The Shepherd

If our actions should be sincere and the things placed within our care are trusts rather than absolute possessions, how do we determine what is actually due to everything and everyone affected by those actions, protect their rights, and become true stewards of what has been placed within our care? Countless times, I've heard the term servant leader which is a great way to think about leadership, but from my perspective, a real steward of something placed within our care is more of a shepherd than servant leader. The word shepherd might seem like an unusual place to begin a discussion about leadership in the modern world. Most of us do not spend our mornings counting sheep, feeding them, ensuring their survival, or trying to determine whether the flock has found enough water. Our images of leadership are far more likely to involve responsibilities that include large offices, titles, organizational charts, boardrooms, governments, wealth, influence, social media followings, or someone on a stage explaining leadership to several thousand people. Shepherding can seem beneath our visions of leadership and simplistic by comparison. However, I think this is precisely why the image, while uncommon, is so powerful. A shepherd does not become important because the sheep admire him and the responsibility certainly does not depend upon whether the flock appreciates how difficult his job is. His work matters because something vulnerable has been placed within his care. He has to pay attention when a sheep wanders, notice when water is running low, recognize danger before the flock does, protect what cannot protect itself, know when to lead, when to wait, and sometimes when to go looking for the one that somehow managed to get itself into trouble again. Anyone who has ever raised children may already recognize characteristics of shepherding leadership. The shepherd's significance doesn't come from status, but from the fact that the sheep can be helped or harmed by what he does or neglects to do.

The Prophet Muhammad gave us this image in one of the most comprehensive teachings on the responsibility of leadership when he taught that each of us is a shepherd and responsible for what has been placed within our care. He then applied the principle across different layers of society, including: the ruler and those under his authority, the man and his family, the woman and her household, and even the person entrusted with another person's property. What fascinates me about this teaching is how thoroughly it removes leadership from the exclusive possession of people we normally call leaders. The ruler is included, certainly, but he is only one example. Responsibility moves from government into the home, from public authority into ordinary life, and from grand decisions affecting nations all the way down to the simple responsibility of caring properly for something belonging to someone else. That means you may never lead a country, run a company, manage a department, or have anyone report to you on an organizational chart, yet it is nearly impossible to move through life without something eventually entering the reach of your care. A teenager watching his younger brother while his parents are away has become a shepherd for the time they are away. An adult daughter helping an aging parent navigate medical appointments has become one in another sense. A teacher has responsibility for students during the hours of the school day, while a doctor possesses knowledge that can profoundly affect the life of a patient who may understand very little about the treatment being recommended. An engineer can approve something thousands of people will someday depend upon while a manager can influence whether people spend eight hours of each day in an enjoyable workplace or one filled with stress and anxiety. A person holding sensitive information suddenly has power over another person's privacy or reputation and even someone caring for a pet has responsibility for an animal that may not understand certain unknown dangers that may be lurking. These situations are obviously different, but the principle underneath them is remarkably consistent. There are things that exist in the range of my decisions which require greater consideration from me. This is why I prefer the image of the shepherd to many of the ways we describe leadership today. Modern leadership language can easily become preoccupied with the person doing the leading. It often overemphasizes her vision, charisma, executive presence, influence, communication style, personal brand, strategic thinking, and the ability to inspire others. These qualities shouldn't be discounted because they genuinely important, but shepherding leadership forces our attention away from the person holding the position toward what is being led. A shepherd with magnificent executive presence but dehydrated sheep is still a bad shepherd. She can have an excellent vision statement for the flock, an impressive communication strategy, and perhaps even a very attractive logo, but eventually somebody needs to notice that the sheep need water. The shepherd metaphor refuses to allow leadership to become entirely theatrical because the condition of what is being cared for ultimately matters more than the appearance of the person doing the caring. This also creates a symbiotic connection to sincerity since shepherding leadership helps the leader recognize and correct pretentiousness. If I am leading primarily because leadership makes me feel important, then I will naturally become interested in the parts of leadership that reinforce that feeling. I may enjoy making decisions, being consulted, receiving recognition, occupying the larger office, being introduced by title, or noticing how quickly people respond when I send a message. The less glamorous parts may receive considerably less enthusiasm which may cause me to be negligent in developing someone who could eventually replace me, listening patiently to a problem I have heard before, protecting someone from unfair criticism, or accepting responsibility when blaming someone further down the hierarchy would be much easier. The shepherding model asks a different question. Did what was placed in my care benefit from having me there? Parents, teachers, managers, government officials, and business owners can themselves this question and honestly evaluate the answer. We can ask the same question about wealth, knowledge, animals, institutions, technology, land, communities, or almost anything else that passes within our spheres of influence. Did what was placed within my reach become safer, stronger, more capable, more knowledgeable, more stable, more productive, more dignified, or more beautiful because I was there? This is a much harder question than asking whether people liked us because it requires us to examine what real impact we had rather than how we felt about ourselves while we were leading.

This does not mean everything under our care should remain comfortable with our decisions at all times. A good shepherd may have to move the flock from a familiar place because the grass is eroding or danger lies ahead. A parent has to periodically tell a child no, while a teacher may return poor work and require it to be redone because its quality is deficient. A manager may need to address weak performance of her staff and a doctor may have to give advice a patient does not particularly want to hear. Caring for something is not the same as indulging it and service is not simply giving people whatever they want. Almost everyone who has raised children knows how quickly that definition of service collapses. A child may sincerely desire to eat sweets for dinner, avoid school, remain awake very late, and spend every waking hour attached to a screen, but leading the child does not require accepting the child's strategic plan for his own development. Normally, care requires boundaries and the shepherd's fence provides another useful metaphor. A shepherd does not erect a fence because he hates the sheep. The fence exists because he understands dangers the flock may not recognize. Likewise, many of the rules we encounter in family life, business, law, religion, and society begin to make more sense when viewed through the relationship between freedom and protection. A boundary can certainly become oppressive when imposed unjustly, but the mere existence of a limit does not make it unjust. Some boundaries preserve the conditions that allow freedom to remain beneficial and sometimes a prohibition is easier to understand once we recognize what lies on the other side of it. This is particularly important when discussing social and religious teachings. I often discuss Islamic legal thought with people who initially view its rules as arbitrary legalese without purpose. Obviously, prohibitions separated from the good they are meant to protect can easily appear as unnecessary restrictions. If we ask ourselves, what human relationship is being protected? What weakness is being prevented from being exploited? What dignity is being preserved? What balance is being maintained? What long-term harm is being prevented in exchange for a short-term limitation? We can then see rules as protections rather than restrictions or limitations. A fence makes considerably more sense when you can see the wolf, dangerous highway, or cliff on the other side of it. The shepherding metaphor also helps distinguish between control and care. They can look similar from a distance because both involve influence over another person or thing, but their purposes are very different. Control asks how I can make something conform to my wishes, while care asks what is genuinely beneficial for whom or whatever has been entrusted to me. Sometimes those answers overlap, but many times they do not. Parents experience this distinction as children grow because very young children require enormous amounts of control. We decide what they eat, where they sleep, when they cross the street, what medicines they receive, and whether they are permitted to investigate an electrical socket with whatever interesting metal object they have just discovered. Over time, however, healthy parenting gradually transfers responsibility rather than accumulating it. Children begin choosing their clothes, organizing their time, selecting friends, managing money, traveling independently, choosing careers, marrying, and eventually making decisions about which their parents may have very strong opinions but increasingly little control. The successful parent does not measure success by how long the child remains dependent. We raise children so they can eventually walk beyond the reach of our supervision while carrying enough character, faith, knowledge, judgment, compassion, and resilience to navigate life without us. That is one of the most beautiful aspects of stewardship because, when it works well, it often reduces the need for the steward.

The same principle appears almost everywhere we develop people. A good teacher wants students who eventually no longer need the teacher. A good manager develops employees capable of taking greater responsibility. A good founder builds an organization that does not collapse every time he goes on vacation. A healthy public sector organization becomes dependable because its structure, leadership, and processes are stronger than any one heroic individual. A mentor should be pleased when the person being mentored eventually knows things the mentor does not. There is something wonderful about leadership that genuinely wants the people within its care to become stronger, more knowledgable, and more resilient, because that kind of leadership measures success by growth of the one being led rather than quantity and the dependence of followers. That type of leadership also requires humility because capable people become less controllable. If I teach someone everything I know, that person may eventually exceed me in capability, skill, or knowledge. If I give an employee visibility, someone may decide that employee is more talented than I am. If I teach my children to think carefully, there is a very real possibility that they will eventually use that ability to come up with better solutions or answers than me. If I build an institution around principles rather than my personality, future leaders may change things I personally would have preferred to keep. A shepherd primarily concerned with ownership or compliant sheep may find all of this threatening, while a shepherd concerned with a flourishing flock understands that this is what successful leadership looks like.

This is where the distinction we discussed earlier between ownership and trust becomes important again. If people, institutions, knowledge, wealth, and opportunities ultimately belong to God rather than to me then their growth does not need to reinforce my importance. I can be one person in their story without insisting on becoming the entire story and there is tremendous freedom in that realization. A leader can develop a successor without seeing the successor as a threat. A parent can watch an adult child build a life without needing to control every detail. A teacher can celebrate being surpassed. A startup founder can eventually hand over the growing company to a new leader. A wealthy person can use wealth to help others become more independent rather than structuring generosity in a way that keeps them dependent upon him.

The purpose of shepherding is therefore not to create a flock that cannot survive without the shepherd, but to fulfill the responsibility attached to the period during which the flock was entrusted to his care. However, shepherding requires attention, which is often overlooked. Many failures of care do not begin with deliberate cruelty or some dramatic act of wrongdoing. Quite often, they begin with neglect. The shepherd simply stops noticing and something that should have required attention slowly becomes forgotten. A child's behavior changes and no one asks why. An elderly parent becomes increasingly isolated while everyone is busy. An employee who was once enthusiastic slowly becomes withdrawn, while the manager notices only after his performance declines. A customer encounters the same frustrating problem for years because everyone inside the company has learned to work around it. A neighborhood deteriorates one broken light, neglected park, and cracked sidewalk at a time. A river becomes polluted through thousands of decisions that each seemed too small to matter, while an institution accumulates procedures nobody understands, technologies nobody maintains, and problems everyone has quietly learned to tolerate. Nothing particularly dramatic happened at once, things simply became a little worse every day. A good shepherd notices before decline becomes invisible through familiarity. A shepherding leader notices the deterioration that has become normal but should not addressed. She notices the person whose voice has become quieter, the burden that is being distributed unfairly, the animal showing signs of distress, the employee repeatedly working late, the child becoming unusually withdrawn, the customer whose confusion reveals a badly designed process, or the patch of land slowly being damaged because everyone assumes someone else will fix it. Attention is one of the most underestimated forms of service because proper attention is needed before the need to act on something in decline. Before we can repair, protect, teach, comfort, intervene, or improve something, we first have to notice that something requires our care. This is where empathy becomes practical rather than merely sentimental. Empathy is sometimes described as feeling another person's emotions, but shepherding asks us to go another step and consider what another person's situation requires from us given the responsibility we actually possess. Feeling terrible that an employee is overwhelmed accomplishes very little if I am the manager who keeps assigning the work. Feeling compassion for someone trapped in debt means something different if I am also the lender deciding whether to give the person more time. Feeling concern about pollution becomes more meaningful if I control the factory creating it. Responsibility changes the usefulness of empathy because the closer a problem is to the range of my actual authority, the less satisfying it becomes simply to feel bad about it.

A shepherd is certainly not responsible for repairing everything. That would be impossible and in its own way, rather arrogant. I cannot personally solve every injustice, educate every child, feed every hungry person, repair every institution, protect every forest, or make every person around me happy. Leadership does not ask us to imagine ourselves as the fixer of everything. A shepherd has a flock and setting boundaries matters because responsibility becomes meaningful when it is connected to what has actually been entrusted to us. I may care deeply about education across an entire country without having any authority over national education policy, but I can still take responsibility for the education of my own children, help a student I know, support a school, share useful knowledge, mentor someone, or contribute where my influence is real. I may not be able to clean an entire ocean, but I can decide what I throw into it. I may not control labor practices across the global economy, but if I employ thirty people, thirty sets of working conditions are clearly within the reach of my decisions. This does not make the larger problems unimportant; it simply reminds us that broad concern should not become an excuse for neglecting the responsibilities we can actually influence and change. This is also an important protection against performative concern. It is remarkably easy to become passionate about responsibilities belonging to people very far away while ignoring those sitting at our own dinner table. We can become experts on how governments should treat citizens while speaking harshly to our families. We can consider ourselves passionate advocates for workers rights while mistreating someone who works in our own home. We might seem concerned about poverty while delaying payment to a small supplier, or deeply interested in environmental sustainability while wasting resources under our control. The internet has made it possible for all of us to develop strong opinions about almost everything but shepherding asks a considerably more uncomfortable and useful question like; what am I actually responsible for? The Prophetic description of everyone as a shepherd also tells us something important about personal accountability. It does not merely tell rulers to care about people or parents to love their families; it tells people that they will be questioned about what was placed within their care. Love matters, sincerity matters, and good intentions matter enormously, but responsibility ultimately has consequences. A parent can sincerely love a child while failing to provide what the child needs, a manager can sincerely believe himself supportive while creating an unhealthy environment, and a business owner can sincerely regard himself as generous while delaying wages or treating customers unfairly. Good intentions are essential, but they cannot become a permanent shelter from honest evaluation. The shepherd eventually has to look at the condition of the flock under her supervision, and that is one reason accountability properly understood can be healthy rather than threatening. It gives us a way to ask whether our intentions are producing the outcomes we hoped for. If the flock is repeatedly wandering, perhaps the fence needs attention. If people continually misunderstand instructions, perhaps communication is poor. If children hide mistakes because they are afraid to speak honestly, perhaps correction has become too harsh. If employees leave at an alarming rate, perhaps the problem is not that an entire generation suddenly lost its work ethic. Sometimes the people affected by our leadership are telling us something and leading requires enough humility to listen.

This does not mean every bad outcome proves the shepherd failed. Human beings are not sheep, and the people within our care possess their own wills, choices, responsibilities, strengths, weaknesses, and occasionally truly baffling decision-making abilities. Parents can do many things well and still have children who choose badly. Managers can create excellent environments and still encounter poor performance. Governments can make responsible decisions and still face events beyond their control. Farmers can care carefully for land and still experience drought. Stewardship is responsibility for our part, not control over every outcome. This is an essential distinction, otherwise responsibility would be unbearable. We can begin imagining that if something within our care goes wrong, we must have failed. However, the leader is responsible for shepherding not for every outcome. Our task is to act sincerely, use the knowledge available to us, exercise prudent determination, responsible care, protect rights, respond when circumstances change, correct course, and seek God's help with what lies beyond us. We are responsible for the integrity of our effort and the decisions entrusted to us, while the final outcome remains with Him.

This understanding also brings balance to ambition. A person can want a larger company, greater wealth, more influence, wider knowledge, or a more important position without those desires being inherently wrong. Ambition can be praiseworthy with the right intention, while greed is blameworthy. Much of what is useful and beautiful in the world exists because someone wanted to build something that did not yet exist. Shepherding simply adds another dimension to ambition because if I want a larger flock, I am also asking for more sheep to care for which leads to a greater level of accountability and responsibility. This sounds obvious when stated this way, yet we frequently separate the two. We desire the larger company without imagining the additional livelihoods attached to it or the promotion without considering the additional people affected by our decisions. We want fame and wealth without considering the greater possibility of negative consequences and obligations that accompany it. We want greater influence without considering how many more people our mistakes can now reach. Ambition expands both opportunity and responsibility. A person managing five employees can directly affect five working lives, while someone responsible for five thousand can influence thousands of families through a single decision. A small business owner's mistake may inconvenience a handful of customers, while a decision inside a large financial institution can affect hundreds of thousands of households. The underlying principle is unchanged, but the radius of consequence becomes significantly larger. This is one reason the shepherd metaphor scales so beautifully. It applies to the older brother watching his younger sister and to the person governing a nation. The nature of the responsibility changes, the knowledge required changes, the number of people affected changes, and the consequences certainly change, but neither person escapes the fundamental question; what did I do with what was placed within my care? Greater authority does not exempt someone from shepherding, it simply enlarges the sphere of influence.

There is another dimension of shepherding that I particularly like because it prevents responsibility from becoming merely supportive. A shepherd does not only prevent loss, she also helps the flock flourish. Protection matters, but so does nourishment, health, growth, and access to food. In human terms, this means leadership should not be measured only by the absence of disaster. A parent does more than keep a child alive and a teacher does more than prevent students from failing. A government does more than prevent crime and a company should aspire to something more than avoiding lawsuits. Good stewardship creates conditions in which things can flourish and this is the kind of world I hope this book encourages us to imagine. A family where children become confident and compassionate adults, a workplace where people become more capable because they worked there, a business whose customers genuinely benefit from the products they purchased, a neighborhood that becomes safer and more welcoming because people care about one another, land that becomes more productive without being exhausted, wealth that creates more possibility than it consumes, and knowledge that multiplies because it is shared rather than guarded all represent thriving outcomes. The shepherd should eventually be able to look back and see the positive improvements in the flock under his care.

This idea also helps us understand rights, because if something has been placed within my care, then my feelings toward it are not the only thing that matters. The person or thing entrusted to me may have claims upon my behavior that exist regardless of how generous I think I am. Children have rights that parental affection does not replace, employees have rights that a pleasant office environment cannot substitute for, and customers have rights that clever marketing cannot erase. Borrowers retain dignity and rights even when lenders possess stronger bargaining power, animals have needs whether their owners pay attention to them or not, and land has physical limits regardless of what a title deed permits. Even people who have not yet been born can inherit consequences from decisions in which they had no opportunity to participate. To shepherd something requires us to learn what is due to it and this is where justice begins quietly entering the picture. Responsibility cannot be defined solely by the person holding power, because if I get to decide both what I owe and whether I have fulfilled it, I have created a remarkably imbalanced ethical system for myself. The people affected by my decisions might have a different opinion. Islam repeatedly disrupts that convenience by establishing obligations that exist whether the more powerful person prefers them or not. Parents, spouses, businessmen, the wealthy, and those entrusted with the wellbeing or property of others have responsibilities. Power does not create the right to define goodness entirely for ourselves; it creates a responsibility to discover what goodness requires. This is why shepherding is ultimately an active idea. It asks us to observe, learn, protect, cultivate, correct, develop, and sometimes sacrifice. It requires enough humility to admit that we may not always know what those in our care need, enough knowledge to keep learning, enough courage to make difficult decisions, enough empathy to notice consequences, and enough sincerity to continue doing the work even when no one recognizes the effort we are making. Fortunately, most of this does not happen in heroic moments. It happens in homes and offices, in meetings, beside hospital beds, on farms, in classrooms, at traffic lights, and through thousands of ordinary decisions that rarely feel historically important while we are making them. This may be one of the great beauties of the shepherd concept because it makes ordinary responsibility significant. We do not need to wait until someone hands us an impressive title before beginning to lead well because there is almost certainly already something in our care. It may be a child or an aging parent, three employees or three thousand, a classroom, a bank account, an animal, a garden, a customer relationship, a piece of knowledge, a public office, a rented home, a company, a neighborhood, or simply the ability to make one person's day slightly easier. Whatever it is, perhaps the most useful question is not whether having it makes us important, but whether we understand why it has been placed within our reach. The Prophet's description of us as shepherds gives us a hopeful way of thinking about that responsibility. We do not need to own the flock to care for it, we do not need applause from the flock to protect it, and we do not need something to remain with us forever for our time with it to matter. We simply need to recognize that for this particular stretch of the journey, something has been placed close enough to our hands that what we do can affect what happens to it. We pay attention, protect where protection is needed, provide where provision is needed, teach where knowledge is needed, correct where correction is needed, and step aside where independence is needed. Sometimes we will do those things beautifully, and sometimes we will realize that we could have done much better. In those moments we repair what we can, learn what the responsibility was trying to teach us, seek forgiveness repeatedly even if we don’t think we did a mistake, and begin again.

That makes the shepherd a much more interesting image of leadership to me than the person standing at the top of an organizational chart. The shepherd is defined not primarily by how many people know her name, how impressive her title sounds, or how much authority she can exercise, but by the condition of what was entrusted to her. Once we begin to understand that all of us are shepherds in one form or another, another question becomes difficult to avoid. If responsibility grows wherever our ability to affect others grows, what happens when one person has more knowledge, more money, more authority, more technology, more influence, or simply more choices than someone else? It would seem strange if greater power somehow produced less responsibility. Perhaps the opposite is true, and perhaps the more power we have, the more careful we should become about what we do with it.