The Three Ways We Survive What Our Organisations Don't Provide
Churchill Fellow 2025. Thriving at a cost, coping by disappearing, or failing to develop, only one of these gets named.
Leadership you don't need to recover from starts with an honest look at what happens when the conditions for it aren't there.
Across my Churchill Fellowship interviews, this big question sat at the heart of my conversations: what makes it possible for a leader to develop well, to stay connected to their values, their team, and themselves, as they move into the role? Most of what I found names the conditions that make that possible: trust built before challenge is introduced, peer groups with shared purpose, investment that's protected rather than left to discretion.
But two conversations, held side by side, showed me something the "right conditions" framing doesn't capture on its own: what people actually do when those conditions simply aren't there. I don't think there are two responses to that gap. I think there are three, and only one of them tends to get named.
Response one: thriving anyway, at a cost
Dr Lindsay Giddings, Associate Head of School for Curriculum and Innovation at the Open University, described a manager in her own research who did everything a good, values-led leader is supposed to do: stayed visible and present for her team, protected a family from a rushed handover to hit a compliance deadline, held real risk, and advocated upward, entirely despite her organisation, not because it enabled her to.
"The framework currently treats organisational conditions as enabling factors. This data suggests they may be largely irrelevant to whether individuals choose to lead well. They are choosing to lead well anyway. The question the framework needs to answer is: what is the cost to those individuals of leading well without support?" — Dr Lindsay Giddings
This is the response that gets celebrated, the leader who rises above poor conditions through sheer will and values. It's also the one I think we're most wrong to hold up uncritically. Thriving despite the absence of support isn't proof the conditions didn't matter. It's proof of what a person had to personally absorb because they didn't.
Response two: coping by disappearing
Anna Fairtlough, author and retired senior lecturer, Goldsmiths University of London, described a different and quieter response:
"Some practitioners survive powerlessness by restricting their practice to following procedures and filling in forms, controlling what little is controllable, and withholding their authentic self, not because they're waiting for conditions to improve, but as an active, rational coping strategy under conditions that show no sign of changing." — Anna Fairtlough
This is the response most likely to be misread entirely. From the outside it can look like disengagement, or a lack of development, a performance problem to be managed. From the inside, it's often a sound read of a genuinely unsafe or unsupported situation. Punishing it as underperformance misses what it actually is: self-protection.
Response three: genuinely failing to develop
This is the response our existing frameworks were mostly already built to describe, the one where a person simply doesn't develop, becomes overwhelmed, and leaves the role or the profession. It's real, and it's the one most leadership literature already spends its time on. But treated as the only response to poor conditions, it hides the other two entirely, and both of those come with their own hidden costs to the person, even when they don't show up as an obvious failure.
Why the distinction matters
If an organisation can't tell the difference between someone thriving at personal cost, someone coping by quietly disengaging, and someone genuinely failing to develop, it will keep mistaking absorption for resilience and coping for underperformance, and it will keep missing the actual signal: that the conditions themselves are the variable that needs attention, not the individual's response to their absence.
This isn't a call to romanticise any of the three. It's a call to see all three clearly, so that the leaders quietly thriving at a cost get supported before that cost compounds, and the leaders quietly coping get understood rather than managed out.
The evidence this sits alongside
This pattern isn't isolated to two interviews. It's consistent with a broader, well-documented picture of what's happening to social workers moving into leadership right now:
A 2025 study on Australian social workers' professional identity and transition into practice (Afrouz et al.) found identity disruption to be a recognised, researched feature of moving into more senior roles, not something individuals are simply managing well or badly on their own.
Moorhead's 2019 research on newly qualified social workers' transition into the profession documents the same kind of strain at an earlier career stage, before leadership even enters the picture.
In England, the Department for Education's 2023 workforce data recorded social work leavers outnumbering joiners for the first time in six years.
A 2024 study in Frontiers in Sociology, drawing on 647 participants, identified the early career period as the highest turnover risk window in the profession.
None of these studies name the three-response typology directly. What they confirm is the backdrop it explains: a profession where people are absorbing real strain, in different, often invisible ways, and where "they left" is only ever the most visible of at least three outcomes.
What to do with this
If you're a leader: notice which of the three you default to under pressure, and treat "I'm coping fine" or "I'm just getting on with it" as worth a second look, not a reassurance.
If you're leading others: build the conditions, don't just celebrate the people who succeed without them. The person thriving despite your organisation is not evidence your organisation is working.
Which of the three sounds most like you, right now?
Build a culture your people don't need to recover from.