Reflections on supervisors’ motivation for ethical practice and development

Introduction

As practising coaches and supervisors, one of the joys of supervision work can be the longevity of the relationship. Whereas coaching relationships will tend to last 9-12 months, supervision relationships often last many years. Indeed, we notice that some supervisees only change supervisors when their existing supervisor retires. The depth of the work we do in supervision means that a trusting relationship is vital, longevity facilitates this and allows the supervisor to notice developmental shifts overtime.

Given this context, we wondered how supervisors avoid becoming habituated in how they work with their supervisees and how they keep their practice fresh. Clearly, the supervisor like any helping practitioner will engage in continuous professional development, extending their repertoire through training and further reading. However, Michelle noticed a curious difference between how coaches and supervisors embed new approaches into their practice. Post-qualification many coaches engage in co-coaching triads as a means of embedding and extending their coaching practice. This arrangement starts on training courses and often continues by alumni. Yet this seemed not to be the case amongst the supervision community.

Perhaps, because we are confident as practitioners, we believe we can adopt new approaches without error. Perhaps because we have enduring and open relationships with our supervisees we can specifically contract to learn together. However, when we practice a technique with our peers, it builds a much stronger sense of how, as an individual practitioner, we want to work with it so that it is congruent with our over-arching style. Additionally, when we are on the receiving end of a new technique, we can develop a greater credibility when briefing the client by sharing experience of the possible impacts of a particular technique. But if we must practice a technique before we can use it outside of a training environment, we are in a “catch-22” situation (Heller, 1961). Who is going to be our first practice supervisee? Also, we need to bear in mind that many times we may ‘pick up’ a new approach, not at a training event alongside others, but through reading or social media and even word of mouth. The notion of implementing a technique when we do not fully appreciate how it might impact the supervisee is surely unprofessional at best and verging on unethical at worst.

The case study

In 2020 Michelle approached the Association of Coaching Supervisors (AOCS) with a potential solution to this ‘catch-22’ dilemma. The concept mirrored that of co-coaching. In collaboration, Michelle and AOCS invited supervisors to come together in a virtual Co-Supervision Space (CSS) to practice techniques in an environment of psychological safety (Edmondson, 1999), to extend their skills and to get genuinely candid and developmental feedback from peers. The sessions were monthly and of two hours duration. Yvette, with her wider AOCS volunteer role in member communications, joined Michelle to co-facilitate the sessions. Together they became the CSS facilitator team.

The supervisor participants worked with familiar principles:

Michelle and AOCS were keen to underline that the CSS was not a space for use as a replacement for regular supervision. Rather, the clear intention was that it was an intervention to supplement it. This was because the focus for learning was the practising supervisor, and so as the receiving supervisee it was entirely possible that unfinished business could occur and that they would need support, which was not possible in the AOCS CSS space.

The facilitator team developed a communication and marketing plan including the use of the regular AOCS monthly news update, the AOCS Twitter account, and the LinkedIn AOCS community page alongside short explanatory videos, blogs and guidelines developed to set up the process for success.

What began as an experiment became embedded as a benefit for AOCS members and continued for a second year. All involved hoped that momentum would build; however, towards the end of the second year the facilitators invoked a pause to engage in a learning review. Here, we document the facilitator observations from that review and supplement with observations from our wider practices.

Benefit experienced by participants

During 2021 participants received a Responster survey link to provide feedback immediately after the session. The following feedback highlighted clear benefits for attendees although the number of survey completions was consistently low:

After what felt to the facilitators and to AOCS like a successful first year, a decision was made to extend the CSS space for a further year. In the second year we also changed the session timing from 13:00-15:00 (UK) to 11:00-13:00 (UK) to accommodate a changing work schedule and add in a ‘knowledge share’ session. This new session was a response to participant feedback that they felt rushed by the plenary discussion at the end of standard sessions. Additionally, in the Participant Choice session, participants prioritised knowledge sharing over the practicing of techniques. The intention was to share “hints and tips” of working with new techniques (see Table 2).

While this practical exchange was already a feature of the plenary discussion, we hoped that with more time to practice more of the techniques (year 2 were offered the same prompts as year 1) a greater array of practiced experience would be available. However, the second year did not gain the momentum hoped, indeed overall attendance figures dropped.

Our reflections

The proposed “knowledge sharing” sessions were the least well attended, with the facilitators cancelling the second one (in August) due to low numbers. When bookings were low for the third one, the facilitators broadened the agenda to encourage people to attend for practice or for a learning review as an alternative to knowledge share.

This segment of the Co-Supervision Space was an interesting one to observe. The plenary session came after the three rounds of co-supervision practice. Participants were invited to share their learning which they could apply when they were delivering future supervision (i.e., What did you learn about you (the Supervisor) in your supervision practice today?) Initially when reporting back participants placed more emphasis on the impact of the technique on the supervisee – when in fact our enquiry was more of an introspective one. Initially it seemed that as practitioners who support the client’s learning, there was less curiosity about our own. We wondered whether this was about learning new habits, and/or creating a greater sense of trust and psychological safety.

Over the year the focus of the sharing shifted towards this intended enquiry. This did however take considerable active management by us as facilitators, to guide contributions towards the intended perspective. Reflecting on this experience, the facilitators noticed how they had shared their own experiences of the technique, as a means of prompting wider discussion. While pertinent, the facilitators departed from their intended neutrality, the roles of hosts and practitioners learning in step with attendees. Perhaps unwittingly a “teacher: pupil” or “parent: child” dynamic (Berne, 1961) arose. Who was best served by this - the facilitators or the participants - is a question for the facilitators to further reflect on.

Looking more closely at participant numbers, while the sessions felt rich and engaged, the reality was that only 5/ of the AOCS membership base were attending. As a professional body where our primary purpose is a developmental one and where we pay deliberate attention to quality assurance of our work, this felt disappointing. While the time change of the session between years 1 and 2 may have contributed to the drop out, this did not feel like the whole story.

One of the facilitators experienced a similar challenge in their independent Practice. The Co-Supervision Space was for the practice of individual supervision techniques. The facilitators excluded practice of group supervision techniques, partly because of the complexity of co-ordination on the day and partly because practicing new techniques where group dynamics could also be in play required a different level of facilitation. Michelle offered similar practice-based experiences with the focus on group supervision techniques called Group Supervision Experimentation Labs. While interest in the pilot was high and led to two versions of the events as paid-for programmes, momentum was slow to build. Here the number of people attending was much smaller in order to invite a higher degree of psychological safety. In year one the sessions were ‘open’ and then in year two attendees formed a specific cohort where Michelle facilitated developmental feedback rather than enabling triads to self-manage. Michelle intended both changes to increase the sense of psychological safety. Participant feedback on the experience was positive for example:

However, after the second year, Michelle mothballed the programme as the marketing effort outweighed the financial return.

This echoes the experience of Yvette who through a business collaboration attempted to draw like-minded professionals to think more about working with difference in Diversity – Beyond the Obvious. The three workshops also provided nine core and two developmental continuous professional development hours for one of the coaching professional bodies. The facilitator team worked hard to achieve a diverse set of participants through making direct approaches and having a range of pricing points.

The eight pilot participants provided positive feedback:

A second workshop failed to materialise though, with only a third of those interested in a position to pay for their development. Again, the facilitator mothballed the product as the marketing effort outweighed potential returns on investment.

Discussion

These experiences could suggest a level of resistance amongst supervisors to experiential learning in our community. We are curious about why. Some of our hypotheses about the resistance are:

Over the course of the two years of events, we also noticed other patterns emerging that provoked our curiosity about professional behaviours. Most practitioners who have ever run an “open” event will know that the number of bookings and the number of attendees are two entirely different things. Our assumption was that most of our colleagues will have been on the receiving end of booking behaviour of clients – so how would this affect their own booking habits? Table 5 shows what we observed:

When we started the CSS sessions, we limited numbers and therefore it felt selfish for potential participants to book a place and not attend, as the facilitators could invite others to take the place in service of generating more participation. However, we recognised quickly that there was no need to put an upper limit on the numbers as we could manage the organising with both small and larger numbers.

This led us to a more laissez-faire attitude of “whoever is in the room, are those meant to be in the room.” Participants were adults making their own decision to attend or not and while it was frustrating to deal with changing numbers, we simply accepted that frustration as the “as is” situation.

In our facilitator learning review, we wondered if our response was appropriate. Should we have managed this - and the additional admin - more proactively as we did in the first quarter with follow-up e-mails? Would we have been so accepting if our paying clients behaved this way? Were we colluding with a “lack” of professionalism where people do not communicate changes to plan, and us as facilitators did not invite them to account for, or explore, their behaviours? We also wondered whether positioning the CSS as a free AOCS membership benefit, influenced “on the day” decisions about the “cost” or importance of attending / not attending.

While the feedback on the CSS experience was largely positive, we did also receive “moans and groans” that some participants came unprepared. The irritant was that with the allocated practice and feedback time for each triad member, reading from or clarifying the technique brief reduced valuable time for the practice. Ironically, we always invited participants to arrive 15 minutes early to ensure they have the exercise briefs available, and/or to re-fresh their minds on how they want to work – and yet very few people took that invitation up.

Clearly some participants held this in their awareness:

As co-facilitators, we experienced resolving participants’ irritations as difficult. On the one hand we wanted participants prepared to maximise their learning experience – on the other, we wanted an Adult-Adult space (Berne, 1961), with an inclusivity to different learning and organising styles. We did not see it as our role to mandate preparation.

In our learning review we noticed it as an interesting conundrum – the same issue might also present amongst supervisees. Is it appropriate to contract and mandate for preparation? How do we respond when people have not done this? Similarly, we became curious about how we applied this thinking for ourselves. When we are receiving development or our supervision, do we operate by the same rules or expectations as we have for our clients?

The contract between the facilitators and AOCS did not include us surveying participants on these points, and indeed our experience suggests that these kinds of behaviours are not peculiar to AOCS members or this development. This learning review prompts us to consider a broader research enquiry into the supervisor’s dilemma of how best to engage in ethical practice and how we act (or not) as role models for professional behaviours.

Conclusion

We see this experience as a moment in our own developmental journey, using Yvette’s own Three Ps Model we share the impact of moving forward this attempt at ethical practice, through three inter-related reflections – Personal, Profession and Practice.

Michelle’s reflections:

Yvette’s reflections: