The supervision gap nobody talks about.
When your line manager is not a social worker, something essential goes missing. This could help.
If you have ever sat in a room full of colleagues, all doing similar work under similar pressures, and felt an unexpected exhale of relief, then you already know what I want to talk about today.
That exhale is what happens when you stop performing competence and start thinking alongside others. It is the shift from isolation to connection, from surviving alone to making sense together.
This fortnight, a question I'm pondering and will continue to ask: why do so many aspiring social work leaders feel they have to figure leadership out on their own, when the profession itself is built on the power of relationship?
An Update
Last week marked a significant moment in my Churchill Fellowship journey. My Think Tank met for the first time - a group of social work practitioners, educators, and leaders from across Australia came together as part of the inquiry that will shape my international research. Facilitated by an academic colleague using a Co-operative Inquiry approach, the group spans people working at CEO level, in frontline practice, in academia, and everywhere in between.
What struck me most was what became possible precisely because of that range. The conversation did not flatten out into consensus. It moved. Ideas were picked up, turned over, complicated by someone with a different vantage point. A practitioner said something that reframed what a senior leader had just described. Someone from academia offered a concept that others immediately recognised from their daily experience.
And the facilitation made something else possible too: thoughts did not have to be fully formed before anyone opened their mouth. That is rarer than it should be. In most organisational settings, people edit themselves before they speak. They wait until they are certain. The consequence is that a great deal of genuine thinking never reaches the room.
This group will continue to meet throughout 2026, and their reflections will shape my research as I travel internationally from May. I am deeply grateful for the trust each member has brought to this space.
What I Am Noticing
One of the threads that emerged in my recent conversations was the particular difficulty of leading without social work supervision. This comes up for a range of reasons: organisational policy, resource constraints, the reality that your line manager is not a social worker, or simply that the cost of accessing good supervision falls on the individual practitioner. Whatever the reason, the gap is real, and it is structural.
What strikes me is how much this is framed as a personal problem. Something the individual needs to manage or compensate for. When in fact it is a conditions problem. And it has serious consequences: for how leaders process the ethical complexity of their work, for how they hold their professional identity under pressure, and for how connected they remain to the values that brought them here.
The research is clear on what helps. Sedivy and colleagues (2020), in a study of child welfare workforce retention across a large western US county and two Midwestern states, found convincing evidence that peer support at the unit level was a vital factor in whether workers stayed or left. A 2025 study of 58 experienced child and family social workers across eleven local authorities in England found that peer and collegial support frequently made the difference between staying and leaving during the most difficult moments of a career (Cook, 2025). This is not informal finding. It is replicated evidence.
This is precisely why trusted peers matter so much. When formal supervision cannot hold what needs to be held, peers can help. Not as a substitute for good organisational practice, but as a form of professional sustenance that leaders can build and maintain regardless of what the organisation provides.
If you are leading right now without access to social work supervision, you may not be able to change the structural conditions quickly. What you can do is build the relational ones. Finding even one trusted colleague who understands the terrain may be one of the most important investments you make this year.
One note on that, though. The research also suggests something worth considering: the peers most likely to help you grow are not necessarily the ones who most resemble you. Sociologist Mark Granovetter's foundational work on professional networks found that the connections most likely to bring new information and genuinely different perspectives are those with people who sit outside our immediate circle, who have access to different contexts, different pressures, different ways of seeing the same problem (Granovetter, 1973). Strong ties provide comfort and validation. Weak ties, in his terminology, provide the friction that sharpens thinking.
There is something to that for social work leaders specifically. A peer who works in a different sector, a different country, a different part of the system, may ask the question your closest colleagues have stopped asking. The Think Tank I described above works in part because the room is not homogeneous. That is worth seeking, not avoiding.
From where I stand
I have been thinking about what it takes to create the conditions where genuine peer thinking can happen. Not networking. Not professional development. The kind of conversation where something actually shifts.
In my experience, three things are required. The first is diversity in the room: demographic, location, workplaces. The second is facilitation that distributes voice rather than amplifying the loudest. The third is permission not to be certain before you speak.
That third one is the hardest to manufacture. It tends to emerge from relationships built over time, from facilitators who model it themselves, and from explicit agreements about what the space is for.
Most organisations do not create this. Most professional networks do not either. Which means that if you want it, you have to find it, and often you have to build it yourself.
That is not a counsel of despair. It is an invitation to be deliberate. Who in your life can you think alongside, not just report to or consult? Who asks you questions that stay with you afterwards? Who do you trust enough to not have the answer in front of?
Start there.
Another Question for You
When was the last time a conversation with a peer genuinely changed how you saw a challenge you were facing? What made that conversation different from the usual ones?
I would love to hear what you notice. Your reflections shape this space as much as mine do.
With calm, Jody
Your Trusted Guide Outside the System | Founder, Being Your Potential | Churchill Fellow 2025
Build a career you don't need to recover from.
References used in this edition
Sedivy, J., Rienks, S., Leake, R., & He, A. S. (2020). Expanding our understanding of the role of peer support in child welfare workforce retention. Journal of Public Child Welfare, 14(1), 80–100.
Cook, L. (2025). Being a social worker… it's in my DNA: Retaining experienced child and family social workers — the role of professional identity. Child & Family Social Work. https://doi.org/10.1111/cfs.13233
Granovetter, M. S. (1973). The strength of weak ties. American Journal of Sociology, 78(6), 1360–1380.