Four Principles That Kept Me Values-Aligned as a Social Work Leader (And Still Do)

What new social work leaders struggle with | Leadership identity in social work

There is a particular disorientation that comes with stepping into a leadership role in social work.

You spent years learning to advocate. To hold complexity. To name systems. To stay present with people in their hardest moments and trust the process. And then, one day, you are the one making decisions about rosters, policies, performance, and resource allocation. The values that drew you to the profession are still there. But the environment has changed. And so has the pressure.

What new social work leaders often tell me is not that they stopped caring about their values. It is that they stopped knowing how to act from them. The system gets louder. The rules feel more fixed. The expectations multiply. And before long, they are leading in a way that feels like a costume, not a calling.

This is one of the most consistent patterns in my research and in my practice. It is part of what I am exploring through my Churchill Fellowship, researching how social work leaders in other countries sustain their professional identity and wellbeing over time. Leadership arrives before identity has time to catch up. And when the systems around us are complex, when the policies and procedures are thick and the competing pressures are real, that gap widens.

Which is exactly why, about eight years ago, my leadership team and I decided to do something about it.

Where these principles came from

I was leading in a large, complex service environment. Layers of policy. Constant change. Competing accountabilities. The kind of place where it was genuinely possible to lose weeks to process and procedure and never quite get to the people underneath it all.

What struck me, and struck the team I was working alongside, was how cognitively heavy it had all become. There were rules for everything. And yet somehow, with all those rules, people still felt uncertain about what to expect from their leaders. What would we do when things were hard? How would we make decisions that affected people's working lives?

We wanted something different. Something brain-friendly. Simple enough to hold in a moment of pressure, clear enough to share with our whole team, not just those of us in formal leadership positions.

So we worked on it together. This was not something I brought in and presented for endorsement. It was a genuine, consultative process. We talked about what we believed, what we had seen work, what we wished had been different. We debated, refined, and landed on four principles that felt like ours, because they were.

I want to be clear about that, because I think it matters. These principles worked not just because of what they said, but because of how they were made. The team owned them. And that ownership is what made them real.

When I moved into two subsequent leadership roles, I did not enforce these principles on my new teams. I shared them as a starting point, invited the new team in, and the principles resonated and became theirs. That process of co-creation, of arriving at shared language together, is leadership in itself.

The four principles

Principle One: Come from a position of yes.

When a staff member comes to you with a request, a need, or an idea, your starting posture matters.

In many organisations, the default is caution. Risk management. Protecting the system. And I understand why. Leaders carry accountability, and accountability can make us defensive before we have even heard the question.

But in social work leadership, the people you lead are already navigating an enormous amount of difficulty. They are managing complexity with limited resources, holding relational work that rarely ends neatly, and often absorbing the weight of the communities they serve. When they come to you, they need to feel like the answer is not already no.

Coming from a position of yes does not mean saying yes to everything. It means beginning from a genuine intent to find a way. It means asking yourself: how might I make this possible, before I explain why it cannot happen?

This one posture shift changes the relational dynamic of an entire team. People stop managing up. They stop bracing for no. They start bringing you their real thinking instead of their edited version.

Principle Two: If you cannot say yes, can you compromise?

Sometimes the answer genuinely cannot be yes. Resources are limited. Policy is binding. The timing is wrong. Leadership is, in part, learning to hold those realities without abandoning the person in front of you.

The question is what you do next.

A compromise is not a consolation prize. In my experience, it is often where the most creative and respectful leadership happens. It says: I heard what you need. I cannot give you exactly that. But I will not leave you with nothing.

This principle holds leaders accountable to staying in the conversation rather than closing it. It is easy to hide behind constraints. It is much harder to say, I cannot do what you are asking, but here is what I can do.

That harder thing is leadership.

Principle Three: Do not hide behind a rule or a tool.

This one is perhaps the most confronting for new leaders, because the rules and the tools are genuinely tempting.

When you are new to leadership, policy becomes a kind of armour. You can justify decisions without having to own them. You can point to the system and say, this is not my call, it is what the policy says. You can use assessment frameworks, checklists, and processes to add distance between yourself and the person affected by your decision.

I understand the appeal. And sometimes, yes, the policy is genuinely the answer.

But more often, what staff experience when a leader hides behind a rule is not policy. It is avoidance. It is a leader who is not willing to be seen making a decision. And that erodes trust faster than almost anything else.

When you own a decision, you stay in relationship with the person it affects. You say: this is the decision I am making, this is why, and I can talk with you about it. That kind of transparency is not naive. It is values-aligned leadership in practice.

Principle Four: It is not what you say, it is not what you do, it is how you make people feel.

Maya Angelou said it first, and she said it better than I ever could. We borrowed this from her deliberately, because we felt it said something the social work profession already knows deeply and sometimes forgets to apply to its own people.

New leaders often focus on getting the content right. The right words in a supervision session. The right approach to a difficult conversation. The right framework for a decision. And those things matter. But they are not the thing people remember.

What people remember is how they felt. Whether they felt heard, or managed. Whether they felt like a person, or a problem to be solved. Whether they felt like you were present with them, or already thinking about the next thing.

We teach this to students. We know it in our direct practice. The quality of the relationship is the intervention. And in leadership, that truth does not disappear. It applies to every conversation you have with the people you lead.

Your staff are not separate from your practice. They are part of it.

What these principles share

Each of these four principles asks the same thing of a leader: to stay present to the human in front of you, rather than retreating to position, policy, or process.

In complex environments, where the volume of rules and procedures can be genuinely overwhelming, this is not simple. It takes practice. It takes a team willing to hold each other to the standard, not just a leader declaring it from above. Which is why how we developed these principles mattered as much as what they said.

They do not require a perfect system or an unlimited budget. They require a willingness to be seen. To own decisions. To hold the discomfort of not always being able to give people what they need, while still staying in relationship with them.

For new social work leaders, I think this is the real work of the transition. Not learning a new set of skills. Learning to lead from who you already are. Carrying your values into a different kind of role, and refusing to let the weight of the role flatten them.

You do not have to lose yourself to lead well.

A question for you

Which of these principles feels most at odds with the culture you are currently working in? And where are you finding the small ways to practice it anyway?

Jody Bell is a Social Work Leadership Advisor and Researcher, Churchill Fellow 2025, and founder of Being Your Potential. Her Churchill Fellowship takes her to the US, Canada, UK, Ireland, Finland, Sweden, Belgium and Kenya to research how social work leaders in other countries sustain their professional identity and wellbeing over time. She works with aspiring and early-career social work leaders who want to build careers they do not need to recover from. You can find her at beingyourpotential.com.