Crisis? What crisis?: Recovery worker retention in drug and alcohol services
This short piece began as my second assessed piece of work for the President's Global Leadership Award (PGLA)at King's College London - a postgraduate leadership module that challenges students to engage with global leadership theory and apply it to real-world problems. The PGLA asks you to bring your values, your practice, and your perspective into conversation with leadership thinking from across the world. For me, that meant bringing what I know about drug and alcohol services in England.
I have revised this essay with my assessor's feedback in mind — specifically to develop the argument around recruitment and what Ubuntu-informed hiring might actually look like in practice. I am sharing it here because I think the sector needs to hear it. Recovery worker retention is a leadership problem. And it starts before someone is even employed.
Crisis what crisis: Recovery worker retention in drug and alcohol services
The addiction services workforce is in crisis. High caseloads, rapid staff turnover and dwindling budgets are guiding services to the detriment of patient care following privatisation of the sector (Black, 2021). Service models now involve a tendering process roughly every 5 years; with care pitted against cost. There is a very real crisis in drug and alcohol services – a poorly paid workforce is confronted with an increasingly stressful work environment and suffers high churn. New global drugs appear that are a danger to public health and are not being rapidly addressed by UK leaders through policies – deadly synthetic opioids are just one.
Perhaps lessons can be learned through Afro-communal leadership philosophies like Ubuntu. There is an irony in a Descartes writing about Ubuntu. If we examine many of the challenges faced through the 'I am because we are' lens rather than a Western egocentric lens, such as René Descartes' 'I think therefore I am' – the philosophical cornerstone of Western individualism – we can begin to examine the role leaders can have in resolving a multifaceted, wicked problem.
In an interview by Michael Flavin with Professor Ihron Rensburg (King's College, 2026), Ihron explains what Ubuntu is, that it requires leaders to have human goodness and excellence, the need for reflection, and to elevate the human spirit with a strong emphasis on harmony and community, not exclusionary leadership. Leaders must have instilled within them a sense and desire for goodness, empathy and curiosity, and to invest in and assist others in a world where things go wrong and where colleagues don’t always meet targets.
So how does one apply Ubuntu philosophies to workforce practices? It begins with hiring processes. People often work because they want to get paid. But within drug and alcohol services, there is often a parallel, inherent desire to help people. We need a recruitment process that supports these people to shine, that empowers individuals. At the same time, we also need to provide salaries that fairly reflect essential, emotionally demanding positions to retain experienced staff. Adaptive leadership in this field is essential; the workplace must be a space of psychological safety, with leaders trained in mental health, adequate supervision and coaching, and afforded time to critically reflect, especially in times of change. (Schmitt & Pauknerova, 2025).
Applying Ubuntu to the recruitment phase specifically demands a rethinking of what interview metrics measure. Conventional hiring in addiction services tends to prioritise clinical competence, stress tolerance, professional qualifications and compliance with service KPIs – an individualised, output-driven framework that mirrors the very tendering culture driving staff turnover. An Ubuntu-informed approach would reframe success criteria around relational capacity:
How does a candidate demonstrate empathy, communal accountability and the ability to hold space for others in distress?
Interview panels might be redesigned to include peer workers with lived experience of addiction, ensuring that those most affected by service failures have a voice in who joins the workforce. Scoring rubrics could weight responses that reflect interdependence and potential – candidates who speak of their practice in collective terms, who locate their growth within the development of their team, rather than as isolated individual achievement. Structured scenarios exploring how a candidate responds to a colleague in crisis, or how they have contributed to a shared learning culture, would surface Ubuntu values in a way that a competency-based question simply cannot. Crucially, this also signals organisational culture from the very first interaction: that this is a workplace that values the whole person, not merely their outputs.
The addiction workforce is treated as replaceable – clearly, they aren’t.
Embedding Ubuntu philosophies into routine practice requires that we change our approach to underperformance, ensuring there is financial and temporal capacity for leaders to better support and elevate their teams through enhanced training and supervision, alongside understanding why colleagues may be where they are. Additional mechanisms guided by Ubuntu principles could be ensuring employee consulting is coproductive and ensuring there is capacity for self-reflection to improve role interest, together with collective, communal daily rituals to improve wellbeing.
Resolving the current workforce crisis in addiction services requires a shift from individual performance and service KPIs. It needs increased funding and connection. We must locate oneself, to begin to appreciate that the achievement of one's goals can align with organisational goals. Greater good can be found with the help of others – in community.
The addiction workforce does not need a philosophy lecture. They need leaders who show up for them the way they show up for their clients – with presence, with investment, and with the belief that how we treat each other at work is inseparable from how we treat the people we serve.
Ubuntu does not begin with the service user. It begins the moment someone walks through the door for their interview.
References
Carol Black. (2021). Review of drugs part two: Prevention, treatment and recovery.https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/review-of-drugs-phase-two-report/review-of-drugs-part-two-prevention-treatment-and-recovery
King's College London. (2026). Week 5: 5.2 Different cultural perspectives on leadership [Transcript]. KEATS. https://keats.kcl.ac.uk/mod/book/view.php?id=8901384
Schmitt, J., & Pauknerova, D. (2025). Building adaptive leaders: Rethinking leadership development in the age of uncertainty. European Journal of Training and Development. https://doi.org/10.1108/EJTD-05-2025-0083
