Am I My Brother's Keeper? A New Case for Leadership

“Where is your brother?” God asks Cain. “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Cain answers. It is one of the oldest evasions on record, and one of the most familiar: a question about responsibility, answered by redefining the relationship out of existence. I am not obligated to him. He is not mine to answer for.

Every organisation runs on a modern version of the same sentence. The mandate, the job description, the chain of command, all of it lets a person say, and mean, I was only doing my job. My book, Leadership, Art, and Responsibility: The Shibboleth Effect, makes a claim that runs against most leadership theory. Most models define leadership as a form of influence: moving a group toward a goal, effectively. My claim is that leadership actually begins to matter somewhere else entirely: exactly at the point where that sentence, I was only doing my job, stops being enough, not before, when everything still feels comfortable.

Influence vs responsibility

Judge leadership only by that standard, and the theory can’t rule out even history’s worst chapters. Measured purely on effectiveness, they count as leadership working exactly as intended, because influence never stops to ask what it’s influencing people toward. My book poses that thought experiment directly, and it is not comfortable. But it is the reason the whole argument turns from influence to responsibility: from what a leader can get people to do, to what a leader is answerable for.

Distance is what makes such evasion possible. Modern institutions, including scientific and medical ones, show this again and again: a title can hide the person who actually carries the risk, and the ones who speak up are often the ones who get investigated. Distance does not live only in charts and chains of command. It is also the small permission not to feel, not to see, not to imagine another person’s risk as one’s own.

Between 2007 and 2008, my colleagues and I ran a randomised controlled study to test whether that distance could be closed differently. Around 50 managers took part, split at random into two groups. One followed a course built on lectures, case studies, and skills, the shape every leadership programme takes. The other went through something else entirely, which we called Shibboleth: a live performance to sit inside, literature, poetry, theatre, and music woven into a deliberately fragmentary form, closer to the avant-garde than to a story with a beginning and an end, chosen for its weight rather than its comfort. There was no single thread to follow, on purpose. A thread is exactly what you would use to explain the whole thing away and move on. No explanation was offered in advance, none was asked for afterward, no frame to interpret it by, nothing to apply. ‘I am quite logical and controlling‘, one participant said afterward. ‘Here, the ground was struck from under me. I was shaken’. Another put it plainer, mid-programme, still resisting: ‘I don’t understand anything. It’s hard not to understand’.

Both groups, and 200 of their co-workers, were followed for close to a year, then again eight months later. In the comparison group, laissez-faire leadership, often mistaken for an absence of leadership when research shows it is one of its most destructive forms, increased, and co-workers’ stress rose with it. In the Shibboleth group, it fell.

Something else changed too. Other people’s suffering had begun to matter differently. Not only as a feeling, but as something measurable: higher agreeableness, higher prosocial motivation. And eight months on, their co-workers’ blood levels of DHEA-S, the hormone that counteracts cortisol’s toll on the body, were measurably higher than in the comparison group. Something had closed the distance, and it reached past the leader to the people the leader was responsible for. That kind of transfer, a change in one leader’s behaviour surfacing, months later, in the bloodwork of someone who was never in the room, is rare. Most leadership research stops at what a leader says about themselves afterward.

It would be easy to read the results above the wrong way: as evidence that art is a useful tool for producing calmer, more prosocial leaders. It isn’t a tool. The moment it is invited in to produce a desired outcome, it has already been put to work in the very language Shibboleth exists to interrupt.

None of it worked because art made anyone feel better, and it did not work by being understood. The mandate, the job description, the polished self-justification, they all live in the part of you that can talk its way past your own conscience. Shibboleth was built to miss that part on purpose: unexplained, unresolved, giving the mind nothing it could tidy into a lesson and file away. Art’s power here isn’t beauty, it’s a reality effect: it doesn’t describe someone’s suffering, it puts you next to it, close enough that the distance collapses before your rational mind gets the chance to rebuild it. I still remember sitting outside a closed door as a child, listening to my father read a poem aloud to his students, moved by it before I had any words for what it meant. That is Shibboleth at work.

What is left, once the usual defences have nothing to hold onto, is a person, addressed. ‘I looked for a leader and found a human being‘, one participant said afterward. ‘I was disappointed’. Over time, that address can become a capacity: the ability to remain with what is tragic in a life without fleeing it, and without collapsing into the posture of a victim. I call this an aestemethical stance, not a formula but a fusion: eyes open to what can be perceived, a willingness to be moved by it, and the nerve to answer for what that movement asks of you. I owe this mostly to Levinas: the claim a face makes on you before you have decided anything about it, and before it owes you anything back. One leader put it more simply, looking back: ‘I have never in my life felt such a sense of responsibility toward humanity’.

This is why the book does not read like a leadership manual. It offers no toolkit, no framework, no answer to “am I my brother’s keeper” that lets you close the book and move on. It ends instead with a line I still return to: The one who is moved, moves the world.