5. the jethro principal

Leadership doesn’t carry everything, but leadership does make sure everything gets carried.

In this episode of *For the Love of Leadership*, we unpack a prophetic word our church received: *“We do not yet have enough campuses to contain all that God is doing through Cathedral.”* If God is going to expand us, how do we prepare as leaders without burning out ourselves and the people we lead?

We go to Exodus 18 and the story of Moses and Jethro. Moses is drowning in responsibility, trying to personally handle every problem among God’s people. Jethro steps in and says, “What you are doing is not good. You and these people… will only wear yourselves out.” It’s not just the leader who suffers when leadership is overwhelmed. The people suffer too.

From there, we talk about:

- Why margin in your life is not laziness, but often a sign of healthy leadership  
- The difference between being responsible *for* everything and personally *doing* everything  
- The trap of finding your identity in what you do, which makes certain things hard to hand off  
- How “hoarding responsibility” hinders the fruitfulness God is trying to bring  
- Why more campuses, more services, and more impact require more leaders, not more heroic effort  

We also get practical about delegation and development:

- Delegate *outcomes*, not just tasks: give people a hill to take, not just a checklist to complete  
- How task-based delegation unintentionally teaches people to stay dependent on you  
- Moving from “Can you do this one thing?” to “Can you own this area?”  
- Stopping the habit of being the “answer person” and learning to ask, “What do you think?”  
- Helping people see God in their problems, instead of simply solving problems for them  

Along the way we use a few everyday images:  
- A Formula One car that’s incredibly fast on a track but almost useless on normal roads, because it has no suspension  
- Crumple zones in cars and failure points in bridges, and why leaders need those built into their teams and structures  

This episode is especially for you if:

• You feel guilty when you’re not busy  
• You’re juggling marriage, family, work, and ministry and feel like you should “just push a little harder”  
• You know you should delegate more, but you either don’t trust others to do it “right” or secretly enjoy being the one who does it  

Our hope is that this conversation helps you shift from doing all the ministry yourself to developing people who can carry it with you. Because everything God wants to do in and through the church is already in the church. Our job as leaders is to mine the gold, empower the gifts, and make sure everything gets carried.

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Good morning, everybody. Welcome back to For the Love of Leadership. I'm here with the team. Say what's up, everybody. It's good to be back together. As a reminder, we are doing this podcast because leadership matters and we are trying to help promote the value of leadership throughout the culture of cathedral. Um, and hopefully inspire people to uh grow in their own leadership and maybe consider themselves uh in a way that they haven't before and to see themselves as a potential leader in the kingdom of God. Um so I'm here with my co-host, Pastor James. What's up, dude? Hello, how are you? Good to be together. Um we wrapped up Edwin Friedman, A Failure of Nerve. Great book. Um and now we're diving into some new content. New content energy. What are we talking about today?

SPEAKER_02 0:42

I have um been praying into a word that we received as a church, which is we do not yet have enough buildings to contain what God is doing to do for cathedral.

SPEAKER_01 0:53

We do not we do not yet currently have enough campuses to contain all that God is doing in cathedral.

SPEAKER_02 0:59

Yes. And I have been asking God, what do we need to do to not just prepare for what you're going to do, um, to ready ourselves? Because with more churches, with more campuses, there's a requirement of more people to lead people, more people to disciple. 100%. And so the idea that I want us to talk about today is this leadership doesn't carry everything, but leadership does make sure that everything gets carried. I love that. I was, I'm gonna introduce a principle that probably everybody knows. It's the Jethro principle. Okay, but I want to talk about it from a different angle today. Straight from the story of Moses. Straight from the story of Moses. He is the bottleneck.

SPEAKER_01 1:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_02 1:40

Exodus 18. Moses is buried in responsibility. He is drowning. There's a lot of emails coming in from the people of God. He's got his meetings. There is no in-between meetings, there's no time between them. It is constant. Uh, and he's really stressed. Like you can feel it. Like Moses is like, you're not gonna find Moses in like a John Mark Comer book. No, he's he's he's a he's not he's not your example. He is not, he is not ruthlessly eliminating anything. He is ruthlessly adding everything and everyone's problems to his life all the time. And uh and so Moses, we find ourselves seeing Moses say the same thing that probably a lot of leaders say. I just don't have enough time. Well and so in insert Jethro, and Jethro comes in and who's his father-in-law. Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 2:28

Praise God for a good mother-in-law.

SPEAKER_02 2:30

Which is actually funny because Moses is like, hey, I need you to take your daughter back for a while.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

I'm so busy. Can I get a take a take back on the wife? Don't do that. Don't do that, don't do that.

SPEAKER_02 2:42

And then Jethro's like, no, you married her. I'm married. Uh he's like, I got my own wife. Um okay, we're getting derailed. So uh Jetro then comes in and he says, You've gotta you gotta change the structure. You gotta empower, you've gotta delegate so that you can focus at the highest level of the world. On the things that you you need to focus on. Exactly. So, not you don't need more time, you need a better structure. And uh what stood out to me, we're not gonna talk about structure today. What stood out to me is actually in verse 17, it says this what you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear themselves out. Wow. You and these people. And what stood out to me is that Moses is not just tired, Moses is not just overwhelmed, but the people are now suffering too. Right. And so we as leaders need to realize that when you're called to lead something, it's important that everything is covered, but not that you do everything. Right, right. And so I started asking the question what do we need to do as the people of God to grow so that we can be responsible for everything, but not carry everything. And you guys know I love cars. Formula one is like my favorite thing.

SPEAKER_01 4:03

Plug rolling start podcast.

SPEAKER_02 4:05

Exactly. And the thing about a Formula One car is it is the fastest car in the world. And if you were to take that and you would put it on the streets of Los Angeles, it would become one of the slowest cars in the world.

SPEAKER_01 4:16

Wow.

SPEAKER_02 4:16

It has no suspension. There is absolutely zero, it moves about an inch when it goes over a bump because it is designed to go around racetracks, which are repaved and completely smooth. Right. And you and what you're saying about LA roads is they are destroyed and absolutely disgusting. But the gas company does drive Rivian, so maybe the money will get redirected somewhere into we're not going down that road either. So my point is this your car has suspension because it is designed to absorb impact, not just so that you're comfortable, so that your car can actually function.

unknown 4:54

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 4:56

More than that, your car actually has something called a crumple zone, so that you can hit something, it can absorb the impact, and you can still be safe and continue to operate your vehicle. Wow. Think about a bridge, a bridge that has one point of um of support. If that one point of support fails, the entire bridge goes down. Right. But bridges are designed with failure points, multiple points across the entire structure that can fail to be an indicator, oh, there's something wrong at the top level. Got it. And so I've been thinking, what does it look like for leaders to create margin in their world? Do I fall into the trap where Moses falls into, where it's like every person that comes to me says, I need this, and I go, Yes, I can be that for you.

SPEAKER_01 5:42

In other words, you need a crumple zone, you need a good suspension. Yes. You need multiple fulcrums holding up your bridge.

SPEAKER_02 5:49

Multiple folk, you've been using the word fulcrum a lot, and I love it.

SPEAKER_01 5:52

Have I really? Really? No way. I think a fulcrum is like the point that holds up, you know, like the bridge. I don't know if flip, I don't know. Someone, someone fact check me. Fact check me.

SPEAKER_02 6:05

Uh so uh we're gonna we're gonna circle back on fulcrum. We'll put it in the show notes. Um there are no show notes. Uh okay, so what does this mean? What does this mean for us?

SPEAKER_01 6:17

Um fixed pivot point or point of support. Okay, it's close enough. I'm just gonna perfect term.

SPEAKER_02 6:29

It's the perfect term. It's close enough. So I asked myself, if God is going to God is going to expand us, how do we prepare? I want to be a leader that empowers people, develops people, and releases people. Great. Which means that I need to shift my mentality from being a leader that does everything for everybody.

SPEAKER_01 6:47

Because a leader can't care can't do everything, but they can make sure that everything is so what I hear you saying is like personality types like me, I start to feel guilty if I'm not busy.

SPEAKER_02 6:58

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 6:58

Um, it's very hard for me to take a day off. It's hard for me to take like an hour or two off.

SPEAKER_02 7:03

Yep.

SPEAKER_01 7:03

I'm in school full time, I'm obviously leading the church full time, I'm married and kids full-time. There's a lot going on. And I'm the my kind of personality is like if I got a free hour, I'm kind of like, I start to get a little antsy, a little anxious. So like I pick up a book to read or you know, start going over a paper or whatever. Or maybe I can tweak that sermon a little bit more. You know, there's always feels like there's something to do. But what I hear you saying is that margin is actually a sign that you're leading well. Yes. Because that means hopefully that you're um you're taking the things that you could be doing and you're empowering others to be able to run with those things in your place. That's the good version of margin. Maybe the bad version of margin is like laziness and neglect. Correct. That's not what we're talking about. And I love the way that you phrased it is like leaders don't do everything, but we do make sure that everything gets done. Exactly. I think sometimes we can talk in these terms, and I'm I'm guilty of this. Um, many of you guys would have heard me talk in these terms of like, is it a ball or a chainsaw? You know, to try and determine like, can I drop it or can I not? Yeah. And the reality is like we're all probably just carrying and juggling a lot of chainsaws.

SPEAKER_02 8:07

A lot of chainsaws.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

Everything's kind of a chainsaw, right? Yes. And if it's not a chainsaw, then we probably don't need to be doing it at all. I don't know. Maybe that doesn't, that doesn't fly all the way. But I think more things are chainsaws than balls. And the question is not can I drop it, the question is can I hand it?

SPEAKER_02 8:21

Exactly. So what you're what you just described is great. Because I think a lot of people can can say that exact same thing. You described three full-time jobs. And so the reality is that you can't delegate your marriage. Can't do that. You can't delegate being a father. Can't do that. God has blessed you with a leadership position in his church, which means that you need to make sure that all of those people that that you shepherd are cared for. Right. Can you care for 500 plus people on your own? You cannot. So you could easily slip into that. So you have to ask yourself, who can I empower? And this is one of the areas where I think a lot of people start tripping up because they do feel that guilt of like, I'm gonna ask this person to do it, but I should do it. I'm responsible for it.

SPEAKER_01 9:03

Yeah, yeah. It's my title, my job.

SPEAKER_02 9:05

It's my job. It's my it's my thing. Like I'm responsible for it. And the answer is yes, you are responsible for it. But what you are ultimately responsible for is the great command that God has given you.

SPEAKER_01 9:16

Yeah, you're responsible for the fruit.

SPEAKER_02 9:17

Exactly.

SPEAKER_01 9:18

But you can you can empower. And I love what you were saying too. It's like if if you go down the road of you know, Exodus 18, Moses, it's not just you that's gonna get worn out. It's the people that you're responsible for ultimately that are gonna get worn out as well. And I think that's true on two levels. I think it's true on the level of which um their own needs aren't gonna be adequately shepherded.

SPEAKER_02 9:39

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:39

But I think it's also true on the level of their own capacities aren't gonna be adequately activated.

SPEAKER_02 9:44

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 9:45

Because they're like the the people that were coming to Moses were the same people that Moses pulled from to say, okay, now I'm delegating responsibility and authority to you. So there's there's obviously everything a church needs to become what God intends it to be is in the church. Right? It's just about mining the gold, finding the gifts. Our church is like overflowing with giftedness, rich with gifts, supernatural, and then also just natural. We were just talking about how Charlie Plymouth and Jordy James and Hobie and and and Alicia and Sam, uh Alvar Alvare Alvarez, Alvarado, um, how they were building this thing for for Mother's Day. It's like, man, there's so much gold in the house to help her become everything that God intends her to be. Um, but if we're operating on kind of this like guilty basis of I've got to do it all, first of all, that Mother's Day thing would have been a disaster if I built it.

SPEAKER_02 10:34

Correct.

SPEAKER_01 10:35

Okay, no, this is good. This is good. This is good. There are certain things that are obvious to us in our leadership that we know we can't do, and so we're happy to ask other people to do them. It's the things that we think we're good at that we're not as happy to give away.

SPEAKER_02 10:50

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:51

Because at the end of the day, a lot of it comes down to worth, value, and identity.

SPEAKER_02 10:55

Yes.

SPEAKER_01 10:55

I don't find my identity in being a craftsman and building something pretty and useful. So I'm happy for someone else to do that. I do find my identity in things like preaching and teaching. And so it's harder for me to delegate that stuff than it is other stuff. And we all have our own version of that. Correct. Where there are things that we're probably still holding on to because we kind of like the chainsaw.

SPEAKER_02 11:17

Yes, exactly. And the the trap you fall into there is that you have to ask yourself, am I not delegating this because I don't think they can do it? Which is an it's your job to make and multiply disciples so you can make them into being able to accomplish something. Or am I not handing this to them because I actually like to do this? Right. And I enjoy to do this. And when this is done well, this is what everyone compliments in regards to the area that I lead in. And so now you're gone from, and this is where it's tricky because when when we try to make sure that everything has been is being carried on our team, but not necessarily responsible for it ourselves. We have to make sure that we're not holding on to the things that we love because we can do it. Right. But we are empowering to create because there is another campus that will need what you can do. Yes, there is another city that needs what you can provide to it. Yes. And if we don't teach somebody else how to do it, train them how to do it, and we'll be one light in one city.

SPEAKER_01 12:19

Yep. Wow. That's so good. And I I do pray, um, I pray pretty much every day into that prophetic word that we received at last year's HSC. And my prayer is this God, you said we do not currently have enough campuses to contain all the all that you're doing in cathedral. And and just for all those who are listening, I really do believe that that was a word from the Lord, given the context of my prayers that week and my conversation with the elders about what I'd been asking them to pray into uh in terms of multiplication. So that's another story for another time. But I've been praying, God, you said so. I'm asking you, bring us into our currently. Yeah. Bring us into the place where we can say we do not currently have, not just in Highland Park, in South Bay and Nashville, in every service. I want to be able to look and say, we don't currently have enough space to contain all that you're doing, so that we must multiply into further services, further campuses, so on and so forth. My beautiful wife, did you have something that you wanted to add to this conversation?

SPEAKER_00 13:15

It just made me just a really simple line that we can be asking ourselves is like, or I guess it's not a question, but just thinking through that like my hoarding responsibility is hindering the fruitful mandate we've been given.

SPEAKER_02 13:26

Very good.

SPEAKER_00 13:27

So hoarding hinders and a hoarding hinders.

SPEAKER_01 13:30

Hoarding hinders. You heard it here first, friends and family. Hoarding hinders.

SPEAKER_02 13:35

That's alliteration. I can I can attest that there is no chat GPT in her hand providing that. No. That was straight from the top of her dome.

SPEAKER_01 13:40

You preach long enough, you just start to talk in alliterations. It just happens. I'm I'm convinced that they trained chat on preachers.

SPEAKER_02 13:48

Okay, I want to talk through, I wrote down a couple of traps that um uh me, I mean, people fall into when it comes to making sure that we we we become uh people that multiply others that help make sure that we're not carrying all of the weight. So the first one is this delegate out delegate outcomes, not tasks. Okay. So um here's here's bad delegation. Can you do this one thing?

SPEAKER_01 14:14

Mm-hmm.

SPEAKER_02 14:15

Better is can you own this area?

SPEAKER_01 14:18

Great.

SPEAKER_02 14:19

So uh an example would be uh the Mother's Day that we just experienced.

SPEAKER_01 14:24

Which was lovely.

SPEAKER_02 14:25

Yeah. You can go into that and you can say, hey, I want this, this, this, this, this, and you can list out everything that you want to somebody. Or you can say, Hey, I want to I want to create an experience that is gonna be captured and loved and remembered by mothers.

SPEAKER_01 14:40

Outcome.

SPEAKER_02 14:40

Outcome. An experience that is loved by others. Yes.

SPEAKER_01 14:44

And we want to be able to capture that.

SPEAKER_02 14:45

Yes. Okay. And then run with it. Right. So another way would to say it would be like, give them a hill. Give them a hill. Right. And say go climb it. Love that. Why is that? Why do you feel like that's more important?

SPEAKER_01 14:56

Well, for all kinds of reasons, but not the least of which is that um people are way more drawn to vision than they are to task lists. Yes. Um, and a lot of the times our delegated task list is just another way of us exercising control. Right. So it's it's really it's us staying tethered to the thing because we we love it. We want to keep doing it.

SPEAKER_02 15:19

Dependency.

SPEAKER_01 15:20

Yes. And so we want to say, actually, no, let me give the vision and then make make it plain, make it really clear so that people can can achieve the vision and run after that. Um, and so that's gonna unlock things in them. Yes. Um, vision will always require more than one person, right? And so if like you're just handing out one thing at a time, then yeah, you just need like one person to do that, right? But if you cast a vision, it's like, wow, all of a sudden I need a team to achieve that. And so now you've got the body really involved and actively engaged.

SPEAKER_02 15:50

Yeah. And what you're doing when you give somebody a task list is that you are you are teaching them to be dependent on you.

SPEAKER_01 15:58

Hmm. Okay.

SPEAKER_02 16:00

So the next time I go, hey, can you do Mother's Day next year rolls around to the same person? And I expect they're gonna nail it. What are they gonna say to me?

SPEAKER_01 16:07

They gotta come back and say, what are all the things you want me to do?

SPEAKER_02 16:09

What do you want me to do? Right. Yeah. Versus what's the vision? What's the vision?

SPEAKER_01 16:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:14

I got this.

SPEAKER_01 16:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_02 16:15

Yeah. I remember what you liked from last year. I remember what we fed we would do better, and I've actually been thinking about it. Great. I'm gonna go do this. Really good. And so that creates a leader now. Okay. It creates someone that's ready to go into it. Love this. So we're delegating outcomes, not tasks. Do you have any other unlocks to help us do this? I do have one. Okay. Let people solve problems before bringing them, before solving them for them. Okay. This is something that we've been talking about as people who just disciple people. How do we teach people to see God in their problem rather than solve problems for them? Great. What are some best practices to help us do that?

SPEAKER_01 16:48

Yeah, really good. So when you're uh when you're on the journey and helping people grow in Christ, there's there's different kinds of problems that people are going to face. There's a level of problem that is um, it's it's not something to be efficiently solved. It's something that's that that that God is allowing there to grow their character into Christ-likeness. I think when we are leading others and helping others to grow, one of the pressures that we can put upon ourselves is that we need to be their problem solver. So when they sit down and they talk about all of the struggles that they're having in life, we feel like I've got to be able to answer solutions. If I don't have solutions, then I don't have the wisdom of God. If I don't have the wisdom of God, then why am I sitting here with this person? But but oftentimes, as uh shepherds, um, whether you're an ordained pastor or not, our role is not actually to solve people's problems for them. Our role is to help people see what God is doing in the problem. How is he using that problem to form them more into the image of Jesus? In what way is this problem cruciform? Yes. Um, to help them grow in Christ's likeness. So there's there's that kind of problem. And then there's just kind of like logistic type problems. Um, and so if people are in functional leadership roles, they're gonna run into those kinds of problems all the time. All the time. And what happens a lot is we fall into the trap of we become the answer guy. Yes. People come to us with their questions, and we, as their leader, derive our value in being able to give them the answer. But what we need to get better at is what do you think? Exactly. How do you see it? What do you recommend? How would you solve it? Those kinds of questions are going to A, activate the genius in the person, because they have answers, and God did not God did not plant them in the church just so they could like take marching orders all the time. He planted them there because he has gifts that he wants to activate in them and and you know, uh specific ways of seeing things that that they can bring to the table. So we need to get better as leaders if we want to help people grow in not just being the answer person, not solving all those logistical or even people oriented problems in their leadership, um, but rather pointing them towards their own capacity to solve those problems.

SPEAKER_02 18:50

Yeah. And I'll and there are going to be times where you ask them what they recommend, and maybe they haven't experienced this before. Maybe they have they don't have um the tools or the knowledge to be able to accomplish the problem. But at least you're inviting, you're inviting it before you just autocorrect for them.

SPEAKER_01 19:07

This is really good. I think you're saying something helpful. Immature version of this is go deal with it. That's not what we're saying. The mature version is engage a dialogue. Yes. Literally, how do you see it? Yes. How would you solve it? And then have the conversation and then help shape their answer.

SPEAKER_02 19:22

Yes. Yeah. That's problems. And another version of that, um, which I was um rereading in something that I think his name's Greg Bosch. Yes. Yes, he had an amazing leader. Amazing. Um, he said, stop answering questions for people. And that would be another version of this. Uh and I I like that because what that also does is it creates ownership because sometimes they people that you lead will come to you with questions that they they actually know where to get the answer for this. So maybe it's not a big problem, but it's like, hey, um where where is this again? Or hey, can you approve this this card? Or can you do this, or can you help me accomplish that? Or what what's our process for this? And in those moments, the the easier thing as a leader is to just answer the question. Right. Uh because that's the most efficient thing. And if you're like me, I'm an efficiency junkie. Right. So I just want to answer it, go do it. Then the next time it comes, the next time it comes, the next time it comes. So it's actually less efficient because it drains your time over the course of time. Where instead you go, hey, you you know where to get the answer to this. You know the process to go through. You know where to find that. I actually emailed you about this last week. Did you see that? Read that email and then come back to me and see if you have any questions. Right. Um, because as we continue to grow in leadership, time is you can't get more time. It is finite. And so if we as leaders can remember, like I can actually own this area. That's a good lesson that I try to learn as a someone as a follower as well. Right. Like there's an answer. I'm gonna try to find it first before I actually engage my leader because I understand how much they're they're carrying and the weight that they have. And I want people to do that with me as well. And I understand that. That's true.

SPEAKER_01 21:00

You've you've been on that journey for a long time. Um now that I'm just thinking about it, you probably ask me a question like once a month.

SPEAKER_02 21:07

If if they're big ones, though.

SPEAKER_01 21:09

They're real big questions. But you you almost never ask me a question. Yes. But there's a lot that's happening through you. Yep. Um, and there's a obviously a huge degree of trust that you and I have together. Yeah. And so that's a good example. Yes. We're running out of time.

SPEAKER_02 21:24

We are. Do you have any other? I have plenty more, but this is a couple weeks. So we're gonna pick up next week. We're gonna pick it up next week. We're gonna keep it.

SPEAKER_01 21:29

For the love of leadership, everybody. Thank you so much, Pastor James, for your wisdom. Say bye, everyone.