With the worldwide recognition of social work as a profession, and increment in the scope in the field of social work practice, there are also increase in the challenges as well as demand of qualified and competent social workers or let’s say social work leaders. Lack of confident and effective social work leaders has created a difficulty for the development and sustainability of the profession.
Most of us are aware of the profound links between social work and leadership and the latter is paramount for effective, meaningful social work practice. Embedding holistic leadership in social work can tremendously help overcoming the specific issues at tasks, help providing answers to the ultimate causes behind them, substantially contributing to solve social problems. It is seen as one of the key elements for the generation of the positive changes we aspire to, not only as social worker, but also as responsible, engaged citizens. Therefore, there is a great scope to re-assess and re-discover the interconnection between leadership and social work.
It is then I understood that social workers could be social leaders as well. Usually, we contemplate leaders/ leadership to be commanding or exercising of power. However, based on insights I recently gathered, now to my understanding it could be more than that. I myself used to think that I am happy being one to be following and I have never been anywhere close to think of myself as a leader since I was, and still am, soft spoken. I thought that being soft spoken, shy and perhaps introvert would not qualify me as a leader. But the leadership I am taking about starts foremost from the self, discovering our positive values, our strengths and also to be aware of our limitations. It is about our ability to better the agency and to frame a pathway, an uncertain rather that definitive, something that might resemble a zigzag rather than a straight trajectory but still a way forward, no matter if bumpy.
After all, this is life; uncertain and unpredictable as we all came to realize in the last few months. Self -leadership is a process that starting from the inner side of a person shall be conducive to reach an outer dimension with plans, achievements and failures too. It can also involve a group of people that aim to achieve a common goal, converging towards the more traditional definition of leadership.
Yet from a point of view of social work, self-leadership should also lead to influence social change and therefore turning into social leadership where actions converged towards a common, societal goal. They try to manage the relation between themselves and others. This is the leadership that should be mastered by social workers. So, I might develop this as I go further in life.
As a social work graduand, understanding these dynamics might come to be very relevant. Whether we acknowledge such a different understanding of leadership or not, I believe that social work as profession should make a better effort to educate its students towards fully understanding and internalizing such kind of leadership. There would be multiple benefits. We can try to leverage social leadership in micro level practice working with individual clients, to help them understand their potential like in strength-based approach and empowering them towards change. While at macro level, we can use this while advocating or fighting for social justice.
As a social worker, we always have certain ethics and core values to be committed to while undertaking our profession. Staying true to values like human dignity, social justice helps strengthening the way we understand and practice leadership.
Each and every social worker has the potential to become an outstanding social leader.
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