Coaching supervision is not about “policing” your practise
It should be a supportive space to process the emotional elements that arise in coaching as well as look at the practical aspects.
“Supervision is an opportunity to bring someone home to their own mind, to show them how good they can be.” – Nancy Kline
- Supervision provides a coach (mentor or consultant) with the space to reflect on their own practise.
- A trained supervisor can help you as coach explore how you could have improved a coaching session as well as reflect on what you can learn for your long term coaching capability. It helps to keep you honest by challenging you to think about what you might not be seeing, hearing or saying to your coachee.
- A supervisor is using recognisable coaching skills and techniques such as questioning, listening and summarising but supervision is not just another word for coaching the coach.
- The focus of supervision is your work with your coachee. When you are being coached the focus is about you and your personal issues and objectives. However in supervision we will focus on you as a coach and an individual but mainly in relation to how the “you that is you” manifests itself when with a coachee. “Who you are is how you coach”!
- The types of topics coaches bring to supervision for discussion are varied and here are just a few examples:
- How do I end coaching with a coachee?
- What if the organisation wants me to help them dismiss a coachee via coaching?(but they are not admitting this explicitly)
- Can I coach everyone in the same team?
- What can I do about a coachee who is just playing along in the coaching?
- What if I know something about their situation at work that they don’t know?
- I am concerned about the mental/physical health of my coachee.
- I know my coachee’s wife; could that cause an issue for us both?
- How do I work with an extremely talkative coachee?
- My coachee reminds me of an old boss and I think it is influencing how I work with him?
- What do I do, when I don’t know what to do?
- A supervisor will contract with a coach at the start of the relationship and each session to formulate a working alliance between them on what are the success outcomes of the supervision.
- Supervision is also invaluable when the coach may need to refer the client on to more specialist help such as therapy or a more experienced coach.
- In a corporate setting a good supervisor will help you to look at the wider aspects of the system in which you and the coachee are meeting. This can shed light on unconscious patterns that are being played out in the session which come for the coachee’s workplace and culture.
- The supervisor, as a more experienced coach, will act as a mentor to use their experience as guidance. Like coaching they won’t tell you what to do however as there is more of a duty of care for the supervisor on behalf of the coach and coachee they may advise in certain situations if there is something of greater concern e.g. dependency by the coachee towards the coach, sexual attraction or the mental health of either the coach or coachee.
- The amount of supervision that coaches have depends on a variety of factors. Many coaching bodies like the Association of Coaching, provide guidelines based on the number of coaching hours a coach has completed. Inexperienced coaches (less than 250 hours) can benefit from 1 hour of supervision for every 10 hours of coaching. More experienced coaches may want a supervision session every 30 hours. However unexpected events can occur any time and having a supervisor in the background to call upon is always reassuring.
“Both coaches and coaching supervisors will regularly reflect on their practice and development with a suitably qualified and experienced coaching supervisor.” – Association of Coaching, Code of Ethics and Good Practice
- Supervision can also be seen as a form of CPD and is a good way of proving your continuing progress as a coach after an initial coaching qualification. This enables you to gain valuable feedback on practise in order to become better at the art of coaching and not fall into bad habits
- Regular supervision helps a coach to develop their own “self-supervisor” or “radar” which means they are less likely to fall prey to unethical practises and serious dilemmas with awkward consequences by noticing issues in the “here and now” during a session.
- For internal coaches, supervision is also a good practice from a legal, confidential and health and safety aspect especially in situations of managing performance, tribunals, grievances and any other boundary issues.
Julia