I was twenty-six, and my first marketing company was growing faster than I knew how to run it.
New clients were signing every month, and to keep up I started hiring people who were genuinely good. A few of them were better than me at the very things I had built the company on. One could see the angle of a campaign in the first five minutes of a meeting. Another wrote copy that made mine read like a rough draft.
On paper, that was exactly what a growing company needed. Inside me, it exposed something I didn’t enjoy seeing.
I constantly felt like I had to protect my role. I’d add a final word to projects that didn’t need one, or find small ways to remind the room whose name was on the business. Nobody on that team would have described me as controlling, and from the outside it probably looked like normal founder energy. A small, quiet voice kept asking what it would mean for me if the people I hired outshined me in front of everyone I led, and that voice was steering more of my decisions than I wanted to admit.
That season showed me how much energy a leader can burn guarding a title.
Most leaders carry some version of that voice, and it quietly shapes who they hire and how much room they give. I’ve only grown more convinced since that the most common ceiling in any organization is the leader’s own ego.
The Ceiling You Build Without Noticing
Insecure leaders tend to hire people they can comfortably manage. It feels safe and orderly.
It also quietly caps the entire team at the leader’s personal level.
Insist on being the smartest person in the room and you guarantee the room stays exactly as smart as you are. Every decision bottlenecks through your capacity, and your team inherits your blind spots with nothing in place to cover them.
Moses ran into this exact wall in Exodus 18, and his story reads like a case study for every leader who has confused being needed with being effective.
Israel is only weeks out of Egypt, a nation of former slaves camped in the desert with no courts and no system for settling the disputes that erupt when people live packed together. So Moses sits down and judges every one of them himself. The text says the people stood around him from morning till evening. His father-in-law Jethro, a priest from Midian, arrives for a visit and watches a single day of it.
Then he says what nobody in Israel had the standing to say.
“What you are doing is not good. You and these people who come to you will only wear yourselves out. The work is too heavy for you; you cannot handle it alone.”
Exodus 18:17-18 (NIV)
Notice who delivers the correction. Moses had met God in a burning bush and watched the sea open. He still needed a visiting in-law from outside the camp to tell him he had become the bottleneck. Calling never exempted anyone from their limits.
Jethro’s fix was specific. Find capable people who fear God, who can be trusted, and who hate dishonest gain. Put them over thousands, hundreds, fifties, and tens. Then let them carry real weight.
“That will make your load lighter, because they will share it with you. If you do this and God so commands, you will be able to stand the strain, and all these people will go home satisfied.”
Exodus 18:22-23 (NIV)
The fix required Moses to trust capable people with things he had been hoarding. Working harder was never going to solve it, and the principle holds for a CEO or a church planter today.
A team built from people you can outshine will never outgrow you.
Think Like a Conductor
Moses had to change how he saw his job before he could change how he ran it.
A great conductor plays no single instrument at the level of the musicians in front of him. He may lack the hands of his finest violinist and the lungs of his best horn player, and that has never once made him less necessary to the music. His job is to pull a hundred people, each better than him at their one thing, into something none of them could make alone.
Outplaying them was never the assignment.
Read Jethro’s counsel again with that picture in mind. He moved Moses off the judge’s bench and into the work of choosing judges. Moses still took the hardest cases, and everything else went to people trusted to decide it. His influence grew the day his workload shrank.
Your value as a leader comes from assembling, deploying, and harmonizing talent. The sooner you stop auditioning for first chair, the sooner you hear music you could never play yourself.
Your Weaknesses Are a Hiring Map
“You cannot handle it alone” was Jethro’s diagnosis, and a good diagnosis tells you what to go find. Once you accept the conductor’s role, every place you are weakest marks a seat someone else should be filling.
So make this a standing rule for every major seat on your team. Look for someone who could do that job better than you ever could, then actually give it to them.
If every hire feels comfortable, you’re hiring to protect your status instead of hiring to grow.
Pay attention to Jethro’s criteria, though. Capable came first, and right behind it came fear of God, trustworthiness, and a hatred of dishonest gain. He never asked Moses to choose between gifting and character. A brilliant hire with no integrity will cost you more than a mediocre one ever could, so hold the bar high on both.
Most leaders agree with all of this until someone they hired gets the applause.
What Insecurity Actually Costs
King Saul gives us the full price tag.
David had just killed Goliath and routed the Philistines. As the army marched home, women came out of every town to greet King Saul with songs, and the lyric they chose compared him to the young shepherd in his service.
“Saul was very angry; this refrain displeased him greatly. ‘They have credited David with tens of thousands,’ he thought, ‘but me with only thousands. What more can he get but the kingdom?’ And from that time on Saul kept a close eye on David.”
1 Samuel 18:8-9 (NIV)
One song comparing him unfavorably to a younger, more gifted leader, and his heart curdled.
Watch the math on that insecurity. Saul spent years and enormous energy trying to destroy the one man who could have secured his kingdom. In the chasing he lost his peace and eventually his throne.
Set him beside Moses for a moment. Moses gave authority away and, by God’s promise through Jethro, could “stand the strain.” Saul clutched his tighter and was finally undone by the man he refused to release.
Insecurity toward talented people makes you spend your best energy fighting the people who could have carried you.
The gifted person near you will function as an asset or as a threat, and your own security decides which. From my years in counseling rooms, I’d call that an internal issue wearing an organizational costume. Leaders blame the org chart, while the real source sits in their own unexamined fear.
So which leader are you being this season?
A Four-Question Diagnostic
Answer these based on how you have actually behaved this quarter.
Reaction check. Someone on your team outperforms you. What’s your gut response?
Promotion check. Who is one person you’ve recently moved into a role where they will clearly surpass you?
Trajectory check. Are your most gifted people getting more room over time, or slowly get managed down to your comfort level?
Credit check. If someone else gets the credit, can you genuinely celebrate, or do you quietly need a piece of it back?
Whichever question stung, sit with it. That sting marks the insecurity worth rooting out.
Iron Only Sharpens Against Iron
The discomfort pays off over time. It starts with one person who’s better than you at something that matters. At first it stings. Then, working near them, you pick things up almost by osmosis and your own game quietly rises. Add a few more in your weakest areas and you’re being sharpened from several directions at once.
Proverbs 27:17 said it plainly. “As iron sharpens iron, so one person sharpens another.” Iron won’t sharpen against a sponge. You only get sharper against something at least as hard as you are.
The people you keep close are slowly deciding who you become.
The Barnabas Standard
Barnabas rarely gets talked about, which feels fitting for one of the most secure leaders in the early church. Believers were still terrified of the newly converted Saul of Tarsus, who had been dragging Christians to prison, and Barnabas vouched for him anyway. Later, as the church in Antioch exploded, Barnabas went to Tarsus, tracked Saul down, and brought him onto the team. He recruited a man he had to know would eventually eclipse him, because he cared more about the mission than the ranking.
A few chapters later the phrasing quietly shifts from “Barnabas and Saul” to “Paul and his companions.” The student passed the mentor, and Barnabas let it happen without a fight.
John the Baptist completely explains this concept in one sentence. His crowds were leaving to follow Jesus, and his worried disciples came to tell him so. His answer is the most secure thing a leader can say.
“He must become greater; I must become less.”
John 3:30 (NIV)
I think about that twenty-six-year-old guarding his title a lot. Years later, I get to sit around tables with some of the most gifted people I know, and several of them are better than me at things I once believed made me valuable. My goal with every one of them is to release them fully, with real authority and real room, and then cheer the loudest when they pass me. Holding the role loosely has produced far more than gripping the title ever protected.
Your Move This Week
Work through these in order, because each one sets up the next.
1. Name the person you’ve been keeping small
Write down one name, the person whose gift pokes at your ego and whom you keep slightly out of the room. You already know who it is.
2. Hand them something real
Give that person real room this week, including the authority to make the call. Moses gave his judges whole cases. Do the same, and resist the urge to quietly redo the work afterward.
3. Say it out loud
Put them in front of people and say publicly how good they are. Public credit is where your security actually gets tested, so give it where others can hear it.
4. Raise the bar on your next hire
On your next major hire, set the standard past your own reflection. Recruit the candidate who makes you a little nervous, and hold Jethro’s character standard just as high.
You’ll feel the small, quiet voice I felt at twenty-six. Starve it. On the other side of that discomfort is a team with a ceiling you no longer set, and influence that outlasts your name on the door.
Let them surpass you, leader.
— Jared