What a 1955 Harvard Business Review article and one of the oldest leadership stories agree on.
If every decision in your business still needs your sign-off, you're the bottleneck. Your team waits on you, your customers wait on your team, and you end most days tired and behind. It's one of the most common problems in a growing business, and one of the oldest.
The leader who did everything himself
Picture a leader who has just pulled off something huge. He's led a whole nation out of a terrible situation and into a fresh start. Now they're camped together, and every dispute and every hard call comes to him.
So he sits from morning until evening hearing cases, one after another. The line never gets shorter. People stand around all day waiting their turn.
His father-in-law comes to visit and spends a day watching. Then he asks a simple question: Why are you doing all of this alone?
The leader has a good answer. People come to him because they want it done right, and he cares about getting it right. His father-in-law tells him the truth anyway. What you're doing isn't good. You'll wear yourself out, and you'll wear out everyone waiting on you. This is too heavy for one person.
Then he hands him a plan. Teach everyone the standard so they know how to handle things themselves. Find capable people with good character and put them in charge of groups of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens. Let them make the everyday calls, and bring only the hardest cases to the top.
The leader listens and does exactly that. The line clears, the people are served, and he gets his life back.
What business school calls it
Every leader leans on three kinds of skill. Robert Katz laid them out in the Harvard Business Review back in 1955, and they still hold:
- Technical skill: doing the work itself. Running the numbers, closing the sale, fixing the problem.
- Human skill: working with and through people. Building trust, coaching, and handling conflict.
- Conceptual skill: seeing the whole picture. How the parts connect and where the business should go next.
The mix changes as you grow. Early on, technical skill carries you because you're the one doing the work. The higher you go, the less your job is doing the work yourself and the more it becomes leading people and seeing the big picture. Peter Northouse makes the same point in Leadership: Theory and Practice, one of the standard MBA texts on leadership.
The father-in-law's plan is that exact shift. The leader stops handling every case himself and starts teaching, choosing people and watching over the whole.
The leader in that story is Moses, and you'll find it in Exodus 18, written thousands of years earlier.
If you know your Bible, you probably recognized him a few paragraphs ago. Here's how the passage tells it (ESV).
"Moses sat to judge the people, and the people stood around Moses from morning till evening" (Exodus 18:13). His father-in-law, Jethro, asks, "Why do you sit alone, and all the people stand around you from morning till evening?" (18:14).
Then comes the verdict: "What you are doing is not good. You and the people with you will certainly wear yourselves out, for the thing is too heavy for you. You are not able to do it alone" (18:17–18). Notice who wears out. Jethro says Moses and the people with him. A bottleneck costs every person waiting on a decision.
Jethro's plan
- Teach the standard. "Make them know the way in which they must walk and what they must do" (18:20).
- Choose trustworthy people and let them make the call. "Look for able men from all the people, men who fear God, who are trustworthy and hate a bribe" (18:21).
- Escalate only the hard cases. "Every great matter they shall bring to you, but any small matter they shall decide themselves. So it will be easier for you, and they will bear the burden with you" (18:22).
It's the first org chart in the Bible, and thousands of years later, business school is still teaching it.
Then and now
| Exodus 18 | Business today |
|---|
| Teach them the way they must walk (18:20) | Clear standards, values and processes |
|---|
| Choose able, trustworthy people (18:21) | Hire for character, then let them make the call |
|---|
| Chiefs of thousands, hundreds, fifties and tens (18:21) | Org structure and span of control |
|---|
| Bring every great matter to Moses (18:22) | Escalate only what needs the top |
|---|
Jethro asks for character first: able, God-fearing, trustworthy, and not for sale. Competence can be trained. A person you can't trust can't be given authority, and without authority, nothing leaves your desk.
Why we hold on
If the plan is this clear, why do so many leaders stay in the judge's seat? Usually some mix of three reasons. We're good at the work and enjoy it. We don't trust anyone else to do it as well. And part of our identity is tied up in being the one people need.
The text says, "So Moses listened to the voice of his father-in-law and did all that he had said" (18:24). He was the leader God had chosen, and he still took correction from his father-in-law. That humility is the part that's easy to skip.
Try this week
Write down every decision that came to you in the last five days. Mark the ones only you could have made. For everything else, ask Jethro's three questions:
- Does my team know the standard for this?
- Is there someone trustworthy I could give it to?
- What would they need to bring back to me, and what could they decide on their own?
Pick one and hand it off.
What's one decision you could hand off this week?