From the Field: Leadership identity, whose values are you actually leading from?

Churchill Fellowship fieldwork, preparing for my first research interview in Denver.

Welcome

This edition arrives from the field. I am two weeks into eight weeks of international inquiry across nine countries, and I am writing to you from Toronto, where the fieldwork continues.

I want to share something that happened in nearly every conversation I had across two US States over the past fortnight. Not a finding, exactly. More of a question that kept returning, and kept producing different answers.

An Update

The research is moving in ways I did not fully anticipate. I have now spoken formally with fifteen practitioners, researchers, system leaders, and educators across Colorado and Minnesota. Some of those conversations lasted two hours. Some produced data I am still making sense of. One evening, I sat in a circle with six indigenous women on a First Nations community in northern Minnesota and watched twenty-two weeks of leadership development reach its close.

I will write more about all of it in time. But right now, there is one thread I want to follow here, because I think it is the one that matters most to you, wherever you are on your own leadership journey.

What I am noticing

In my last newsletter, I asked you what the sun represents in your experience of leadership. What makes it possible to hold the turbulence without it becoming the whole story.

In the United States, I asked a different question. I asked it in every formal research conversation, in different ways, at different points in the discussion. The question was this: when we talk about social workers in leadership staying true to their values, whose values are we actually talking about?

I received nine different answers.

The code of ethics. Personal values, full stop. The values of the organisation you are in. The values of the leader above you. A negotiation between several of these, depending on the conditions you are in that day. One person challenged the question itself and asked whether we are protecting a professional identity, or a set of values that a much broader workforce shares.

Not one person gave me the same answer twice.

One response has stayed with me more than the others. A researcher who has spent years studying child welfare workforce development described watching her own team navigate a period of significant political and organisational pressure. She ran an exercise with them. She asked each person: where is your line? Are you willing to lose your job to stand in your values? And she said this: every person answered differently. And the act of naming it together, out loud, as a shared question rather than a private anxiety, shifted something in the room.

I keep returning to that.

Because most of the aspiring and early-career leaders I have spoken with sometimes describe facing this question alone. Not in a room. Not with their peers. Alone, usually at the end of a difficult week, in a way that can feel like personal failure rather than the structural condition it actually is.

Organisations could do better in building the infrastructure to make this question a shared one. That is not a values failure. It is a conditions failure.

And conditions can be changed.

A question for you

I want to ask you the question I have been asking in the field.

When you are under pressure - a difficult conversation with a manager, a resource decision that asks you to compromise, a moment when what the organisation needs and what you know is right do not align - what do you anchor to?

And the quieter question underneath: have you ever named that anchor out loud, to someone who understands the work?

If not, what would it take to do that?

With calm, Jody

Your Trusted Guide Outside the System | Founder, Being Your Potential | Churchill Fellow 2025

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