The Importance Of Leadership In Social Work Management

This paper is a review of an article from the journal administration in social work written by Shelly Wimpfheimer with the journal title leadership and management competencies defined by practicing social work managers. The issue number of the article is 0364-3107, volume 28:1,45-56. The article was published online on 28th September, 2008. The primary audiences for this article are social work practitioners in the area of management, as well as students and those yet to assume such positions. This article is targeted at introducing individuals to new developments in social work management, whiles, stirring up interest in the academic and practice fields to come up with new concepts and ideas with regards to leadership in social work management.

The author provided information on the social work management competencies developed by the NNSWM and its importance to social work management. He added that these competencies are needed to be able to aid board of directors in hiring management staff, support the appraisal process for current managers, as a way of defining the professional development needs of managers and as a tool for managers to refine their own skills. Apart from the competencies, the author talked about the credentials that social worker managers should acquire or have acquired coupled with standards in professional ethics, personal skills, knowledge base and other skills.

The main ideas highlighted in the article include the 10 competencies for social work managers that have been divided into two sections as internal and external relations. Internal relations for competencies that are utilized by managers to directly improve the agencies primary affairs in

In the article, the author noted that, to improve the quality of service delivery the most important thing to do is to identify and explain the needed competencies of managers. Consequently, she noted in her analysis that these competencies can be used as a yardstick to recruit or hire managers to evaluate their work in the agency, as a way of identifying developmental needs of managers and as a tool to enhance the skills of managers. In all Wimpfheimer put a great deal of knowledge and information on social work administration but she mostly focused on knowledge of managers on the various competencies and not skills. Skills like human, technical and conceptual skills are also important to enhance effective running of agencies. If a manager can exhibit all the competencies ranging from internal relations to external relations outlined by Wimpfheimer and employees are not happy at work whilst clients or service users are shunning away from the services provided, then that effectiveness she talked about cannot be