In this regular column, Paul Heardman puts coaching supervision under the spotlight. This issue: Inspired by Nicholas Janni’s book, Leader as Healer, Paul explores the notion of supervisor as healer. What might that mean? And what are the implications for practice?
Coaching supervision is commonly regarded as a helping profession. But if we pause to reflect, what half-hidden values and mindsets are revealed when we see ourselves as ‘helping’? Could the perception of supervisors as ‘helpers’ skew our vision, obscuring the deeper potential of supervision?
Let me offer three ways that viewing ourselves as ‘helping’ may not, ironically, actually help.
First, one risk of a ‘helping’ model is in evoking a quasi-medical paradigm and its associated dynamics of diagnosing and treating. The impact here can be subtle yet powerful. It encourages an implicit view of supervisor as expert. Shohet and Shohet (2020) remind us instead of the value of ‘homeopathic supervision’ – doing the minimum possible for maximum effect.
Second, ‘helping’ can tip easily into its close cousin, ‘rescuing’. We’re lured then, unconsciously, into Karpman’s Drama Triangle. When we look closely, we sometimes discover the motivation to ‘help’ stems from our own unmet needs as supervisor. This raises important questions about who the helping is really for – the supervisee or the supervisor?
Third, ‘helping’ implies a subject-object orientation. It rests on a philosophical belief in our fundamental separateness: the one who helps and the one who is helped. Such separation is comfortable ground for our left-brain, analytical processing. Yet many (eg, Einzig, 2017) argue it’s precisely this over-dominance of left-brain thinking which fuels our current poly-crises of excess consumption, burnout, polarisation and ecocide.
So when we view our supervision from a ‘helping’ paradigm, might we become caught, subtly, in the wider cultural trance of disconnection, disassociation and disembodiment?
But then, if we’re not ‘helping’ in supervision, what are we doing?
One alternative frame is the possibility of supervision as about healing rather than helping. This is more than a simple semantic shift. Exploring the healing potential of supervision invites us to reconsider the whole premise of what we offer. It can change our inner stance, shifting how we show up as supervisors.
My inspiration for writing this piece came from Nicholas Janni’s (2022) Leader as Healer. This remarkable book explores the healing potential of leadership in organisations. Janni describes how our 21st century challenges make it vital we open intentionally to the healing capacities of leadership.
Janni defines healing in leadership as drawing on mindful, embodied practices to relax the excessive dominance of our left-brain hyper-rational, action-oriented ways of doing. Instead, leadership as healing embraces our right-brain capacities for intuition, feeling and inter-connectedness. In short, opening ourselves more to being, we become less driven by incessant doing.
Janni’s insights on leadership can apply also to coaching supervision. For example, Janni’s call for more holistic, integrated, embodied leadership echoes insights from Robin Shohet and Edna Murdoch about the importance of supervision practices which support us in tuning in to our being, rather than acting from relentless doing. We then access deeper, more powerful brain wave states where more profound connection becomes possible.
Of course, as any supervisor knows, this is easier to aspire to than live from continually. Even when we intend consciously to bring a holistic approach to our supervision, we can lapse easily into applying an apparently systemic lens from a wholly left-brain analytical frame. Especially when we lean heavily on our theories and concepts. We then fall back into doing supervisionrather than connecting to being. The real magic of supervision is then lost.
Supervision as spiritual practice
If we ponder the implications of opening more to being, we recognise this is not simply another technique to develop. It is in fact a radical shift. This is why, for me, supervision as healing is profoundly different to supervision as helping. It is a summons to recognise our deeper inter-connectedness, what Thich Nhat Hanh (1991) calls our inter-being.
Viewing supervision as healing can contribute to a reconnection to wisdom that our post-Enlightenment rationalism has chronically devalued but which now is once againsorely needed.
Transpersonal psychology has long recognised the value of opening to consciousness beyond the individual. Prentice (2013) notes this can invite, “a spiritual dimension characterised by a sense of inner peace, compassion for others, reverence for life, gratitude and appreciation both for unity and diversity…[which] brings a kind of grace in the supervision dialogue.”
Shohet & Shohet (2020) similarly encourage us to view supervision as spiritual practice.
Janni also overtly embraces this spiritual aspect in leadership. He describes healing in leadership as bringing fragmented systems back into coherent wholeness, and awakening transpersonal levels of consciousness.
So if these times now require healing more than helping, how do we contract for this? Can we name the spiritual aspect of supervision? Do we worry this sounds ‘woo woo’, or might scare clients? Does it scare us? And if we do wish to practise more from being, what are the implications?
Prentice reminds us that to access the transpersonal in supervision, we need ourselves as supervisors to connect authentically to the transpersonal in us. So one place to start is by exploring what blocks our own connection to being as supervisors.
Supervisor as wounded healer
Opening to the healing, spiritual dimension of supervision brings the ethical imperative that we do our own personal development work as supervisors. Otherwise, we risk inflation, grandiosity and hubris. We must walk this path with humility. If not, we risk believing we are doing ‘special’ work, when actually we’re simply projecting our own ‘stuff’ onto our clients.
Janni emphasises that we must work on our own inner fragmentation – what Vaughan-Smith (2019) identifies as our “trauma splits”. This underlines that the healing we should work on, above all, is our own. Then we’re less likely to use our clients to avoid facing our own shadow.
If we have the courage to do this inner work, we will contribute to a wider healing, from a place of our own healing. But when we avoid this challenge, we risk perpetuating dividedness, both in ourselves and in the supervision we offer. Then, we may end up neither healing nor helping.
References
- Einzig, H. (2017). Future of Coaching. Routledge.
- Janni, N. (2022). Leader as Healer. LID Publishing.
- Murdoch, E., & Arnold, J. (2013). Full Spectrum Supervision. Panoma Press.
- Prentice, K. (2013). Invitation to the Music: the Transpersonal Note in Supervision. In: Murdoch, E., & Arnold, J. Full Spectrum Supervision. Panoma Press.
- Shohet, R., & Shohet, J. (2020). In Love With Supervision. PCCS Books.
- Thich Nhat Hanh (1991). Peace is Every Step. Rider.
- Vaughan-Smith, J. (2019). Coaching and Trauma. OUP.
- Paul Heardman is an EMCC Global accredited coaching supervisor. He received Coaching at Work’s 2023 Editor’s Award for Outstanding Contribution to Coaching Supervision and Coaching. Paul is EMCC UK’s director for supervision practice.