If We Don't Advocate, Who Will?
The Beacon of Hope, Belfast. A figure reaching for a ring of thanksgiving, standing on a globe built to represent peace and reconciliation.
A few months before I left for this fieldwork, someone who knows me well asked a question that stopped me: "Jody, why do you find it so easy to advocate for others, and not for yourself?"
I didn't have an answer ready. I've turned it over many times since, tracing it back to messages I absorbed as a child without ever choosing them: children should be seen and not heard. Respect your elders. Only speak when you're spoken to. Terrible training for a woman who was going to spend her career leading people.
This fieldwork turned out to be far more personally revealing than I expected. I went looking for what helps social workers advocate for their teams and their clients. I didn't expect to keep running into a mirror held up to my own reluctance to advocate for myself. I hope what follows offers something useful.
Nobody trains you for the moment you're standing in the messy middle, your team telling you you've sold out, the people above you asking why the numbers haven't moved, and something in the decision being made doesn't sit right. Most leadership advice tells you to manage that tension. Almost none of it tells you that you're allowed to advocate your way through it, or gives you the actual words to do it with.
Across my Churchill Fellowship interviews, one theme kept surfacing that I hadn't expected to find sitting so close to the surface: advocacy isn't an add-on to social work leadership. Several of the most compelling people I spoke with argued it's the thing that makes social work leadership recognisably social work at all.
What actually makes us different
In Northern Ireland, Áine Morrison, Chief Social Worker, offered this about what’s unique about social workers as leaders. Her list:
- Value base, brought to every single encounter
- Communication and relationships, good leaders listen hard and listen well
- Human rights, the discussion and implementation of them
- Legal training, human rights implementation within the law
- Anti-oppressive practice, the willingness to speak up and speak out when something isn't right
- Relationship-based practice, understanding human behaviour and human dignity
Social justice expertise, she said, is the connective thread running through all six. Not a separate skill you bolt on. The thread the rest is woven from.
At University College Dublin, Dr Mary Kennedy made the point even more directly. Social justice, she told me, is not a module in social work education. It's our professional identity. Wherever a social worker goes, a clinical team, a community setting, an organisation, their job is to ask whether what's happening is fair, equitable, and just. She told me she never heard that stated plainly, once, during her own social work degree, and that when we don't name social justice as the core of what we do, we make it easier for other professions to define leadership roles and leave us out.
Why this matters right now, not abstractly
While I was in Ireland, I learned that when social work was first regulated there through CORU in 2011, the Code of Professional Conduct and Ethics contained six separate references to human rights, including a statement that social work is a profession based on principles of human rights and social justice. In 2019, when the Code was revised, all six references were removed. No public explanation was given. The Irish Association of Social Workers has been campaigning since 2021 to have the language reinstated, so far without success.
Meanwhile, at a leadership event in Belfast the same week, practitioners and system leaders stood up and named values, human rights, and anti-oppressive practice as exactly what makes social work leadership distinctive. The profession keeps insisting on the thing at least one regulator has quietly removed. If we don't advocate for that, nobody else is positioned to.
The cascade
This connects directly to something I wrote about in my last piece, the idea that culture and skill both travel downward through an organisation, what a leader models is what gets replicated below them. Professor Prospera Tedam gave that idea a name I hadn't heard before, echoing something I'd first heard in Denver: she called it the cascade.
"The quality of relationship flows downward through an organisation. How a leader behaves shapes how others behave. How a supervisor treats a practitioner is transmitted into how that practitioner treats the people they serve. You cannot build a profession that holds its clients with genuine regard if nobody is holding the practitioners that way." — Professor Prospera Tedam, University College Dublin
Advocacy works the same way. If you don't advocate for your team, your team doesn't learn that advocacy is safe or expected, and that has a direct line down to how they advocate for the people they serve.
Why this exact transition is where we lose ourselves
Ask early-career leaders what they want most in that first year, and the answer is almost always the same: help with HR, help with budgets, help with report writing. It's a reasonable answer, and I don't think it's actually the real question. What people are describing, underneath the technical language, is disorientation, a sense that something about who they are at work is shifting, without anyone telling them that's what's actually happening.
One Australian leader I interviewed, now a CEO, described her own version of this. She didn't lose herself overnight. It took about two years for what she called a forensic, adversarial drift in her own practice to become undeniable to her, not one bad decision, a slow erosion, invisible while it was happening and only obvious in hindsight.
That's not just one Australian leader's account, either. A 2025 study on Australian social workers' professional identity and transition into practice (Afrouz et al.) found the same drift documented at a population level, identity disruption is a recognised, researched feature of moving into more senior roles here, not something individuals are simply mismanaging on their own. There's also a name for what's actually sitting underneath those technical training requests: managerialism. Research on the shift toward managerial-technicist practice in social work describes exactly this pressure, an environment that rewards workers who think and question less, and follow instructions and complete forms more (Harlow, 2003). Other researchers describe the same shift as a move from treating staff as professionals to treating them as tools, and from effectiveness to efficiency as the measure that matters (Tsui and Cheung, 2004). None of this is really a skills gap. It's a slow pressure toward becoming a different kind of person, one who complies rather than questions, and stops being seen as someone raising a legitimate concern and starts being seen as a problem.
Advocacy is one of the few things the literature actually names as a countermeasure. Independent advocacy, one paper argues, encompasses and encourages exactly the principles that get obscured within social service departments once managerialism takes hold. If that's true, embracing advocacy explicitly at this exact transition point, not later, once the drift is already underway, isn't just values talk. It's a real anchor against a well-documented structural pressure, one your organisation may not be actively resisting on your behalf.
There's also a term for why this specific moment, stepping into a first supervisory role, is where the identity work gets hardest. A recent systematic review of what researchers call "managerial identity work," the ongoing process of shaping and renegotiating a professional identity under organisational pressure, names first-time managers as one of the most studied and most vulnerable groups within it. This isn't a personal failing. It's a known, researched phenomenon, and naming it as one might be the first real defence against it.
Finding the words, without making it about you
The hardest part of speaking truth to power usually isn't the courage, it's finding language that holds up under pressure without sounding like a personal grievance. A few things from the fellowship help with that.
Anchor the ask in the code, not in how you feel. Karen Goodenough put a version of this plainly:
"The code of ethics does not require you to stay and fight. It requires you to do your best with the power you have." — Karen Goodenough, NASW Minnesota
That reframe does real work, it turns "I feel strongly about this" into "I am meeting a professional standard," which is a much harder thing for anyone to argue with.
Lead with the obligation, then let the request follow. Robyn Elliot, Team Leader for Kinship and Adoption, approaches funding discussions by building a strong evidence-based case grounded in children's rights and existing legal obligations. Rather than starting with the cost, she begins by considering the standard of support that children are entitled to, and then works collaboratively to identify how this can be delivered within organisational processes and resources. Framing the conversation around rights and responsibilities first helps shift the discussion from whether support should be provided to how it can be provided effectively.
Use a plain test instead of an opinion. Mary Kennedy's own framing doubles as something you can say out loud in a meeting: is this fair, is this equitable, is this just? That's a question, not an accusation, and it's much harder to dismiss than "I disagree."
None of this requires a title change or extra authority. It requires deciding, in advance, that you're going to speak from the standard you're already bound by, rather than from how the moment makes you feel.
If not us, who?
You don't have to lose yourself to lead well, I wrote that in my last piece, and I meant it about staying connected to practice. Advocacy is the other half of that same argument, turned outward. If the relational skills you already have transfer directly to leading people, so does your voice. Using it isn't a departure from social work. It's the clearest expression of it.
I understand my own struggles a little better now, and the cascade is most of the reason it matters beyond me. If the people I lead never see me advocate for myself, on what basis would they learn to advocate for themselves? I can talk all I want about protecting my team's right to speak up, but if I can't show them what that looks like when it's me on the line, I'm modelling the opposite lesson, however good my intentions sound out loud. Advocating for others while staying quiet about your own standing isn't the more selfless version of advocacy. It's half of it, demonstrated in a way that tells everyone watching the other half isn't allowed.
Where have you had to advocate, for your team, for their clients, or for yourself, and what helped you find the courage to do it?
None of this works on willpower alone, though. What I've described here is what an individual can do. In the next piece, I want to turn the question around: what does an organisation owe the people doing this work, and what actually happens, in real places, when advocacy isn't safe. That's next.
Build a career you don't need to recover from.