Staying in the profession as a leader

Social work does not have a retention problem. It has a leadership conditions problem.

We have spent years framing the loss of good practitioners as a workforce supply issue, as though the answer lies in recruiting more people through the door. But the people who leave are not leaving because they stopped caring. They are leaving because something in the system made it too costly to keep caring. That distinction matters enormously, because it changes who is responsible for the solution.

My Churchill Fellowship research keeps returning to a question that sits underneath the retention conversation: what are the conditions that allow a social work leader to stay connected to their own values, their own body, their own sense of purpose, while doing some of the most demanding work in any system?

Because what I notice is that the social workers who stay are not tougher than the ones who leave, they are not more resilient, more committed, or more passionate. What they tend to have, more often than not, is at least one of these: a supervisor who sees them as a whole person, a peer group where they can think out loud without performing competence, or a leader above them who has not been hollowed out by the same system.

Retention, at its core, is a relational outcome. It is produced by conditions, not by individual willpower.

If you are an aspiring or early-career social work leader, I want to offer you something that no one said to me when I first stepped into leadership: you are allowed to notice the conditions around you. You are allowed to name them. And you are allowed to decide that your role as a leader includes changing them, not just surviving them.

Too many new leaders carry the emotional weight of retention on their own shoulders, as though people leaving is a personal failure rather than a systemic signal. It is not your job to compensate for what the system will not provide. It is your job to lead in a way that makes the system visible, and to advocate for the conditions that allow your people to stay well, stay connected, and stay in the work.

This month March's theme for me is embodiment, and I think it connects to retention in a way that rarely gets named. The leaders who burn out fastest are often the ones who have stopped noticing their own bodies entirely. They override fatigue, push through tension, skip meals, and call it dedication. But retention does not only mean keeping people in the profession. It also means keeping yourself in your own body while you lead. Noticing when your jaw is clenched in a meeting. Recognising that the tightness in your chest before a difficult conversation is information, not weakness. Choosing to pause before you respond rather than react.

An embodied leader creates different conditions around them, not because they have mastered a technique, but because they are still present in the room.

Build a career you do not need to recover from.

If you thought about retention not as a workforce metric but as a measure of whether leadership conditions are working, what would you notice first in your own context? Where does the system ask people to leave parts of themselves at the door?

I would love to hear your thoughts.

With calm, Jody

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