You Don't Have to Lose Yourself to Lead Well
Why staying a social worker while you lead isn’t a compromise, it’s the point
One of the most common reasons capable social workers give for not pursuing leadership isn't fear of the work itself. It's fear of losing something else entirely: the connection to clients, to practice, to the reason they came into the profession in the first place.
Across my Churchill Fellowship interviews, this came up again and again, often from people who were clearly good enough to lead, and clearly torn about what it might cost them.
The fear
In a group conversation with leaders and workforce development staff across Northern Ireland's health and social care trusts, one contributor put the dilemma as directly as I heard it anywhere: many advanced social workers who've been in their roles 10, 15 years or more, phenomenal leaders who'd make fantastic team leads, won't go for that role simply because they don't want to lose why they came into the profession. They don't want to lose touch with their service users and get caught in what they'd call the corporate rat race, keeping everybody above and everybody below happy.
It's not a confidence problem. It's a values problem, and a completely reasonable one. If the thing that drew you to social work was direct relationship with people, a role that seems to trade that away for meetings and budgets is a legitimate loss to weigh, not something to be talked out of.
What it actually looks like to keep both
The leaders I spoke with who'd found a way to stay connected to practice while leading weren't doing it accidentally. It was a deliberate design choice.
One team leader in Scotland, managing a kinship and adoption team, described continuing to build her own direct practice skills alongside leading her team, story work training, and pursuing a further therapeutic qualification, not because her job required it, but because she'd decided her vision for the team meant understanding the work at a level beyond supervision alone. Her own plan was never to be the one doing direct work with the children herself, she manages a team of people who already hold those qualifications, but she wanted to understand what that work actually involves for her team, and to build a better sense of it through professional development.
Other approaches that came up across the fellowship, in different countries, with different structures behind them:
Staying on a roster for direct crisis work, even in a leadership role, so the skills and the relationship to the work stay current rather than theoretical.
Practice teaching, guiding a student through their placement, which keeps a leader genuinely present in someone's practice development without requiring a formal caseload of their own.
Site visits as a deliberate practice, not just an oversight function, going out with a worker, sitting in on the actual work, then debriefing afterward.
None of these fully replace frontline practice. That's not really the point. The point is that leadership doesn't have to mean a clean break from the work itself, there are genuine, structured ways to keep a foot in it.
The skills were never really separate
One phrase followed me across the fellowship more than almost any other: parallel process. I first heard it in Denver, and all the way to Sweden, from different people, in different systems, meaning the same thing each time, that what you already know how to do with clients is the same underlying skill you need with staff, engaging someone's reality, building rapport, working with resistance, holding a boundary without losing the relationship.
One US child welfare leader put it plainly when I asked her directly whether the skills genuinely transferred: so much of what she'd learned in her degree was directly applicable to organisations and individuals alike, you just have to make the connection for yourself. It isn't that different from working with families, understanding their dynamics, helping them navigate difficulty, staying strengths-based with them, all of it directly applicable to supervising individuals in any setting.
If that's true, and everything I heard across nine countries suggests it is, then leadership was never really asking you to leave your social work self behind. It was asking you to apply it somewhere new.
This shows up in how people described their own approach to supervision, too. Several leaders across the fellowship talked about applying essentially the same relational instinct to staff that they'd bring to a client: meeting someone where they actually are, not where the job description assumes they should be, treating people the way they want to be treated, and starting from wherever a staff member is on a given day rather than expecting consistency they may not have. And culture travels the same way skill does, what a leader models tends to get copied by whoever's below them in the structure, for better or worse, so the same relational care that shows up further down a team usually mirrors what was modelled from above it in the first place.
What the research adds
Three things worth knowing, not just from social work, but from the much older literature this idea actually comes from.
Specialism, not just seniority, keeps experienced staff from leaving. A 2025 study in Child & Family Social Work (Cook) on retaining experienced child and family social workers found that many of the practitioners most likely to leave weren't burnt out or disengaged, they were reluctant leavers who missed frontline work and simply couldn't see a sustainable way to remain connected to it. Building a genuine specialism, rather than treating seniority as automatically meaning "less practice," was identified as a real lever for keeping them.
Leaders who stay embedded in practice-level conversation help everyone else keep their own professional identity intact too. A 2025 study in Human Resource Management (Currie, Bharatan, Mahesh & Miller) looking at how new ways of working got embedded in social care found that Principal Social Workers who ran peer-to-peer reflective practice sessions at team level, staying present in the actual sense-making about difficult practice, helped frontline workers connect new requirements back to their professional values, rather than experiencing change as something imposed from a distance. It's open access, free to read in full: doi.org/10.1002/hrm.22271.
"Parallel process" itself is a genuine, decades-old concept, not just a phrase people use. It originates in clinical supervision research going back to the 1950s (Searles, 1955; Hora, 1957), describing how relational dynamics in one setting tend to reappear in another, connected one. More recent work has extended the same idea deliberately into staff development and coaching for practitioners, arguing that the same relational skills used with clients can be consciously carried into how you support and develop the people you lead, rather than treated as two separate skill sets.
The other thing I heard repeatedly was less about staying connected to the work itself and more about staying connected to yourself while doing it: a confidential space entirely outside the line management arrangement, and often outside the organisation altogether. Not a mentor who reports to your boss, not a peer in your own team, someone with no stake in the outcome and no reporting line back to anyone you work with. It's the one piece of staying grounded that can't really be built into the job description, because its value depends on being separate from it.
The choice isn't binary
Leading doesn't require becoming someone else. The leaders who navigated this well didn't ask "how do I let go of being a social worker so I can lead," they asked "what does staying a social worker look like from here." Different question, completely different outcome.
If you've found your own way to stay connected to practice while leading, I'd love to hear it: what does it actually look like for you?