At one point, a state legislator came in to talk about her experience on her campaign as well as being a public servant. And during the Q&A, one of the attendees started his question with the statement, “well, we know that we need to elect LGBTQ women of color…” He continued to list these off, not as separate identities, but as the identities of one singular person.
When he was finished, the state legislator, who is herself a woman of color, replied with something along the lines of “you don’t need someone who checks off boxes. You need someone who is a servant and is passionate about serving their community.”
We tend to think of leadership as a role or, better yet, a job. And when we think of leadership as a job, we tend to think of it in terms of hiring for a job.
When we hire for jobs, we look for people that meet certain criteria, or are as close to meeting these criteria as is possible. Along with this, we assume that whoever did not get the job was not good enough or not qualified for it. We assume this, though we know logically that there were probably several people who fit the qualifications and didn’t know about the opportunity, did not think it was right for them, or simply were passed over for it.
Treating leadership like a role that needs to be filled or a job that needs to be done means that we treat those who are not specifically in leadership positions as not able to be leaders. But this is simply not true.
As a social work practitioner and student, the key to leadership, in my opinion, is to step up and fill gaps.
In her training They Didn’t Tell Me This! Compassion Fatigue and the Healthcare Provider, Kristy Blazer deVries describes the concept of balance and how we typically think of balance as a state of being instead of a constant state of adjustments. During her presentation, deVries, who practices yoga, stood on one leg to demonstrate a yoga position.
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| Balance is not a state of being but requires little adjustments. |
I believe that this understanding of balance can be applied to leadership. Not that leadership requires a series of small adjustments (though sometimes it can) but rather that we do not have to pursue leadership as one big role, but as a series of small opportunities and adjustments.
In other words, instead of seeking out formal opportunities for leadership, we as practitioners and students can seek to fill small gaps. We can ask questions about the way things are done (“Why do we repeat the same question in two different ways on our intake form when we clients only seem to understand one version of it?”) or take initiative to fill gaps (“It looks like you could use an extra set of hands to help with this training. Would you like help?”)
Leadership in a helping profession means, well, helping. And, specifically, helping things run better. We spend a lot of time helping others, whether one-on-one or at a macro level. Helping our fellow workers, ourselves, and working to make things easier, more streamlined, or simply just better helps us to do our work better. It’s like the phrase “help me help you.” If we help fill the gaps or adjust the things that prevent us from helping our clients best, we are practicing leadership.
At its core, the leadership I described above is another definition of servant-leadership. Larry Spears’ article “Practicing Servant-Leadership” defines the concept as a leadership style “that puts others – including employees, customers, and community- as the number one priority” (Spears, 2004).
Making these small adjustments in order to better our practice and our work is a form of servant-leadership. When we are driven by helping others, which many (if not most) in our profession are, these small adjustments can be a large part of how we show leadership. So long as those adjustments are driven by a desire to better serve others, they are an aspect of servant-leadership.
However, being driven by the desire to help others in a career can be a slippery slope.
We talk at length about the importance of self-care in the social work profession. It is a critical part of social work professionalism and a great opportunity to practice leadership in our profession and with other professions.
Self-care is crucial to preventing secondary trauma, compassion fatigue, and burnout. Though this is crucial to all social work, as Lewis and King (2019) found in their research of introducing a self-care course to social work curriculum to run concurrently with field placement, teaching self-care in the MSW curriculum can prepare students to practice self-care in practice as well (Lewis & King, 2019).
Practicing self-care regularly as a social work student can be tied to meeting the Council on Social Work Education’s (CSWE) core competencies. Newell and Nelson-Gardell (2014), in their article on competency-based self-care education, gave the example “under the core competency of identifying oneself as a professional social worker (EP 2.1.1), knowledge of professional self-care and the methods of preventing or intervening with conditions such as professional burnout could be used to measure a student’s ability to attend to their professional roles and boundaries and to practice both self-reflection and self-correction (CSWE, 2008).” (Newell & Nelson-Gardell, 2014).
Because self-care can be considered part of professional competency in social work education, it can be considered an aspect of competent practice as well.
Though self-care as a concept valued by more disciplines all the time, it is something that, I believe, sets social work apart from other disciplines. When we practice self-care, we are showing ourselves, our colleagues, and other professionals we work with that we value the work we do and our ability to do it. When we practice self-care, we lead by example.
Speaking from experience, however, sometimes even when practicing self-care regularly, burnout can still creep up on us.
In the spring of 2018, I was very close to burnout. The job I had at the time was as one of three employees of a state-wide association. We were in the midst of preparing for our annual conference, the first one we had held in years.
Because of our small staff, and the amount of work that it takes to put on a two-day conference, we were constantly operating at max capacity.
I practiced self-care a lot throughout the couple months leading up to the conference. As writing is my primary self-care activity, I spent every waking moment not working at one of my two jobs writing. I ended up composing a story that clocked in at just over 96,000 words.
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| See? I didn't make that "writing a novel in two months" thing up. |
However, at that conference, our membership voted to approve our new association name and we introduced our new logo. And though it took a lot of work to pull the conference off, I was able to have conversations with members about the growth that the association could see with the new name and the membership expansion that came with it.
The following week, I then had a conversation with my other boss about the potential for some health outreach events that he was interested in having my input on.
It was then that I realized something important: self-care can prevent burnout but getting your motivation back can cure it.
Of course, this is not a hard-and-fast rule. But when I left those conversations eager to get back to work at a job (well, jobs) that, not a few days prior I was ready to quit, it taught me something important.
In the Goleman article “What Makes a Leader?” (1998), one of the five aspects of emotional intelligence is motivation. The article defines it as “a passion to work for reasons that go beyond money or status” and says that the concept is characterized by “a strong drive to achieve, optimism in the face of failure, organizational commitment,” (Goleman, 1998).
Though instances like the conference in 2018 reminded me of my motivation to do the work I do, those instances are few and far between. Self-care helps to off-set symptoms of burnout, but I struggle to sometimes find motivation in the every day.
I am very self-motivated when I have clear goals in mind and/or a plan to follow. When there is reason to do the work, I will do it and I will do it well. But if there is no clear end goal that I am working towards, it can be difficult to motivate myself and, even when practicing self-care regularly, burnout can still settle in.
Because I am aware that I have struggled with maintaining motivation in the past and because I know that there will be times in my life that I will be working without goals or plans, this is something I intend to work on throughout my time in the MSW program. I have worked hard in recent years to be more self-aware of my feelings and to reflect more on how and why I do certain things. I intend to use this self-awareness to reflect on motivation and develop strategies to keep motivated in the times where I feel distinctly unmotivated.
In the future, I think this course would do well to integrate more self-reflection of leadership by students. In the ASAP curriculum, much of the information that is taught in this course is repetitive for those with a recent bachelor’s degree in Social Work. However, because of the student population the program serves and when this course is offered, it offers a unique opportunity to engage student practitioners right before they start in their field placement. Hitting the key points of practice review and then focusing on student leadership and developing leadership skills would be very beneficial to this course and those who take it.
References
DeVries, K. B. (2019, April 8). They Didn't Tell Me This! Compassion Fatigue and the Healthcare Provider. Lecture presented at 2019 Safety-Net Symposium in Marriott Columbus University Area, Columbus, OH.
Goleman, D. (1998). What Makes a Good Leader? Harvard Business Review, 82-91.
Lewis, M. L., & King, D. M. (2019). Teaching self-care: The utilization of self-care in social work practicum to prevent compassion fatigue, burnout, and vicarious trauma. Journal of Human Behavior in the Social Environment, 29(1), 96–106. https://doi-org.proxy.lib.ohio-state.edu/10.1080/10911359.2018.1482482
Newell, J. M., & Nelson-Gardell, D. (2014). A Competency-Based Approach to Teaching Professional Self-Care: An Ethical Consideration for Social Work Educators. Journal of Social Work Education,50(3), 427-439. doi:10.1080/10437797.2014.917928
Spears, L. C. (2004, Fall). Practicing Servant-Leadership. Leader to Leader, (34).
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