Putting Professional Leadership into Practice in Social Work

Peter Scourfield, Author

• Publisher: Learning Matters
• Year: 2018
• Print ISBN: 9781526430038, 9781526430021
• eBook ISBN: 9781526453198
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Work
• Index: Social Sciences

The ability to demonstrate professional leadership is a core requirement for social work students and social workers operating at all levels. This comprehensive textbook is ideal for any student on a social work course, from undergraduate to postgraduate study, and will go onto serve as a useful reference for more experienced social work professionals. this book engages in the essential discussion of what professional leadership means in the context of contemporary social work and why this is considered to be important for the future of the profession. Each chapter contains illustrative case studies, a range of interactive activities, a summary of key point and suggestions for further reading that enable students and qualified social workers to understand the knowledge, skills and attributes required in practicing professional leadership in real life contexts.

1 What Do We Mean by Professional and Professionalism?

Achieving a social work degree

This chapter will enable you to develop the following capabilities to the appropriate level from the PCF:

• professional leadership
• professionalism.

It will also introduce you to the following academic standards as set out in the social work subject benchmark statement:

• 5. 3 Values and ethics
• 5.17 Skills in personal and professional development

More specifically it will enable you to:

• explore ideas about what makes something or someone ‘professional’;
• reflect critically upon concepts of professionalism;
• examine ideas about what defines a profession.

Introduction

A basic assumption underpinning this book is that how we approach professional leadership in social work will be bound up with our ideas and beliefs about critical questions that relate not only to social work but also to professions and professionalism generally. Because the focus is professional leadership in social work, clearly we need to think about what leadership means and what it requires, but, equally importantly, we also need to engage with questions about the purpose, tasks and values of social work and what constitutes professional practice in social work. However, these questions are inevitably linked to broader questions about what defines professionalism and what we expect of professionals. Underlying both these sets of questions are, perhaps, even more fundamental questions of whether social work is, can be or should actually be regarded as a profession and, assuming that it is, what type of profession it is and aspires to be. These questions have been part of social work discourse and debated keenly for many decades. They cannot be easily resolved and they will not be resolved in this book. However, neither can they be glossed over. They need careful consideration if professional leadership in social work is going to be a meaningful activity.

You might well say that the questions posed above are substantially dealt with and answered in professional codes and frameworks laid down by social work’s professional and regulatory bodies. After all, social work in England is based upon a Professional capabilities framework (PCF) (BASW, 2018b), is an occupation regulated by the Health and Care Professions Council (HCPC) and has a professional association – BASW (the British Association of Social Workers). However, while official codes and frameworks lay down the goals of what social work is meant to achieve and also what professional qualities and behaviour are expected of social workers in meeting these goals, how these codes and expectations are interpreted and enacted in practice in specific everyday situations inevitably varies from practitioner to practitioner, from team to team and from organisation to organisation. While there will be broad agreement, there will also be differences in interpretation about what constitutes professionalism.

Given the nature, range and complexity of the work in which social workers are involved, it is not surprising that views differ about what professional social work is generally and also what constitutes professional practice in any particular situation. This is made all the more challenging because the various contexts in which social work takes place are constantly changing. Therefore, for social workers, social work students, social work educators and others involved in social work, making sense of and defining what constitutes professionalism in social work is an ongoing project that is never complete. As will be argued in subsequent chapters, an important function of professional leadership is making sense of what constitutes professionalism in social work and how it should be put into practice, both in general and in specific situations. Because of the wide ranging nature of the task, everyone involved in social work can and needs to play their part in this process.

In this chapter we start by exploring the various meanings attached to terms like ‘professional’ and ‘professionalism’, which circulate both in lay and professional discourses. Activities will encourage you to reflect upon the various ways in which we use these terms and how meanings change depending on a range of factors. You will be prompted to think about whether it is possible to identify the basic ingredients of professionalism and come to a shared understanding of what we expect from a professional, whatever occupational activity they may be undertaking. We discuss the concept of ‘professionality’ as a way of understanding professionalism both in terms of the behaviour of an occupational group as a whole and in terms of the behaviour of individual practitioners in that group.

Lastly, we look at the defining characteristics of a profession in the traditional or ‘classic’ sense of the word. This will enable us to start thinking more critically about social work’s status as a profession. This will also link us directly with Chapter 2, where we will examine in more detail how diverse forms of ‘social work’ activity in the nineteenth century gradually developed into the ‘professional’ occupation it is considered to be today.

What does it mean to call someone or something ‘professional’?

In all walks of life, to call someone or something ‘professional’ seems to make it special in some way. For example, the phrase ‘in my professional opinion’ seems to carry more weight than simply ‘in my opinion’. If a friend decorates our bathroom and we are pleased with it we might compliment them not just by telling them that they have done a ‘good job’ but that they have done a ‘professional job’. There are a very large number of such examples that could be used from all sorts of contexts. In the field of social work, appeals to social workers’ ‘professional’ selves are diverse and many. In matters of safeguarding, for example, social workers are increasingly exhorted to exercise their ‘professional’ judgement. The publication of an official report, such as a serious case review, might remind social workers of their ‘professional’ duties and responsibilities. Social workers are also expected to respect ‘professional’ boundaries, attend to their continuing ‘professional’ development and abide by ‘professional’ codes of ethics. It is not uncommon to hear that social workers need to develop their ‘professional’ identity. It is interesting to consider how the addition of ‘professional’ in those sentences changes their meaning, if at all. For example, what is the difference between using ‘judgement’ and ‘professional judgement’? What actually is a ‘professional’ boundary, who decides where it should be erected and around what exactly? Why is it important to develop a ‘professional’ identity in order to do your job properly? In what ways are the normal contractual responsibilities that come with doing a paid job different from ‘professional’ responsibilities?

So, while there is no doubt that, when used in certain contexts, the use of ‘professional’ as a qualifying adjective can alter meaning, the question is in what ways and to what effect? We know that professionals cannot always agree the answers to these questions among themselves. We also know that those who use professional services can hold different opinions again about what they consider is professional and what is not. Against this background of potential conceptual and terminological confusion, it is therefore useful to begin to explore this concept in more depth, with the goal of finding common ground but also identifying possible areas of ambiguity and differences in meaning.

Activity 1.1 What is ‘professional’? Definitions and synonyms

The Oxford Dictionary Online contains the following definition:

Definitions

Professional

Adjective

1. Relating to or belonging to a profession.
   ‘young professional people’
   • 1.1 Worthy of or appropriate to a professional person; competent, skilful, or assured.
     ‘his professional expertise’
     ‘their music is both memorable and professional’
2. Engaged in a specified activity as one’s main paid occupation rather than as an amateur.
   ‘a professional boxer’
   • 2.1 derogatory, informal Habitually making a feature of a particular activity or attribute.
   • ‘a professional gloom-monger’

Noun

1. A person engaged or qualified in a profession.
   ‘professionals such as lawyers and surveyors’
   • 1.1 A person engaged in a specified activity, especially a sport, as a main paid occupation rather than as a pastime.
     ‘his first season as a professional’
   • 1.2 A person competent or skilled in a particular activity.
     ‘she was a real professional on stage’
     https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/professional

Synonyms

An online thesaurus (http://www.thesaurus.com/browse/professional) provides the following synonyms for ‘professional’:

Adj. skilled, trained

• competent
• efficient
• experienced
• licensed
• qualified
• skilful
• ace
• adept
• crackerjack
• expert
• sharp
• slick
• there
• able
• acknowledged
• finished
• knowing one’s stuff
• known
• learned
• on the ball
• polished
• practised
• proficient
• up to speed
• well-qualified

Questions

Read through both the definitions and synonyms provided.

1. Which definitions or synonyms best capture your own ideas about what professional means?
2. Which definitions or synonyms would you not include yourself?
3. Are there any definitions, synonyms or qualities that you feel have been omitted and need to be included?
4. If you had to define professional in just one sentence, what would it be?
5. What are your reflections on this exercise? Has it made deciding what is ‘professional’ in any given context easier or more difficult?
6. Share your thoughts with another.

Commentary

You have been presented with a variety of definitions and synonyms relating to ‘professional’. Arguably, at least three broad themes are detectable in the lists provided. There were also some noticeable omissions. The three broad themes are as follows.

Expert/competent

The first theme is that we usually regard a ‘professional’ as someone who has a recognisable level of expertise or competence in a specific area and whose work is regarded as achieving a certain standard or quality.

Paid

Second, in everyday usage, being ‘a professional’ often refers to the fact that someone is paid for what they do and usually they make their main livelihood from a particular activity or occupation.

Trained

Third, in the definitions and synonyms provided there are indications that ‘profes-sional’ is associated with ideas about being specially ‘qualified’, ‘trained’ or ‘certified’ in some way.

Finally, it is worth making the point that even within these broad headings, there could be differences of opinion on a range of matters – for example, what exactly the ‘professional’ standard is for any piece of work and what counts as the proper level of training.

Omissions

While the three themes above were evident, there were some interesting omissions. For example, in some contexts, we talk about the concepts of ‘professional discretion’, ‘professional autonomy’ and ‘professional authority’. This implies that it is the mark of a professional that their expertise is such that we place our trust in them to make the correct judgement call or do the right thing in certain situations. This puts professionals in a powerful position of authority. Indeed, many are inclined to mistrust professionals for this very reason. The issues of professional power, authority and trust, in turn, raise questions of both ‘professional ethics’ and ‘professional accountability’ – that is to say, to whom are professionals answerable and against which or whose standards of conduct? Interestingly, you might have flagged up that terms such as ‘powerful’, ‘trustworthy’, ‘ethical’ and ‘accountable’ were absent from the lists provided and these are important dimensions of being professional to which we will need to return to later.

This exercise illustrates that, whether used as a noun or an adjective, ‘professional’ has several meanings and that an important factor that shapes meaning is the particular context in which the term is used. The list of synonyms is interesting because it underlines the variety of associations that ‘professional’ has in everyday discourse. Again, context is important in this respect, as is the perspective of those concerned.

Professionalism

Like ‘professional’, ‘professionalism’ is a concept that has meanings that shift in diff-erent contexts. A standard dictionary definition states that professionalism is: ‘the com-petence or skill expected of a professional’ (https://en.oxforddictionaries.com/definition/professionalism).

On its own this definition will not get us very far. However, following on from the ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Series editor’s preface
• About the Authors
• Introduction
• 1 What Do We Mean by Professional and Professionalism?
• 2 The Development of Professional Social Work: How We Got to Where We Are
• 3 Leadership and Followership: Definitions, Theories and Models
• 4 Leadership in the Context of Social Work: Limiting and Enabling Factors
• 5 Putting Professional Leadership Into Practice
• 6 Preparing for Professional Leadership Challenges Ahead
• Appendix 1 Professional Capabilities Framework (2018)
• Appendix 2 Subject Benchmark for Social Work
• References
• Index