Here is another one of the interviews I conducted back in 2021 with leaders from a variety of industries.
When lockdown first began, everything changed almost overnight.
For one clinical team leader in the integrated specialist public health nursing service, the work did not simply move from one place to another. It shifted shape entirely. The familiar rhythm of visits, office conversations and face-to-face support was replaced by laptops, Microsoft Teams calls and the strange quiet of working from home.
At first, there was friction in the team. Some people felt strongly that staff should be back in the office as much as possible. Others saw that many parts of the role could be done from home. Over time, it became clear that these views were not just about the work itself. They were also about people’s different needs. Some missed the office, the chatter and the company. Others, including the team leader, found working from home easier in some ways.
But the service was still a face-to-face service at heart. School nurses, health visitors and other staff were used to seeing families, stepping into homes and noticing the things that could never fully be picked up through a screen. When face-to-face visits stopped for a few weeks, it felt wrong. Staff worried about the families on their caseloads. They wanted to see new mothers, antenatal contacts and children. They wanted to do what they had always done: be there.
Technology helped, but it was not the same. Microsoft Teams became a way to put eyes on people, as the team leader described it, but it could not replace the warmth of being physically present. For someone whose instinct was to offer reassurance through a hand on the shoulder or a hug, this was one of the hardest losses. Compassion had to find new ways of showing itself.
As the months went on, the emotional weight grew heavier. Staff were trying to work while home-schooling children, managing family pressures, keeping conversations confidential and absorbing the anxieties of the families they supported. Some had partners who had been furloughed or had lost work. The team leader could see people reaching the limits of what they could carry.
And that brought its own kind of powerlessness.
“I can’t fix this,” she found herself realising repeatedly. That was difficult, because her instinct was to fix things. To offer a solution. To suggest a way forward. But she was learning that leadership was not always about fixing. Sometimes it was about standing alongside people, being honest, and resisting the urge to solve pain that could not be solved.
She worked hard to create psychological safety within the team. She wanted people to know they could make mistakes, speak honestly and say when something had gone wrong. None of them were perfect. All of them were fallible. What mattered was being able to own things, learn from them and fix what could be fixed together.
But even that felt harder through a screen. In a virtual team meeting, she could sense defensiveness before it came. She could see when perfectionism was about to collide with fear. A comment would be made, and she would think, here we go, knowing that behind the response was often not arrogance or incompetence, but anxiety.
She described herself as a sponge, someone who absorbed the emotions around her. If the team was anxious, she would begin to feel anxious too, even if she had not started the day that way. And health visitors were experiencing something similar. They had fewer contacts with people, but each contact seemed heavier. Families were offloading more emotion, more worry, more need. It was exhausting work, even when it was done remotely.
There were moments when that pressure broke through. One day, after a difficult email exchange with someone in HR, she found herself crying for two hours. Normally, she might have wondered what was going on for the other person. She might have assumed they were having a bad day. But this time, she was too depleted to hold that perspective. Later, it became clear that the other person had also been struggling during lockdown, not sleeping and working late. It was, as she put it, a perfect storm.
Despite all this, working from home suited her in some ways. She did not miss the daily travel. The extra time at home felt valuable, even blissful. She could close the laptop and be there, rather than spending hours driving to and from work. But she knew this was not everyone’s experience. For some staff, the office was not just a building. It was where they checked things out, ran ideas past colleagues and had the informal conversations that made the work feel manageable.
There was guilt too.
When people were asked to volunteer for the Nightingale hospital at Harrogate, she felt the pull of expectation. She had worked in acute care years before, but she knew she was no longer close enough to that world to feel safe or useful in the way she would want to be. She also did not want to leave the small amount of family contact she still had. She chose not to go, but the decision came with guilt.
Later, when she was able to help at the vaccine centre, that felt different. It felt practical. Useful. Something she could do. Others talked about making history, and although she did not quite see it that way at the time, she understood what they meant.
Throughout it all, she kept returning to the same question: what did her team need from her?
They needed someone who understood the risks they were taking when they stepped into people’s homes. They needed someone who recognised that community staff often went in blind, without knowing exactly what situation they would face. They needed someone who understood the professional burden of not being able to visit families in the usual way, while still feeling responsible for them.
And perhaps, most of all, they needed to feel supported.
That was her reason why. Supporting the staff was the thing that drove her. Being a team leader meant standing between staff and senior management at times, holding the pressure from both sides, and still trying to create a space where people felt cared for.
When asked what, with hindsight, had been helpful during the pandemic, she paused. It was not an easy question. Technology had helped. It had given the service more options and shown that some people could work well from home. It had pushed innovation forward. But she struggled to call it positive, because the cost had been high.
Virtual meetings, she realised, were exhausting in a different way. People were present, but not always fully present. Sometimes they were doing something else at the same time, in a way they never would have done in a face-to-face meeting. It made connection thinner. Less rich. Harder to read.
In the end, what she missed most was not just the office. It was the small human moments. The quick conversation after a meeting. The ability to notice when someone was not quite right. The chance to show compassion in a practical, immediate way.
Because leadership, for her, had never been only about decisions or workload. It was about knowing people well enough to read them. To notice. To care. To offer support in the way they could receive it.
And during lockdown, when so many of the usual ways of caring had been taken away, she kept trying to find new ones.
