The Accidental Leader: How Do You Supervise Your Friends? (Copy)

Jody Bell, Churchill Fellow 2025, in the field at Women's College Hospital, Toronto, May 2026.

Social work leadership often begins without warning. You're an excellent practitioner, someone notices, and within days, sometimes overnight, you're supervising a team that includes people who were your peers, sometimes your friends, the week before.

Across the sixty-five plus interviews I've completed for my Churchill Fellowship this pattern showed up again and again. Nobody expects this transition to be easy. What's missing is any real preparation for the specific, awkward mechanics of it, especially when the people you're now supervising are the people you used to sit alongside.

What people told me actually happens

Several leaders I spoke with described a genuine anxiety about supervising colleagues who were older, more experienced, their former peers and/or their friends. One Principal Social Worker at a UK local authority hadn't seen herself as a leader early in her career, describing herself at the time as not especially assertive. What propelled her wasn't ambition, it was watching poor management from the outside and believing she could do better.

Another leader traced his own confidence back to a single realisation:

"If you're a really good social worker, you already manage your workload through supervision. That skill translates directly." — Stuart Lackenby, Executive Director for Adult Social Care and Health, Birmingham City Council

Rosemary McCusker, Head of Employment & Training at Upper Springfield Development Trust in Belfast, managing a five-organisation consortium, described the transition in blunter terms: stepping into leadership means genuinely reckoning with the loss of direct peer relationships, the personal weight of managing people through hard processes, and ongoing insecurity that comes with the role. Her advice to anyone considering it: weigh the real rewards against those realities honestly, because only the individual can make that call.

Several senior leaders I interviewed, well into their careers with plenty of other professional transitions behind them to compare it against, described this specific one, stepping up to supervise for the first time, as the most challenging transition of their career.

What helped, in their own practice

A few things came up consistently in what people described as useful, across very different countries and systems:

Say the shift out loud. More than one leader described trying to act as though nothing had changed, and having that pretence collapse within weeks. What worked better was acknowledging directly and early that the relationship is now different, rather than letting the team discover it through awkward silences or mixed signals.

Get explicit about what you don't know. One leader's turning point was learning to state plainly what she wasn't across yet, and inviting the team's expertise into the conversation rather than performing an authority she didn't have. She described the moment it clicked as a real revelation, once she stopped trying to have every answer and focused instead on building relationships, she felt she could manage anything.

Find a confidential space that isn't your old peer group. This is one of the strongest and most consistent findings across the whole fellowship: leaders need somewhere to think out loud that's genuinely separate from performance management. Your former peer group can't be that space anymore, not fairly to them or to you. Finding a different confidential space, a mentor, a supervisor, a peer group outside your own team, matters more than most people expect going in.

One team leader in Scotland described exactly why this matters with a hard example: she was managing a genuinely difficult, long-running situation with a toxic, long-tenured team member, and couldn't safely work through it in her ordinary supervision, because her own manager was implicated in how the problem had been allowed to continue for so long. A confidential mentoring relationship outside that line of management gave her somewhere to be fully honest about how hard it was, without it affecting her working relationships. She described it as unexpectedly therapeutic, and said it left her feeling stronger going into the difficult conversations that followed.

Expect a period of loss, and let it happen. More than one leader described a real sense of grief in the first months, for the relationships as they were, before things settled into a new and different kind of closeness. Treating that as a normal part of the transition, rather than a sign something has gone wrong, made it easier to move through.

Being direct when a boundary is tested isn't unkind. One leader described a moment where a team member pushed back on a decision by invoking the old friendship. The response was calm and firm: the role had changed for both of them, and the decision stood. They didn't experience this as harsh. They experienced it as the first time they'd properly claimed the role.

Have the boundary conversation explicitly, before it's tested. A team leader in Scotland, asked what she'd tell someone about to supervise a friend, put it simply: accept that the dynamic shift is coming, and have an actual conversation with your friend about what the boundaries will look like, rather than leaving it unspoken and hoping it sorts itself out on its own.

Some leaders redraw the social boundary permanently, not just during the transition. Kristy Houchin described no longer drinking at after-work events once she became a manager:

"I couldn't drink because I was like, I am the manager and I need to have a perception of being professional."— Kristy Houchin

She now keeps a standing personal rule:

"I have a rule now where I'm not friends with anyone that I work with on socials, and it's not until I leave that I become social media friends." — Kristy Houchin

Not every leader will want a rule this firm, but it's a useful marker of how seriously some people treat the boundary once they've been burned by blurring it.

Manage up as deliberately as you manage down. One leader in US child welfare described this as core to surviving the first year: you're not only responsible for the people below you, you're also responsible for managing the relationship with the people above you, asking questions, pushing back when it matters, keeping them invested in your team. She saw herself as a conduit of relationship as much as information, and treating it as a skill to build, not something that just happens to you, changed how supported the role felt.

Put expectations in writing, not just in conversation. One team leader described learning this the hard way: a difficult message raised verbally in supervision got softened in the retelling, or simply forgotten, and the same issue resurfaced weeks later. Her fix was to record it plainly in the supervision notes and return to it directly if nothing had changed, which she found created more openness, not less, than avoiding the written record.

The point isn't to become someone else

None of this is about becoming a different person the day the promotion comes through. It's about being honest, early, that a real relationship has changed shape, and building the new version deliberately instead of hoping the old one adjusts on its own.

If you're navigating this right now, I'd love to hear: what's the part of supervising former peers that nobody warned you about?