Through the looking glass

In this three-pronged special report, Alison Hardingham, director of business psychology at Yellow Dog Consulting, reflects on the meaning of supervision, while Jessica Jarvis, CIPD adviser, learning, training and development, looks at why supervision is so important and offers advice on choosing a supervisor. Lastly, Graham Lee, director of OCG, discusses how to use supervision to develop psychological competence.

Alison Hardingham writes:

I have been teaching coaches for just over a year. The coaches I teach usually already have significant experience of coaching and of being coached. They have the basic skills and their approach to coaching is already thoughtful and reasonably self-aware, but they want to know how they can develop further and grow in confidence, as well as competence.

It is clear to me that what they need more than anything else is access to high quality supervision. By that I mean the activity of thinking about what they are doing as coaches so that they gain a better understanding of the choices they make, why they have made those choices and what effect their choices will have on their clients. Thinking in this way enables coaches to see more of what is going on, and so become learners themselves in the coaching relationship.

This kind of thinking can be done by a coach alone (self-supervision) and in a variety of paired or group processes. But it is not usually a kind of thinking that happens naturally. People need to learn how to supervise themselves and how to be supervised, that is, how to interact with others in a way that will result in more self-awareness about their practice and a greater ability to choose a good course of action from several alternatives. It is also important for people to learn how to interact with others in a way that builds their confidence as coaches, rather than undermines it: clients are not well-served by coaches who are uncertain and needy of approval.
How, then, can the capability to benefit from supervision be developed?

The safest method is by answering a set of questions after every coaching session, and by receiving feedback, not on the quality of coaching but on the quality of the reflection. I suggest coaches use the questions from Borders and Leddick, quoted in Hawkins and Shohet’s classic text Supervision in the Helping Professions: 

• What was I hearing my client say and/or seeing my client do?
• What was I thinking and feeling about my observations?
• What were my alternatives to say or do at this point?
• How did I choose from among the alternatives?
• What effects did my response have on my client? 
• How then would I evaluate the effectiveness of my response?

Often when coaches are first invited to write up reflections on their coaching sessions, they start by producing a more or less self-justificatory narrative account. But with the help of questions such as those above, and feedback on the quality of their reflections, they rapidly learn to dig below the surface of their behaviour and the client’s reactions.

This method is safe because the coach does not have to expose him or herself to public scrutiny. But it is also limited for the same reason. The coach can privately discount anything that is hard to take.

In the programmes I run, group supervision is pivotal to the learning process. We want the speed and intensity of learning for participants that results from group work. But more than that, we want them to learn from experience how to benefit from group supervision.

Groups are psychologically challenging environments. If people are to learn to benefit from group supervision, the balance of challenge and safety as they experiment with group processes has to be right. This is a difficult thing to achieve, and I would not claim that my fellow tutors and I always get it right. But we facilitate the groups closely, particularly in the early stages of their working, and we provide a high level of structure, too, at that time.

The group is taught how to behave as a “reflecting team”, commenting on thoughts and feelings triggered by observing a coaching exchange between two of its members. The facilitator intervenes heavily to enable the group to tolerate diversity of reaction, and maximise thoughtful and self-reflective exploration.

The aim is that these developing coaches have such a compelling learning experience through opening their practice up to peers that they are prepared to take the risks such opening up inevitably entails. A sign that this has been accomplished is the willingness of the group to move away from a process where “everyone has a turn” to one where group members will actively choose to bring up a piece of coaching experience for the group’s reflections and comment. A sign that we still have a long way to go is when group members are reluctant to share problems, successes, puzzles, and dilemmas. The facilitator may then need to take the lead in exposing her own problems, puzzles and dilemmas for the group to comment on.

It seems to me that people learn best what to expect from supervision by having an experience of the best it can give. And of course it goes without saying that in learning how to be a member of a good supervision group, a coach is also working directly on the skills of authentic communication and total presence that are at the heart of effective coaching.

Jessica Jarvis writes:

While supervision has been used for years in a variety of counselling and therapeutic settings, its application to coaching is still fairly new. However, during the past 12 months we have seen significant attempts to improve the credibility and image of the coaching industry. As a result, supervision is receiving more and more attention as a means of providing quality assurance for the emerging profession. In fact, many of the professional bodies and associations representing coaches believe that it will become one of the main methods of regulating the emerging profession.

Supervision means different things at varying stages of coaches’ professional development. The newcomer will perhaps require clearer guidance and closer attention to the anxieties they experience as they begin to practise.

The veteran coach, by contrast, is likely to look for a more equal, peer relationship where they can have an open discussion. As for the frequency of supervision sessions, the consensus is that it depends on the volume of coaching being undertaken and the experience of the coach.

Some people believe that only full-time professional coaches need supervision. I would argue that few people who work as coaches – even if it is only part of their job – would fail to benefit from an opportunity to reflect on their practice and gain support on any issues they are facing.

But while the benefits of supervision for the coaches themselves are fairly obvious, the reasons for organisations to take this issue seriously are less immediately apparent.

However, coaching isn’t a cheap option, and organisations are increasingly thinking about how they can protect and boost the return on their investment in this area. Many organisations also realise that newly trained internal coaches need support and guidance.

The question of how best to do this has led a growing number of organisations to consider supervision.

Coaching supervision also provides an element of external quality control. The lack of transparent accreditation and regulation in the industry means some companies are apprehensive about bringing in external coaches for confidential sessions with their top players. They want to see evidence that coaches they are thinking of hiring are serious about their own professional development and take an ethical stance on their work. Supervision therefore serves a dual purpose – supporting the continuing development of the coach, while also providing protection from unethical or inappropriate coaching for the coachee and the client organisation.

The rationale for investing in supervision is beginning to trickle through into mainstream practice. During our research for the new CIPD book The Case for Coaching we found that several of our case study organisations were using supervision in programmes for both internal and external coaches. They arrange
for coaches to meet regularly with supervisors in a variety of settings, ranging from formal supervision sessions to communities of practice.

For example, the external coaching company used by United Utilities (see page 44) runs external supervision days for internal coaches so they can share learning and get independent advice and coaching on difficult situations they experience. Similarly, at the Norfolk, Suffolk and Cambridgeshire Strategic Health Authority – another of our case study organisations – coach/mentors are required to meet a supervisor or attend a “supervision and continual development group” every three months.

Coaching supervisors need to be experienced practitioners in their own right, as well as having a good understanding of the demands of supervisory relationships. Ideally, they should also be trained for their role. But one of the contentious issues emerging in this area is how much psychological training and background is needed to operate as a supervisor. Those who come from a counselling or therapy background tend to see this as essential, but there are many coaches who don’t subscribe to this view. It’s up to individual coach/clients to make sure they are comfortable that supervisors have the credentials to take on the role. Finding a supervisor may be difficult, so several professional bodies, such as the Association for Coaching, International Coaching Federation and European Mentoring and Coaching Council, are now offering assistance and keep lists of coaching supervisors. However, with the coaching industry still in its infancy, the field is bottom heavy with many newly trained coaches and relatively few “old hands”, although short and longer courses are now available for people wanting to train as coaching supervisors. So it is likely that supply will grow over the next few years and that professional supervision will become more widely viewed as integral to effective coaching practice.

Jessica Jarvis is CIPD adviser, learning, training and development.

The psychology of coaching supervision By Graham Lee

It is now widely recognised that effective coaching at work demands a degree of psychological-mindedness on the part of the coach, in addition to organisational awareness. Coaching supervision is one of the most important methods for developing such psychological competence.

To understand what is meant by psychological-mindedness, consider an example of coaching supervision. The coach I was supervising described her client, a senior manager, as abrasive and dominating. I invited the coach to think psychologically about this manager by asking the simple question, “Why do you think he behaves like that?” Psychology implies a curiosity about the “why” of behaviour and I might also have asked some other useful questions, such as:

• What are the manager’s beliefs?
• What are the emotions linked to those beliefs?
• How are these beliefs and emotions enacted, particularly in his relationships?

Seeking answers to these questions invites the coach to develop a “story” about how this manager thinks and feels, and from this psychological vantage-point, to understand more about what it will take to enable him to change his behaviour.

My use of the word “story” is not accidental – it emphasises that the coach’s story is a construction, a psychologically based creation designed to bring explanatory coherence to the manager’s behaviour. And it is here that coaching supervision comes alive, because this story may say as much about the coach as it does about the manager. For example, the coach’s use of the words “abrasive and dominating” will be influenced by her own experience of relationships with others. Thus coaching supervision, if conducted by a psychologically minded supervisor, is designed to bring awareness and coherence, not only to the coach’s story about the client, but also to the coach’s story about himself or herself. By developing greater self-awareness, the coach gains a clearer view of the client, and is less blinkered by his or her own hang-ups and implicit judgments.

We can think of the supervisor as focused on both the inner and outer game of coaching – that is, on the circumstances and psychology of the coach, as well as the circumstances and psychology of the coach’s client. By examining and noticing themes of resonance between the inner and outer game, the coach learns experientially about the “use of self”. This term refers to the process where the coach learns to take notice of the feelings, bodily sensations, thoughts, and reactions that are evoked at certain moments in the presence of the client. Using such experiences to make sense of unconscious aspects of the client can provide the key to a successful piece of coaching, as long as the coach, with support from a supervisor, is able to recognise potential distortions resulting from his or her own psychology.

We can think of coaching supervision as the outermost link in a sequence of relationships, from the organisation to the client, from the client to the coach, and from the coach to the supervisor. By encouraging coaches to reflect on these relationships from a psychological perspective, supervision can provide them with an opportunity to deepen their awareness of themselves, their clients and their client organisations, and so make a more powerful and positive impact through their work.