I want to begin with something I do not often say out loud. There was a period in my career — when I was a middle leader — when I became the kind of manager I would not have wanted for myself.

Not because I did not care. I cared deeply. But the culture I worked inside measured what it could count. Cases closed. Targets met. Throughput. And gradually, almost without noticing, I began measuring those things too. The emotionality of the work, the impact on my social workers, the relational fabric that holds a team together — all of that became background noise.

I have asked myself, in the years since: who was holding me in that? Where was I supposed to have learned a different way of leading? Because nobody taught me. And I am not sure anyone was taught.

What makes this harder to admit is that I came from a radical social work background. I knew about power. I knew about structural oppression. I knew, intellectually, about whose interests the system served and whose it did not. But reflexivity about my own inner world — my emotional responses, what I was carrying into my leadership, what the work was doing to me — that was a different kind of knowledge entirely. And nobody in my formation had given me that.

The language the organisation handed me

I remember feeling angry. Not occasionally. Regularly. My staff seemed to be avoiding the hard conversations, not moving cases forward, not engaging. And I pushed. I labelled them, in my own head — difficult. Lazy. Resistant.

What I did not understand then — and this is the thing that still stays with me — is that what I was seeing was not obstruction. It was the emotional weight of the work, landing on them with nowhere to go. And the reason I could not see that?

I was carrying exactly the same weight myself. I just did not know it.

Underneath the anger, if I am really honest, was helplessness. I did not know how to reach them. I did not know how to reach myself. And the organisation gave me a language that made all of that bearable. Resistant team. Difficult staff. Lazy workers. That language was everywhere. It was almost encouraged. And what it did, I now understand, was close down the very curiosity that might have opened something up.

What use of self actually asks

Use of self sounds deceptively simple. The idea that who you are — what you carry, what you feel, what you have lived — is not incidental to the work.

It is the work.

Your emotional responses are not problems to be suppressed, or professional failings to be ashamed of. They are information. They are data — if you know how to read them.

I later had the privilege of teaching use of self on the social work programme at the Tavistock Clinic. And it was there — in the teaching, and in the leadership development work I was doing alongside it — that some of what I had lived as a practitioner and a leader began, slowly, to make sense in a different way.

It was at the Tavistock that I first really understood the relationship between candour and kindness. That these are not opposites. Kindness without candour becomes collusion: we avoid the difficult truth because we do not want to cause pain. And candour without kindness becomes cruelty: we deliver hard truths without any regard for the person receiving them. The leader who can hold both — who can say the difficult thing with genuine care for the person they are saying it to — that leader has done their own inner work. They know themselves well enough to stay present in discomfort, rather than reaching for the easy exit.

In those seminar rooms, I watched students struggle with what use of self was asking of them. Not the theory. The theory they could manage. It was the personal it asked for. The willingness to look inward at the same time as looking outward. To ask, not just what is happening in this case? — but what is this case doing to me? And what does that tell me?

That is use of self. And it is harder than any framework, any assessment tool, any procedural checklist. Because it requires you to bring yourself. Fully. Honestly. Courageously.

The thing the literature does not always say

There is something the mainstream literature on use of self has not always been willing to say. And I want to say it clearly.

Use of self is not a neutral concept. It never has been.

Whose self gets brought into the room — and whose self gets questioned, minimised, scrutinised, or rendered invisible — that is a profoundly racialised question. For Black practitioners and leaders, bringing yourself has always carried a different weight. A different risk. The self you bring has often been the self that institutions were not designed to hold.

Any honest conversation — about use of self, about reflexivity, about compassionate leadership, about the relational fabric of social work — has to reckon with that. It has to ask: whose emotional experience has been taken seriously in these organisations? Whose struggle has been named as data, and whose has been labelled as difficulty? Whose leadership has been trusted and supported, and whose has been scrutinised and questioned?

These are not peripheral questions. They are central to what use of self actually means in practice.

Compassionate leadership is not soft

Compassionate leadership is not soft. It is not about lowering expectations, or avoiding difficult conversations. It is about curiosity. It is about asking — before you label, before you push, before you conclude — what is this work doing to this person, right now?

Because social work is not like other work. It asks something of the whole person. And when we reach for labels like resistant, or difficult, or lazy, we are closing down the one question that might actually help. We are choosing the comfort of a conclusion over the discomfort of genuine understanding. And in doing so, we lose the worker. And we lose something of ourselves too.

Here is what I have learned, and what I wish someone had said to me when I was that struggling middle manager.

You cannot give what you have not received.

If we want leaders who hold their staff with curiosity and compassion, we have to ask who is holding those leaders. What are we creating in our organisations that makes this possible — not as a personal virtue, but as a cultural norm? Because compassionate leadership practised in isolation, without support, without containment, without anyone asking how are you really doing — that is not sustainable. That is martyrdom dressed up as good management.

What this looks like in practice

What does it actually look like? It means creating real reflective spaces for leaders. Not tick-box exercises. Not appraisal conversations that stay safely on the surface. Spaces where psychological safety is genuine. Where it is possible to say I do not know. I am struggling. I got that wrong — without career consequence.

It means senior leaders who themselves model reflexivity, not just mandate it downward. And it means peer structures: places where leaders can think alongside equals, without hierarchy distorting the conversation.

And here is what I want to say about those spaces — because it is the part that often gets missed. They are not just spaces for processing difficulty. When they work well, they become some of the most exciting spaces in organisational life. Places where new thinking emerges. Where people feel safe enough to say what they have never said. To question what has always been done. To imagine something genuinely different.

Reflective practice as creative practice. Containment as the condition for innovation, not just survival. That is not a luxury. That is how organisations grow.

Coming back to her

I want to come back to where we started — because I do not want us to lose sight of it. Use of self. That deceptively simple idea: that who you are, what you carry, what you feel in the room, is not incidental to the work. It is the work. And what I have been trying to say throughout is that this does not stop at the practitioner's door. It travels. Into supervision. Into leadership. Into the culture of the organisation itself.

I want to come back to that middle manager I described at the beginning. The one who was angry, and underneath the anger, helpless. The one who reached for the language the organisation handed her, because nobody had given her anything better.

That manager was me. And I suspect she is recognisable to many of you reading this.

If you are a senior leader, this piece has been for you. Because the conditions that made me that manager — the absence of reflective space, the culture of measurement, the silence around the emotional weight of the work — those conditions are created and sustained at the top. And they can be changed there too. That is both the responsibility and the opportunity.

And I want to say this once more, because I say it as someone whose passion for anti-racist practice has shaped everything in my professional life. Use of self is not a neutral concept. It never has been. For Black practitioners and leaders, bringing yourself has always carried a different weight, a different risk. Any honest conversation about use of self, about compassionate leadership, about organisational culture, has to reckon with that. It is not a footnote. It is the ground we are standing on.

Wherever you are in your organisation — whatever role you carry — I want to leave you with this. The work is relational. Leadership is relational. And that means it begins with you. Not the role. Not the title. Not the framework, or the policy, or the procedure. You. Brought fully, honestly, and courageously into everything you do.

That is what use of self asks of us. And it is worth everything.

Speak again soon, much love.

Sylv x