I'm Chase Williams.
Speaker 1:Hey everybody, so glad that you joined us for this. This is Episode 0, where we're just going to kind of share our heart, share our mind about the reason that we're doing this podcast and and we're just excited to get into it.
Speaker 2:Yeah. So, reed, tell me what's really your heart behind putting together a leadership podcast. There's plenty of them out there. This isn't the first one.
Speaker 1:No, it's definitely not. You know, one of the things I've learned over the years is leadership is one of those topics that is really attractive to a lot of people and I love talking about, I'm passionate about helping leaders, all of those things. But one of the things that I've realized over the years is that people that feel called to leadership and end up in what we call organizational leadership, they have a hard road ahead of them and there's lots of skills, there's lots of pain and there can be a lot of loneliness, and this podcast really is designed to speak to people who carry the weight of leadership, to just help them climb higher and to maybe lighten their load.
Speaker 2:So I want to come back to this idea of organizational leadership and we'll unpack that a little bit more, but I would say part of my heart behind it is the world is starving for great leaders. Yes, right, like we've just gone through an election cycle, right, and it seems to be similar in a lot of ways every four years in America, right, and yet you don't have to look very far, whether it's politics or business, or church or community, family, yeah, to realize that great leadership is super important and it can be hard to find. Yes, and so my heart, really, as a leader that's developing myself alongside of you, is to help other leaders that really feel a calling to lead well, to have some resources, some tools, shared experiences, failures, wins, all the things that go along with that experience to just help them get there in a maybe a little less painful way.
Speaker 1:Yeah. So you know, if you look at some of the traditional definitions of leadership, right, john Maxwell is famous for saying leadership is influence, nothing more, nothing less. And that's so great. The challenge is, if you're going to lead over a long period of time with people like you are with your kids and like you are inside of a business or a non-profit, is that leadership is not just influence. It's the ability to keep and sustain influence by being consistent and growing and leading yourself first over a long period of time and then being able to lead other people. Well, and because, if not, you erode influence over time.
Speaker 2:Sure. And of course, I want to ask you about this idea of the difference of organizational leadership as we think about it and just influence you mentioned it there for Maxwell because we're kind of in this era of influencing. Yes, we joke about it once in a while back and forth, but there's lots of mediums and lots of people that desire to influence others and that's not a bad thing, right. It's just not the same as being face to face, belly to belly, over a long period of time with people in an organization, part of a team, a family or otherwise. There are some really key differences, I think, that make that a topic in and of itself.
Speaker 1:Yeah.
Speaker 1:So when I think about organizational leadership, I think about this internal dialogue that I have, and that is I want those that are closest to me to think the most of me when it comes to my leadership, and for me, my experience is that's a high bar, right, I can jump on Instagram or I can jump on a stage and I can have people walk away saying, wow, that guy's a phenomenal leader, sure, right.
Speaker 1:But what I actually want is my wife and my kids to say, wow, my dad is a phenomenal leader, because I know that they're going to see me at my worst. Yeah, they're going to see me when I'm not a good leader. And if, if they at the end of you know when I breathe my last, they look back and they're like look at dad's leadership legacy at home, right. And then I have that with my business partners and people that are in my company, and so on and so forth. For me, that's that's kind of the essence of organizational leadership, because you can't fake it with your kids, you can't fake it with your spouse, right? There's too many touch points over too long of a period of time.
Speaker 2:That's right, and you can't fake it with the people that you work alongside every day over a long period of time. As another example, yeah, it really speaks a little bit to the naming of the podcast Sherpa Leadership Podcast. Right, the idea of a Sherpa is a guide who takes you to the top of the mountain Right. Sherpa is a guide who takes you to the top of the mountain Right Safely and then back down safely, and the reason they can do that is they go with you, yes, and they've been there before and they know the pitfalls and the places where you can slip and die. If you're thinking about mountain climbing, leadership might not be quite that treacherous but it can feel that way, right, Sure can.
Speaker 2:So a Sherpa has been there, has taken the licks, gone through the crucible and can help you get there safely. It's not someone who just stays down at base camp and points to the top of the mountain and says go up there.
Speaker 1:Yes, yeah Right, it's very different. That's more like in theory. You should take that route Very different. It's like actually that route's the worst, because I almost died there.
Speaker 2:Yeah, so talk to us. Read about this idea that part of good organizational leadership is first leading yourself. Well, what does that mean to you?
Speaker 1:Yeah, so my experience has been that it is so much easier to see challenges and faults in other people, and it's so much easier to help them with those things, than it is to be able to look in the mirror, to be able to accept feedback, to be able to have other people speak into your life and then to make those changes right. I'm the hardest person in my life to lead by a landslide Me, too. One of the houses that we used to own had this big, beautiful tree out front and it was probably 120, 130 feet tall and three people, arm to arm, just reached around, arms around. It was amazing.
Speaker 1:We had a windstorm one night and we heard this giant crash and we woke up in the morning and this giant, perfect, beautiful, strong tree had broken in half and, and, like it, went down the gully and unfortunately it didn't land on the house. We walked around the back side. Guess what we saw in the middle of that tree. What's that? It was punk. Okay, it was rotten at the core. Yeah, it looked great, but when there was too much pressure it broke, and it broke in a violent way that if it was on the other side of our house, it would have crushed the house. Yeah Right, that's the idea here, is that nobody gets to see whether I'm leading myself well or not. But I know, yeah, and if I can fight that and then I can fight for leading the people closest to me, first, the actual ripple effect across the community, across the country, across the world can be profound.
Speaker 2:Yeah, and my hallucination around this too, reid, is that when people are deciding whether they will allow you to lead them or not because that's a choice that you have to earn right there are some key things that they think about, either consciously or subconsciously that they look at. One of the most famous ones we talk a lot about is do you care about me? Right, right, that's an important one, but I believe another one that they actually think about is can you help me? Yeah, do you do? Do? Are you a person that has character and has capability and has capacity?
Speaker 2:However, you might think of that, that, that you can actually help me get where I'm going, and I would be willing to follow you. And so, if you're not first, as a leader, building a strong foundation of those things, my gut tells me that a lot of people are going to see through that right, unlike the tree story that you shared, it had to fall over before you saw the punky wood in the middle. I think people can see through that right, if you're working really hard to lead someone, but they're kind of paying close attention to how well you lead yourself, they start to question if you're the right person to follow.
Speaker 1:Yeah, and really talented people are going to. You could say really talented people. You might tell yourself that you're hiring them, but there's the other side of that coin and they are hiring you to get them where they want to go in their lives. And if where they want to go in their lives is somewhere in the world of wealth and wholeness, it's somewhere around the world of building a big life. They're going to be looking to you to model that. It doesn't mean you need to be perfect. It doesn't mean you need to be on that journey actively.
Speaker 2:So what does it look like to focus on leading yourself first right, and we kind of we kind of pull this out of what we call the I serve leadership model, and we'll go through that from time to time. We won't cover it all on the episode zero, but the first, the first letter in the acronym I, is individual performance and results. So tell us what that looks like practically.
Speaker 1:Yeah, so.
Speaker 1:So in in kind of leadership conversations there's, there's something that's really, you know, pretty prolific and it's an important idea, and that is work on your strengths, not your weaknesses.
Speaker 1:And that's true to a point, but as an organizational leader, you'll find that your weaknesses can quite readily undermine your strengths, and so they do have to be worked on. And so, when we look at the I serve model, there's just this handful of things that every leader needs to continue to grow, and the first one is individual performance and results, which we'll talk about in our next episode, right, and there's all these other elements, right, see and shape the future as a leader, engage and develop others, reinvent continuously, value results and relationships and ultimately embody the values. Right, what you see is what you get, yeah, and so we're going to spend time really thinking through these different elements of this model, and and and being sherpa is as best we know how sure and bringing people on that are seasoned, matured leaders to be able to help share their story about what it looks like to to climb this mountain of leadership okay.
Speaker 2:So, reed, let me ask you a tough question. Yeah, Anyone watching this podcast episode zero of the Sherpa Leadership Podcast that might be considering or wondering if we would be two good Sherpas for their leadership journey. What would you tell them?
Speaker 1:I think the classic answer that I've learned is I don't know that you should Fair, and if you decide that maybe it's worth listening, fair, and if you decide that maybe it's worth listening, what I would say is that I've had the opportunity to be in business with people that have been in my world for over a decade lots of them and if you get a chance to meet my kids, you're going to see kids that maybe exemplify some of some of these different character tendencies and hopefully they would say what you see is what you get with my dad different character tendencies and hopefully they would say what you see is what you get with my dad.
Speaker 1:And I've been able to, through pain, through failure, produce results in the business space for going on over 20 years now Well, actually 25 years now and so I would just say I'm a pretty obsessive journeyer and the things that I've learned I have an ability to kind of encapsulate and and turn around and maybe hand them off to somebody else, uh, in a way that makes their journey a little bit easier. Right, maybe, maybe I, I, I went up the mountain. It was really not the best way to do it, so next time up I've learned a couple of things.
Speaker 2:Yeah, I would say something similar. Right, like I, I would consider myself still on the journey, right, we both are so. So if you're thinking of climbing, you know, from a perspective of leadership, we're both still climbing on a daily basis. Right, this isn't a position of we've arrived and now we're going to share everything with you. It's like we still learn today. We learned yesterday, we're going to learn tomorrow too, and and share those stories, share those wins, but also those dark moments of leadership that were legitimate failures and mistakes that we learned from. Yeah, right, I didn't get this gray hair for nothing. Right, this bald head for nothing? At least I don't. I don't think I got it yeah, yeah.
Speaker 2:And, you know, I ultimately, I think that I believe that a lot of us feel called to leadership. Yes, right, it's more than just something we want, it's something that we feel called to. So I have a real passion for, you know, sharing everything I can in a way that hopefully people can understand, through examples, through story. We're going to bring some amazing leaders as guests on this podcast that we get to interact with and be in relationship with, to share their stories and their failures and their wins, so it won't just be the two of us all the time, right, I'm fond of saying that if people are following you, you don't actually get the choice of whether you're a leader or not. Yeah, if people are following you, you're already a leader. Right, the choice you get is how good of a leader you'll be and how much effort you give in developing your leadership. Yeah, and so that's something that I'm really passionate about delivering any value that I possibly can man so good.
Speaker 1:I love that, and there's a weight, and that's the idea is we want to lighten that weight, we want to make you stronger to carry that weight. Craig Groeschel says something that I just love, and that is everybody deserves to be led well, yeah, and that really captures the heartbeat of what we're setting out to do here. Love it, hey guys. Thank you so much for joining us for episode zero. I'm really excited about the first episode we're going to talk about. Individual performance and results is a foundational principle for you to be able to lead well.
Speaker 2:Thanks for listening to the Sherpa Leadership Podcast. If today's episode inspired you, don't forget to subscribe, leave a review or share with your favorite leader. You can find more tools and resources on sherpaconsultinggroupcom. Remember, leadership is a journey and every step you take matters. Keep climbing. We'll see you next time.