Sticky Feet, Not Glass Ceiling

Churchill Fellow 2025. Why capable social workers hold themselves back, and what actually helps.

Most conversations about why social workers don't step into leadership focus on what's blocking them from above: no succession planning, no clear pathway, nobody tapping them on the shoulder. All true, and all things I've written about elsewhere in this series.

But across my Churchill Fellowship interviews, another pattern kept surfacing, one that has nothing to do with what's above you, and everything to do with your own feet.

The phrase that stuck with me

In a group conversation with leaders and workforce development staff across Northern Ireland's health and social care trusts, one contributor named the pattern precisely: the barrier is often sticky feet rather than a glass ceiling, people not necessarily putting themselves forward for opportunities that are genuinely there.

It's a small reframe with a big consequence. A glass ceiling is something done to you. Sticky feet is something you can actually work on, but only once you've named it honestly, without turning it into another reason to blame yourself.

What holds people in place

A few things came up repeatedly when I asked people directly why capable, experienced social workers hesitate to put themselves forward.

Imposter syndrome shows up as a structural symptom, not just a personal one. One contributor traced it back to disconnection: when the people with power seem distant from the people on the ground, it's hard to imagine yourself belonging in that room. She described the shift she'd felt more recently, coming to know her own directors and divisional leads as part of her actual team, not a distant tier above her, and how that changed her sense of whether her voice carried weight.

The tension between empathy and authority gets treated as a contradiction, when it isn't one.

Maria Emilsson, Principal Social Worker, Development Lead at the Western Health and Social Care Trust, who contributes on the values-based leadership program she has developed for her trust, described watching this tension play out again and again in the programme cohorts: people worried that being decisive would read as authoritarian, while also needing to hold their teams to account:

"There was definitely tension between sitting with those two hats on" — Maria Emilsson.

Her point wasn't that the tension should disappear. It was that social workers already hold exactly this balance every day with the families they work with, clear goals, real empathy, both at once, and somehow stop trusting themselves to do it the moment the people involved are colleagues instead of clients.

Age and experience don't automatically produce self-belief.

Brenda Horgan, Head of Service for the Social Services Workforce Development & Training Team at the Southern Health & Care Trust, described a moment that challenged her own assumptions directly: presenting a leadership framework to a room of newly qualified staff, one of the most experienced people in the room, older and further into her career than most new graduates, told her plainly that even after hearing the whole case for it, she still didn't see herself as a leader.

"My own bias was you're older, you're more experienced in years in life. Surely you'll be the person who will see yourself as a leader." — Brenda Horgan.

It's a useful check against assuming that confidence simply arrives with tenure. Sometimes the most experienced person in the room has the stickiest feet of all.

What actually shifts it

Nothing here is about finding a single fix. But a few things came up as genuinely useful:

Someone asking the question directly. Across multiple countries, the same small moment kept recurring, someone simply asking "where do you want to take your career," often for the first time, sometimes decades into someone's practice. It cost nothing and changed how people thought about themselves.

Visibility of ordinary success, not just extraordinary achievement. People being reminded that competence built quietly over years counts as leadership too, not only the loud, visible kind.

Permission to hold both halves at once. Stating directly that empathy and authority aren't opposites, and that the skill of balancing them is one social workers already have, just not yet applied to leading colleagues.

What the research adds

Three findings worth knowing, two of them specific to social work rather than borrowed from general management literature:

Imposter syndrome in social work is common enough to be treatable at a systems level, not just a personal failing.

A 2026 paper in the Clinical Social Work Journal (Apgar & Zerrusen) frames it as a genuine occupational hazard of the profession, given the weight of responsibility placed on practitioners, and offers concrete recommendations at the individual, team, and organisational level, not just "build your confidence."

For early-career social workers specifically, what gets labelled imposter syndrome may actually be a normal developmental stage, not evidence you're unsuited to the work.

A qualitative study in Social Work Education (2023) found that early-career practitioners used the term to describe the ordinary, uncomfortable gap between the idealised professional identity they'd held as students and the messier reality of everyday practice. Reframed this way, the discomfort is a sign of active adjustment, not a red flag.

Holding back from self-promotion may not be irrational at all.

A longitudinal study in Sex Roles (2018) found that self-promotion had a measurably negative effect on women's leader emergence specifically in peer-to-peer group settings, the opposite of what happens for men, and the opposite of what happens for women in more formal interview contexts. Read one way, sticky feet isn't just a confidence problem to be coached away. For many women, holding back has been a genuinely accurate read of how self-promotion actually gets received, which changes the fix: not just "be braver," but building environments where stepping forward doesn't carry a penalty in the first place.

The feet, not the ceiling

If you're a capable social worker who's never quite put yourself forward, it's worth asking honestly: is something actually stopping you, or have your feet just gotten used to standing still? Both are real. Only one of them is entirely within your control to work on.

What's kept your feet stuck, or helped you unstick them?