In my 40-year career in social care, I have seen the best – and the worst – of leadership. I've seen leadership that uplifts, inspires, and creates spaces for people to thrive. I've also seen leadership that flattens people, stifles creativity, and leaves teams feeling like expendable cogs in a machine. I have also felt as a leader who didn’t fit in, where I could see how things could be different, but my voice went unheard. That caused a genuine “falsification of type at work” that led to stress and ultimately to illness.
If there is one thing I know for certain, it is this: social care is about people. It is relational through and through – people supporting people. And this truth extends to how we lead. Compassionate leadership is not an optional extra or a soft add-on. It is the very foundation of healthy teams, effective support, and lasting transformation. Compassionate leadership is the only route to fully functioning teams.
Professor Michael West, a leading thinker in the UK on this topic, defines compassionate leadership as attending, understanding, empathising, and helping. It's about creating psychologically safe environments where people feel valued and heard. It's about leading with emotional intelligence – being present, authentic, and willing to be vulnerable. Do you see the link with coaching here? It’s about seeing and nurturing potential so that individuals and ultimately the team, thrive.
Andy Bradley of Frameworks 4 Change speaks even more boldly. He calls for "a revolution of love in leadership." Yes, love – the kind of compassionate, courageous love that sees each person as valuable, capable, and worthy of respect. I am wondering what you’re thinking and feeling as you read that? Please take the opportunity to explore your reaction.
These aren’t just warm words. The evidence tells us that compassionate leadership improves team performance, wellbeing, and retention – especially in high-pressure environments like health and social care. It builds trust, loyalty, and resilience. It creates the conditions where people can flourish.
We are all frustrated with the lack of funding, systems and processes taking over genuine human interaction, tick box approaches and traditional models of support that don’t lead to people leading fulfilling lives, and these frustrations can either kill our spirit or we can look deeply into what we do and how we do it and make those localised changes that will have real impact in the lives of people supported and those supporting.
Too often, I’ve seen Support Workers treated as if they were transient, dispensable – even a nuisance. Yet these are the people who form the very backbone of social care. Their experience of work directly shapes the quality of support the person they are supporting receives. These two realities cannot be separated.
I’ve witnessed leaders who didn’t even try to know their team. One Team Leader once said to me, "Andy, why do you need to know how everyone ticks? It’s a waste of energy. You’ll learn that the only way to manage people is to keep them under your thumb." That never sat right with me – and it never will.
I’ve also been the person who introduced a transformative new care planning model – only to watch it be adopted and rebranded by managers who never acknowledged his contribution. He talked to me of feeling used. Devalued. Disillusioned, and talked of losing respect for those who were in leadership positions. That one experience damaged his career meaning that people lost out on a compassionate leader.
Supervision isn’t just about ticking boxes every six weeks or making sure the Care Certificate is complete. It’s about relationship. Does the supervisor know the people they supervise? Not as friends, we need professional boundaries, but as individuals with strengths, hopes, and growth edges? Is the relationship transactional – or genuinely relational?
When leaders know their people, they can support their growth. They can spot potential. They can offer challenge and encouragement. That’s succession planning in action – not picking out the most ruthless climbers but nurturing the people-centred future leaders. Effective leaders create leaders, not followers.
A healthy workplace culture allows people to be – not just do. When people feel psychologically safe, they bring their whole selves to work. They show up with creativity, curiosity, and courage. But I’ve worked with team members who had to pull over on the way to work to be sick, so anxious were they about what awaited them. That is the opposite of compassionate culture.
Compassion is not weakness. It is radical. It is strength. And we must build our compassionate reservoirs before the crisis comes. You don’t learn how to use a parachute after the plane’s engine fails.
Let me give you an example: a manager once told me how frustrated she was with a Support Worker who was "full of ideas" but never followed through. "He’s so annoying!" she said. But I asked: what if you celebrated the fact you have an ideas person in your team? What if his ideas were handed to someone who thrives on implementation? That’s what relational teamwork looks like.
Action Learning Sets are one way to enable this. They create space for team members to share openly, listen deeply, and develop mutual respect for each other’s gifts. This is the beginning of self-managed teams – where difference is not a problem but a superpower.
In too many systems, people being supported are seen as "needs" and those doing the supporting are seen as "problems". But what if we started seeing people as people? How radical does that sound? What if we explored the root causes of issues rather than just lopping off the visible branches? And what if we explored those root causes together, as a whole team, and not just top down?
Leadership isn’t about playing a role – it’s about being real. We must lead from a place of authenticity, emotional awareness, and trust. That is how we engage the hearts and minds of others.
Compassionate leadership is not fluffy. It is the bedrock of high-performing, people-centred teams. And it is desperately needed – not just in social care, but across all sectors. If we want to transform services, we must begin by transforming how we lead.
Let’s start now.
