When Competence Becomes the Measure

His friend came to Houston without being asked.

Chris Gates had been diagnosed with stage IV cancer. He responded the way he knew how: organize the resources, establish a base near treatment, and get to work. Within days, he had an apartment near MD Anderson and a plan for moving forward.

He was less prepared for someone simply showing up.

His friend didn't arrive with answers. He didn't press for an update or insist on a conversation. He stayed. Days passed before they talked about what Chris was facing.

"I felt that the courageous thing was to do it by myself and not let others in," Chris recalled.

At the time, keeping the burden private felt protective. He cared about people and didn't want them hurt by what he was going through. He also didn't want a diagnosis to change how they saw him.

For a leader accustomed to carrying responsibility, receiving someone else's presence required a different kind of courage.

## What a Number Can't Tell You

The habit of proving himself started early.

Chris worked his way through community college and then a four-year degree, paying his own way without loans while working full time writing satellite-tracking software for the military. Tuition covered twelve credit hours, and additional credits up to eighteen carried no extra charge, so he took the extra classes to save money and stay on track. It demanded tradeoffs. Sometimes he enrolled in two classes scheduled at the same time, attended one, and taught himself the other, showing up for the tests.

His grades reflected those choices.

When he reached the final interview at a prestigious company, the leader across the table stopped at one line on his résumé: 3.5 (in major). What did that mean?

Chris explained that he had done well in the classes that mattered to the work. His overall GPA, which included general education classes, was 2.9. Asked why he hadn't listed it, he answered plainly:

"If I put that on here, we wouldn't be having this conversation."

The leader offered him the job a few weeks later. Chris had already committed to another opportunity and honored that commitment. The leader left the door open: come back when you want something different.

A number could have screened him out. A question revealed the person behind it.

## The People Behind the Work

Chris's career took him to CIO roles at GE, Under Armour, and Allstate. Along the way, he learned to navigate large organizations and make difficult decisions. But when his former colleague Abel Jimenez asked what the people he led might not have understood about the burden he carried, Chris spoke about people.

He remembered a small GE technology organization on the West Coast. Moving there from a broad shared-services CIO role, with roughly three thousand people across fourteen functions and six businesses, had initially puzzled him. The new IT team numbered about thirty.

Why was he being asked to leave something so large for something so small?

A mentor helped him see the responsibility differently. In a vast enterprise, he could navigate an ecosystem of leaders and relationships. Here, he would be the person accountable for the decision.

Then the 2008 financial crisis arrived, along with an instruction to prepare a plan for a 30 percent reduction.

Chris and his team did the work sincerely. Before asking senior leaders to consider another direction, they needed to demonstrate that they understood the request and could deliver it. They built a credible reduction plan.

Then they turned the page and presented an investment case.

While other organizations were losing talent and confidence, this team could strengthen itself and build capabilities for the future. The increased budget was approved. The organization helped enable the business's shift from physical sensors toward data subscriptions, as revenue grew from roughly $400 million to $2 billion during that period.

Those results mattered. So did what happened to the people. Several later became senior executives at Fortune 100 companies.

Chris remembered colleagues whose families he knew, whose development mattered to him, and whose livelihoods weighed on his decisions.

"You have to recognize that person behind the keyboard."

He wanted people to exercise judgment and take risks, knowing they would have support if something went wrong. That conviction could spread beyond the people he personally knew. Leadership helped establish what people believed was safe to do, and whether they believed they were on their own.

## When Capability Becomes Identity

That ability to carry responsibility had served Chris well. It also shaped expectations he didn't immediately recognize.

Early in his career, he noticed how differently people received him once a prestigious company name appeared behind his experience. When the pet food business where he worked became part of Procter & Gamble, his abilities hadn't suddenly changed. The credentials attached to them had.

Recognition reinforced a pattern: become competent, earn confidence, gain influence, and receive greater responsibility. Over time, he saw how easily he could accept somebody else's definition of success and organize his efforts around achieving it.

Only later did he recognize a similar instinct in his faith.

He described trying to be someone who "didn't need him." God had equipped him with abilities, and Chris felt he should use them rather than burden God with things he believed he could manage himself.

The instinct felt responsible. It also left little room for dependence.

Recently, his reflection brought him to a question:

"Do I want God, or do I want God to want me?"

For someone accustomed to demonstrating that he belonged, the question reached beneath the next decision or achievement. How much had the desire to be capable shaped the way he approached God?

He is still working through that question. His earlier leadership and his continuing spiritual growth belong to the same unfinished life.

## Making Room to Receive

The friend in Houston gave that reflection a human expression.

Chris knew how to organize a response to a crisis. He was learning what it meant to allow someone alongside him without assigning them a problem to solve.

As he let more people in, he discovered something else: acknowledging his own difficulty sometimes gave others permission to acknowledge theirs. A conversation that began with his circumstances could create room for someone else to say that things weren't going well for them, either.

The support could move in both directions.

For leaders who spend their days offering confidence and stability, that possibility matters. People can trust our leadership and still know that we have uncertainties. They can receive our support and have something to offer us.

## The Chapter That Never Really Closed

Abel brought another discovery into their conversation.

When they worked together, he hadn't known Chris was a Christian. He had seen something in the way Chris led that he wanted to emulate. Years later, those experiences were still shaping his decisions, his mentoring, and what he passed on to others.

Chris had thought of their time together as a chapter in a career. Abel helped him see that the chapter was still active in someone else's life.

Reflecting on moments that feel finished, Chris put it this way during the interview: "Maybe this isn't a summit. Maybe this is a ledge."

There may be more to contribute than a completed role allows us to see: someone to reconnect with, a story worth preserving, encouragement that arrives when another person needs it.

For Chris, the next chapter includes learning to receive as well as continuing to give.

## Two Questions Worth Sitting With

Who needs to know they don't have to carry their burden alone?

And who have you allowed to do the same for you?

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This article is an editorial arrangement of an exploratory conversation, not a verbatim transcript or complete biography.