Leadership Identity in Social Work: Early Findings from Global Research

Welcome

This edition arrives 10 days before I depart Australia for eight weeks of fieldwork across nine countries - England, Scotland, Ireland, Sweden, Belgium, Finland, Canada, the United States, and Kenya.

I want to share where the research already is before I go.

An Update

Over the past year, I have been in conversation with social work leaders across Australia and, virtually, overseas. Practitioners, executives, academics, CEOs, peak body leaders, my Think Tank members, and scholars. Some of those conversations have been exploratory and collegial, part of the long process of sharpening a research question and testing early thinking. Others have happened in conference rooms, on Zoom calls, in supervision contexts, and across professional networks I have been part of for decades.

Five of those conversations have been formal research interviews: audio recorded, conducted with informed consent, and followed by structured analytic memos in the constructivist grounded theory tradition. These are the Australian sensitising interviews for my Churchill Fellowship inquiry, and they form the first analytical layer of the study.

It is those five I want to draw on here. Not because the other conversations matter less. They don't. But the formal interviews give me something specific: a set of accounts I can hold alongside each other and ask, what keeps returning? What contradicts what I thought I knew? What surprises me?

Here is what I am noticing.

What I am noticing

Values alignment is active work, not a disposition you either hold or you don't.

Every leader I have spoken with formally holds strong social work values. None of them holds those values the same way. One maintains alignment by repeating an identity statement, deliberately, in environments that actively discourage it: I am a social worker. Another recalibrates through returning to formal study, a recurring mechanism across a career that had at times pulled toward the managerialist and the adversarial. Another operationalises values through ethical frameworks and the Code, treating alignment as something you do rather than something you are. And one holds values that were never professionally acquired in the first place: they were inherited, embodied, a condition of origin.

What these accounts share is not the mechanism. It is the effort. Maintaining alignment, in every account, involves active work. And in most cases, that work is self-initiated, individually resourced, and largely invisible to the organisations these leaders serve.

The gap between what organisations aspire to offer and what they provide is consistent, and structural.

I have spoken with a new CEO, of a not for profit organisation, that has its own leadership development program, informed by social work for a workforce of mostly social workers. And yet when I explored the detail: evaluation of impact is limited, peer supervision is not formalised, professional development budgets are under pressure in difficult financial times.

If the gap persists even in a well-resourced, values-aligned organisation with a strong social work identity and a CEO who understands the problem from the inside, it is not a resourcing failure. It is structural. And it will require more than goodwill to close.

Something is present in these accounts that the profession does not yet have a shared language for.

I have been careful not to move too quickly here. But across these conversations, a pattern keeps returning: leaders describe experiences that sit somewhere between exhaustion and a values conflict, and they often reach for their own words to name it. A period of adversarial practice that felt like drift. A moment when the organisation's decision made the work feel like something close to harm. A decision to leave, not out of depletion, but out of a kind of ethical clarity.

The experience is present. The language is often absent. I will be taking this into every country I visit. I want to know whether it is explicitly named elsewhere, whether organisations have built a response to it, and whether having a word for it changes anything at all.

On weather, and what sustains people through it.

I have been asking the leaders I have spoken with formally to describe their experience of leadership transition as a weather pattern. One answer has stayed with me.

Fast and furious, this leader said. Never boring. And then, after a pause: but there has been a lot of sun.

When I reflected that back and asked what the sun represented, the answer came without hesitation. Vocation. The refusal to want any other work. A career not chosen strategically or by accident, but one that had become so thoroughly part of identity that the question of leaving simply did not form.

I thought about that for a long time afterward. The turbulence and the warmth, held together rather than one resolving the other. And I found myself wondering: how many aspiring and early-career leaders enter their first formal role without knowing that the sun is available to them? That vocation, not just competence, is something the profession can offer?

A question for you

If you were to describe your experience of leadership transition, or of watching others move into leadership, as a weather pattern, what would it be?

And the harder question underneath that: where does the sun come from, in your context? What makes it possible to hold the turbulence without it becoming the whole story?

My next edition will be from the field. And I will share what I find, as I find it.

With calm, Jody

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

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