Why leadership stability is vital in child welfare
September 16, 2021
Families are the fundamental building block of our species. Regardless of their size or composition, our family should be where we belong, where we can exhale and release our full selves. In any family, we know we will experience loss, and we expect to bury our elders. While these deaths are sad, we know such loss is the nature of life. But when our families bury a child or lose a loved one abruptly, we experience a unique kind of grief. We struggle to make sense of the loss; it leaves a little less of us to give to the world.
Families are core to the work of any child welfare or child services organization. Yet these organizations also function as “families” – families that go through intense experiences under extremely difficult circumstances. That includes mind-numbing bureaucratic processes, backbreaking reminders when they make a mistake or fall out of compliance, and the soul-crushing experience of witnessing some of the worst things human beings are capable of.
Like any other family, child welfare and child services agencies have a head of the family – usually the director. If you have served as a child welfare director, you know this role encompasses some special responsibilities that aren’t mentioned in formal job descriptions. The best leaders spend a significant amount of time and energy practicing the ‘ministry of presence’ in a way that undergirds the work. They walk the halls and greet people by name. They show up at the ER when a caseworker has been hurt on the job. They attend funerals. And they join the line dance at the summer picnic, holding the hands of children who are lost.
To get staff moving in one direction, a child welfare leader must quite literally love the grueling daily challenges out of them. It’s the only way to balance the scale.
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Every child deserves a safe and permanent family
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So, imagine what happens when a child welfare leader leaves abruptly. If a director is dismissed on a Friday afternoon, staff may hear the news through the rumor mill, by reading the paper or when they receive a short, two-line memo announcing the change. Then – just as abruptly – a new director arrives. This new leader may be experienced and well-intentioned and equally as present and loving as the previous director. But from the perspective of caseworkers and other staff, this new “head of the family” is a stranger.
Without the history and context of the agency family, the new director doesn’t understand the organization’s ways of knowing and being together, how they create joy and dissipate grief. In an attempt to improve the organization, the leader might establish new rules and mete out punishments designed to drive compliance with those rules.
Much like a family burying a child, the agency suffers all this change like a death. It rocks the boat in unending ways – including leaving a little less of caseworkers to give to the work. In fact, the cruel irony is that it creates instability that ripples through the agency and out to vulnerable families and children – the very people who need more, not less, stability in order to thrive.
How can we increase the stability of child welfare leadership?
Let’s start with a leadership model that acknowledges that agencies function as family units. Let’s make decisions through a lens of preserving stability for the workforce that devotes their professional lives to the uniquely challenging work of child welfare. And let’s begin to think about leadership as part of a broader effort to create a child welfare workforce of the future.
With a career that exacts such a high emotional toll, caseworkers need to know they can return to a stable “home” where they will be supported and encouraged. We owe them nothing less.
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