In order to ensure on-going support for coaches in what can, at times, be a stressful and emotionally challenging environment, as well as a physically gruelling one, supervision in coaching is a vitally important aspect of practice.
Organisations such as the EMCC and ICF now expect their members to engage in supervision. There is also greater pressure from individual and corporate paying clients for coaches and mentors to be ‘quality assured’, with supervision having the potential to offer a way in which clients can be more confident that they are dealing with a competent professional and perhaps be reassured that another professional is monitoring their work.
Effective supervision also ensures a more extended learning experience and helps coaches make the necessary connections with their own thoughts, feelings and behaviours.
Caraccioli (1760) believed that a mentor needs a more experienced mentor to work with. More recent comments include Hawkins and Smith’s (2006) who describe supervision as ‘the process by which a coach/mentor/consultant, with the help of a supervisor, who is not working directly with the client, can attend to understanding better both the client system and themselves as part of the client-coach/mentor system, and transform their work.’
Gray and Jackson (2011) developed what they refer to as a ‘meta-model’ of supervision, which takes a more holistic view of the relationship between supervisor and supervisee, and has the following features:
- It involves facilitating the development of the supervisor in terms of confidence, motivation and knowledge.
- It is complex and includes paying attention to what is happening between the supervisor and the supervisee and the supervisee’s relationship with the client.
- Teaching is at the heart of the relationship for both supervisor and supervisee.
- The supervisee’s development is not necessarily linear and can involve progressing at different speeds for different processes and functions, and that it can involve regression.
- It is influenced by social and organisational contexts within which it occurs.
My two favourite definitions of supervision are the simplest, namely those of Thomson (2014) who talks about supervision as ‘maintaining and enhancing a high quality of practice’, and Brookes (2001), who states it is ‘naïve at best and dangerous at worst, if coaching is not supervised by another professional with some psychological expertise.’
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