Across nine countries between May and July 2026, in conversations with social workers, leaders, academics and behaviour scientists, from the US to Kenya, one theme surfaced regularly: a worry that leaders lose their hold on the values that brought them into the work.
Two conversations on opposite sides of the world have stayed with me. In Belfast, Aine Morrison, Chief Social Worker for Northern Ireland, Office of Social Services, Department of Health (personal communication, 9 June 2026), mapping what makes social work distinct, kept circling back to a value base that shapes every encounter, a fluency in human rights and how they sit in law, and a hard-won comfort with anti-oppressive practice, speaking up even when it costs something.
In a different country, Niketa Sanderson-Gillard, Founder and CEO of Why Care (personal communication, 2 July 2026), put it more bluntly. The discomfort many social workers feel about claiming positional power, she said, is a misreading of the profession’s values, not evidence of a real conflict between them. People with sound values have an obligation to occupy leadership roles precisely because of that values base, not despite it.
I do not think this is only an Australian anxiety. What I heard repeatedly was not simply that the work is hard, but that the leadership on offer is often built elsewhere, for someone else, and can ask social workers to set their values base aside precisely when the profession is asking them to lead with it.
A gap not yet adequately measured
Australia’s welfare and community services workforce, the broader category social work sits within, grew 65 per cent between 2012 and 2022, to more than 662,000 workers, driven largely by growth in aged and disability care (Australian Institute of Health and Welfare, 2023). Healthcare and social assistance employment is projected to grow a further 25.9 per cent by 2034 (HumanAbility, 2024). Work-related psychological injury sits inside that growth as a genuine risk.
Safe Work Australia reports that mental health conditions are associated with substantially longer time away from work than serious injuries and diseases overall (Safe Work Australia, 2024).
A 2025 survey of a closely adjacent Queensland sector — domestic and family violence, sexual violence, and women’s health and wellbeing services — gives some indication of what this looks like in practice. Values alignment with an organisation was the single strongest factor keeping workers in their current role, cited by 57 per cent of respondents, well ahead of pay and benefits.
The same survey identified leadership and management among the hardest occupational categories to fill, alongside limited opportunities for career progression and a lack of clear pathways from practitioner to advanced practitioner to leader (WorkUP Queensland, 2025).
The Australian Association of Social Workers, representing more than 18,400 social workers nationally, is already turning its attention here (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2026a). Its Social Work Leadership Program explicitly grounds leadership in the ethics, principles and identity of the profession rather than generic management training (Australian Association of Social Workers, 2026b).
There is important scholarship to build from. Australian research has examined the transition from practitioner to social work supervisor (Cousins, 2004), while more recent work has explored how leadership can more authentically embody social work identity, values and social justice commitments (Lynch & McMillan, 2025; Venning et al., 2025). Internationally, Angie Bartoli’s research has focused explicitly on the lived transition from social work practitioner to first-line manager, including preparation for the role, changing professional identities, peer support and supervision (Bartoli, 2024).
So this is not an entirely unstudied transition. What appears limited in Australia is contemporary evidence focused specifically on how social workers experience the move into leadership, how they maintain alignment with their professional values under organisational pressure, and what conditions help them do so. This fieldwork attempts to help fill that gap.
Two arguments, not one
This fieldwork makes two arguments, and I want to keep them separate rather than let them blur together, because they are relevant for different reasons. The first is about what social work leadership has to protect, and why that protection cannot be outsourced to generic leadership training. The second is about why the protecting cannot wait.
What social work leadership has to protect
For most social workers, a first-line supervisor role is the first time they hold authority themselves, rather than working within someone else’s. I call this the messy middle, the territory between frontline practice and genuine seniority, and what it asks for, at first, is mostly management: rosters, performance conversations, budgets, compliance. That training matters, but it is not the whole job and treating it as the whole job is where social work leadership quietly loses itself.
Any competent manager can run a roster. What social workers bring to leadership is a value base that shapes the encounter itself, the relational skill of bringing people along rather than simply directing them, already used every day with clients, and a trained professional awareness of power.
Miller et al. (2025) describe social work as “leading by inclusion, not authority”. Drawing together international scholarship on social work leadership, they identify connection, shared values and diversity, rather than reliance on hierarchy and positional power, as recurring characteristics of how the profession leads. That distinction matters here. The task is not to turn social workers into conventional managers; it is to help them recognise that much of what makes them effective social workers can also make them effective leaders.
In Edinburgh, Dr Sarah Rose, lecturer at Edinburgh Napier University, and Dr Gillian Ferguson, DHSC Programme Leader at The Open University (personal communication, 3 June 2026), helped me see why this recognition can be difficult: social work trains its students so heavily to minimise power in the client relationship, drawing on Brigid Proctor’s work, that power is negotiated in every interaction rather than possessed, power over and power with being different things, that it may be quietly teaching a generation to see power itself as a problem.
That can make claiming a leadership identity feel like a betrayal of the values that got someone into the profession, not an extension of them.
That tension sits within a broader documented pattern. A large scoping review of professional identity research, covering 91 studies across 25 years, found that professional identity in social work is sustained by some mechanisms and undermined by others. A robust and congruent professional identity, pride, belonging and continuing professional development can sustain it, while internal tensions and sociopolitical contexts can weaken it (Moorhead et al., 2026).
So, what does protecting this require? Asking people directly whose values a leader should hold onto — the profession’s, the organisation’s, the senior leaders’, their own — produced no straightforward answer; spiritual, societal and political answers came too. There is not one answer.
Caroline Manning, Ethics Complaints and Notifications Team Leader, Australian Association of Social Workers (personal communication, 24 March 2026), put the discipline of it plainly.
People will go into leadership and may not want to remain connected to their social work profession. That’s well and good, but within human services it’s very hard not to want to maintain those values. Staying connected must be an active process, something a leader does, not something that happens on its own.
What was consistent across countries was agreement that the answer cannot be worked out alone, inside a performance conversation, under time pressure.
It must be worked out somewhere confidential, outside the line management relationship, with room to work through a genuine dilemma before deciding what it asks of you. Of everything in this fieldwork, that is the finding I would defend most strongly: a confidential developmental space genuinely separate from performance management, and explicit permission to advocate upward and sideways.
That is where first-time leaders can struggle most, caught in the messy middle between the people they lead and the people they answer to. That distance matters: in country after country, the same complaint surfaced about supervision from a line manager, focused on the task, not the person doing the task, the reverse of what development needs.
Bartoli’s (2024) work echoes this. Her research with newly promoted social work managers places professional identity, peer support and supervision at the centre of navigating the transition rather than treating becoming a manager as simply acquiring a new set of technical skills.
In Scotland, Dr Martin Kettle, Programme Lead for the Postgraduate Diploma Chief Social Work Officer at Glasgow Caledonian University (personal communication, 3 June 2026), found this at scale: cohorts value peer relationships more than curriculum content, people who would otherwise have stayed professionally isolated start reaching out to each other. That is not a curriculum problem. It is evidence that some of what protects social work leadership must be built between people carrying the same thing, not simply taught.
What that costs is real, and Juha Kahila, former CEO of the Finnish Youth Housing Association (personal communication, 15 June 2026), put a number on it. His organisation chose not to bid on government tenders because the funding on offer would not cover the quality of service they were committed to delivering, knowing the likely outcome was staff losing their jobs rather than compromising on what the organisation owed the people it served.
Values are not real until tested.
Six months later, frontline social workers who had watched the new provider’s work up close were quietly working to bring his organisation back.
The cost is not only organisational. Tiffany Ramos, Division Manager for Child, Adult and Family Services in Broomfield, Colorado (personal communication, 22 June 2026), described a personal version: being passed over, more than once, for pushing the system to look at itself rather than staying quiet. Sometimes the cost is you are not chosen, she said, and it costs more than opportunity, closer to heartbreak, wondering whether you are doing the right thing at all.
Protecting values is not free, for an organisation or the person carrying them.
What Ireland is teaching the rest of us
Ireland shows how real, and how losable, this protection is. Monica Hynds, Director of Innovation and Development and Guardian ad Litem at Barnardos Ireland and a board member of the Irish Association of Social Workers (personal communication, 11 June 2026), said if we want social workers to lead from their values, we need to keep teaching those values and showing early career practitioners their values are not a liability in leadership.
They are what makes the profession distinct, and what makes it necessary.
In a 2019 revision, Ireland’s social work regulator removed reference to human rights from its code of professional conduct, an omission that has generated sustained debate within Irish social work and calls for human rights to be explicitly reinstated (CORU, 2019; Whelan & Flynn, 2023).
Other countries, Australia included, should hear that as a warning: a rights and advocacy commitment, once quietly dropped, is far harder to write back in than it ever was to remove.
Why this can’t wait
There is an uncomfortable complication worth being honest about. Niketa Sanderson-Gillard raised this from a different angle: people who put themselves forward for leadership are not necessarily the people whose values we most want leading. Teaching people that living those values and leading are compatible is not just permission-giving; it edges closer to necessary.
Left unaddressed, positions of influence risk being filled by those most comfortable claiming power, rather than those most committed to using it in service of the people social work exists for.
I said something close to this at my Churchill Fellowship interview last year: if we do not give social workers an opportunity to practise and reflect on being a whole human being, we place them, and the people they work with, at risk of moral, ethical and legal decisions none of us would choose. Nine countries later, that sentence has only sharpened.
In several countries I visited this year, political and economic power is concentrating in fewer hands, and public discourse is challenging values social work was built on: rights, dignity, collective responsibility. That is not simply a trend for politicians to sort out. It is a direct challenge to the profession’s reason for existing.
Which is why the ambition cannot stop at getting social workers into supervisory roles. We need more social workers in decision-making positions across the whole system — policy, executive suites, boards, wherever decisions shaping lives get made — because what this profession offers is needed there more urgently than in a long time.
Venning et al. (2025) make a related argument in calling for a distinctive activist approach to social work leadership, one capable of carrying the profession’s commitments to social justice and systemic change rather than simply importing leadership frameworks developed for other purposes.
The obligation this places on us
Workforce evidence from adjacent sectors shows that values alignment, career progression and leadership capacity matter to workforce sustainability. The growing scholarship tells us, too, that social work leadership cannot simply be generic management with a social work job title attached.
What we have not yet adequately built is an approach to the transition that treats leadership development as a values and identity question as much as a management one.
A program with values as explicit content, and power taught as a tool for empowerment, would be a genuine start. But more than either, what this fieldwork asks for is space: confidential, protected and separate from performance management.
A place to ask: Who am I becoming as a leader? What am I being asked to compromise? Which values are mine to hold? How do I use power without abandoning what I learned about it as a social worker? And who can I think with when the answer is not obvious?
That is the harder thing to build, and the one this profession cannot keep going without.
That is the alignment gap that gives this article its title. Closing it is not a program to procure. It is a set of conditions we have not yet adequately built, and a seat at more tables than we currently occupy.
The views and opinions expressed by interviewees in this article are their own and do not necessarily reflect those of their employers or organisations.
References
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