ICCS

Do Coaches Really Need Supervision? 7 Reasons Coaches Find Coaching Supervision Invaluable

Sat, 10 Oct 2020 15:08:48 GMT

Charlotte loved her coach training. Each of the topics she studied brought something new and significant to her life. Her daily commute became the highlight of her day as she devoured books recommended by her classmates and teachers. She was so proud of the results her practice clients were getting – she had a real gift for getting people to open up. She was overjoyed when she qualified and got her diploma.

The desire of making coaching a rewarding career was stronger than ever. Charlotte set the wheels in motion.

She hired someone to design a logo and a set of business cards. She created social media profiles. She wrote words for her brand spanking new website. She hesitated a bit at the paragraph for her home page promising a profound transformation, but she wrote it anyway. After all, that’s what everybody had on their websites.

Charlotte’s closest friends were proud of her and cheered her on, but many others didn’t quite get what coaching was, and why it was worth paying for. She realised that in her new business she would be selling an invisible product and having those new business cards and a website made it feel real and legitimate somehow.

Making coaching into a business had Charlotte’s full attention. She felt the pressure to start earning and she needed clients. The barrage of Facebook posts promising to make her into a 6-figure coach kept reminding her of that daily.

Pursuing coaching mastery took the back seat. She reflected on her sessions less and she tracked Instagram followers more.

Around the same time, Charlotte started to doubt herself, wondering if her coaching was powerful enough and if she was giving her clients what they paid for. That was a tough question to answer. Plus, nobody saw if she was doing a good job or not.

This feeling started to seep into her discovery calls. Unsure of her ability to bring the desired transformation, she sold herself short. The combination of self-doubt and pressure to start earning created a fertile ground for imposer feelings to emerge. Charlotte started feeling like a fraud.

I’m wondering if any of this sound familiar?

Coaching work comes with its challenges.

It can also feel lonely at times. What to do when you find yourself triggered by a challenging conversation?

Who do you ask when you’re unsure whether you are serving your client with impact, or when you’re stuck on what approach to take?

How can you feel confident in your style beyond what you learnt during your coach training?

How does supervision help coaches?

Coaching supervision is learning-in-relationship. It’s a safe environment for you to bring your successes and failures and to discuss them with a skilled thinking partner, your supervisor.

Michael Carroll writes about supervision being a shift from isolation and stasis to connectedness and development, and from individual to communal, through a process of continual reflection.

By engaging in this process on a regular basis, you become masterful in the way you work.

Supervision can take different forms including 1 to 1, group or a mixture of both. Research suggests that group and individual supervision can be similarly effective and rewarding (1). It’s up to you to choose if you prefer to have your supervisor’s undivided attention or rather be part of a supportive group of coaches who grow and learn together.

Here 7 coach aspirations that lend themselves well to be achieved through supervision:

Develop your coaching style.

When we learn coaching skills, we catch glimpses of what coaching can be like. We observe our trainers, we search for demonstrations on YouTube (and cringe at some of what we find), we look for books with case studies and dialogue examples.

In that process, we may forget who we are and what we already know. Supervision is a place to develop your own style. Similar to a chemist mixing ingredients to create a compound with its unique properties, supervision is your experimentation lab where you integrate your life experience with you coaching skills to an approach that you can confidently call your own.

Stay emotionally balanced.

Working with our clients can affect our emotions in a myriad of ways. Their challenges may remind us of our own ghosts, some of them still not ready to face the daylight. Tough assignments in divided or angry organisations can leave us feeling conflicted or exhausted. Difficult ethical decisions can make us question ourselves and leave a residue of guilt. Our ideal client saying no to working together can affect how we show up.

Supervision is a place to put all that exposes us and hurts us on the table. The support of an experienced supervisor who has gone through similar experiences before can help us get perspective and put our challenges into context.

Expand your toolkit

At its heart, supervision is about learning. And although the ICF recognises supervision hours as CPD, it’s not about yet another certificate on your wall.

Supervision is a reflective space where learning happens. It’s where we experiment, broaden our vision, assess what works. We brainstorm new ways forward when we feel stuck on what route to take with a client.

And although we read the books and discuss a host of theories, we also learn to leave them outside to be fully present with our clients.

Work through ethical issues.

Supervision is a space where you can explore ethical issues in confidence. However dry it may sound, ethical dilemmas and conflicts of interest are an innate part of working as a coach.

Can I take on a coaching client who has a diagnosed mental illness?

What to do when my corporate client wants to use their session to plan their exit from the organisation?

How to uphold boundaries when working with different members of the same team?

Rather than give you “the right answer”, a good supervisor will help you develop your own ethical maturity. This is your ability to embrace complexity and make decisions that deal with respect and fairness to all parties involved.

“Know thyself”

Developing self-awareness is such a crucial part of coaching mastery. The ability to see what is happening for us clearly and objectively allows us to be present with the client, ask better questions and be more impactful overall.

Supervision can help you:

Understand where you tend to get hooked into your clients’ issues and where do you show up in your rational (adult) self.
Learn your emotional patterns so that you can distinguish emotions that are yours from those coming from the coachee and their system,
Be clear on your coaching strengths and growing edges.
What scripts might you have that unconsciously impact upon the way you coach.

A skilled supervisor will help you address aspects of your own behaviour that might get in the way of how effective you are as a coach.

Have a team behind you

Building a coaching practice can be lonely. Being the only person left in the room after a challenging client session can amplify any worries and doubts that might show up.

Is everyone else handling this better? Are you doing enough?

Perhaps you worked as part of a team before or were lucky enough to have had a decent boss. If so, you may have enjoyed brainstorming challenges together when work-life threw curveballs. Having an opportunity to vent about a difficult client.

Feeling validated. Yes, you are doing great. With a suggestion to tweak a thing here or there, but knowing that you’re on the right track.

Your supervisor becomes that person on your team to brainstorm with, challenge your beliefs and assumptions, and champion you when you need it.

Reduced feelings of isolation and a heightened sense of belonging are often cited as important benefits of supervision(2).

Develop your “internal supervisor”

During your training, you learn about the importance of reflecting on your sessions. In supervision, you are reflecting with someone who is truly present, engaging emotionally and intellectually in what you choose to present. They are on a journey with you, working through your challenges in as effective, honest and caring a relationship as is possible.

This in turn will help you strengthen your self-reflection muscle. You may find yourself reflecting more objectively during and after your client work. Rather than letting your inner critic take over, you may find yourself able to fully explore your experiences without judgement.

This is your “internal supervisor” that you can access when working with your clients.

Do all coaches really need supervision?

The simple answer is… no. Nobody needs it… no more than we need coaching or therapy. You may be a business coach or a performance coach who is very confident in their coaching, 100% satisfied with the results that you are getting and you don’t feel the need to challenge yourself. Or perhaps you’ve been doing this for years and not much emotional content comes up for you in your sessions.

If that’s you, that’s ok. You might not need supervision but my provocation for you is:

Can we ask our clients to take risks and challenge themselves out of their comfort zones but stay comfortable ourselves?

It’s a question of values so no right or wrong answers here.

Sheila Ryan, quoted in Michael Carroll’s Effective Supervision for the Helping Professions, says it so well:

Supervision interrupts practice. It wakes us up to what we are doing. When we are alive to what we are doing, we wake up to what it is, instead of falling asleep in the comfort stories of our clinical routines and daily practice…

But then there are also coaches like Charlotte.

Coaches who tend to work at a deeper level and because of this get exposed to a multitude of emotions and dynamics that may be tricky to manoeuvre.

Coaches who want to develop their authentic coaching style and need support with that.

Coaches who want to develop their mastery because they don’t want their coaching to become run-of-the-mill and formulaic.

If you are a newly qualified coach, you may think there is no point accessing coaching supervision until you have a full schedule of clients to bring to supervision. Nothing could be further from the truth. Establishing good coaching habits from the outset is far easier than trying to fix bad habits we picked on the way.

But experienced practitioners can find themselves drifting towards the zone of unconscious incompetence every now and again. When that happens, a good supervisor will make sure to hold the mirror up to our face, but do so without judgement. And perhaps they will even throw in some humour for good measure!

References

de Haan, E. (2017). Large-scale survey of trust and safety in coaching supervision: Some evidence that we are doing it right. International Coaching Psychology Review, 12(1), 37-48.

The body of academic research on coaching supervision keeps growing. The article in International Coaching Psychology Review, (Volume 12, No. 1, March 2017) identified key benefits for coaches who receive Coaching Supervision as:

Increased self-awareness
Greater confidence
Reduced feelings of isolation
Heightened sense of belonging
Increased resourcefulness

The Seven Eyed Model: A Map to Navigate Your Coaching Supervision Practice

Wed, 26 Aug 2020 23:06:20 GMT

The 7-eyed model is one of the most well-known and widely used supervision models.

It stems from Peter Hawkins’ work in the early 80s. At the time Hawkins was trying to get a deeper understanding of differences in supervisory styles and concluded that they were linked to where supervisors chose to focus their attention. The model was further developed by Peter Hawkins and Robin Shohet into what supervisors know and use today.

A map to navigate your supervision practice

In their book “In Love With Supervision” Robin Shohet and Joan Shohet describe the 7 eyed model as:

a map, a framework, with which to view the landscape of supervision (…) [that] enables people to navigate their supervision practice with increasing confidence.

Many new supervisors find this to be very true. Moving around the seven eyes is helps open the conversation up relatively quickly and derive richer insights.

At its heart, this model is about inviting a diversity of views and perspectives. It combines both the psychodynamic as well as systems understanding of how things connect. It creates space for the exploration of the relationships at play. It openly invites the subjective feelings and perceptions of the supervisor as a valuable source of information.

As the story of the coaching relationship unfolds in a supervision session, the role of the supervisor is to listen for modes, or eyes, that may be helpful to explore towards the outcome set by the coach (who is also referred to as “supervisee” in this article and in the literature).

A skilful supervisor helicopters in and out of those seven areas of focus, collecting information and helping the coach paint a richer picture of the various dynamics at play.

The structure of the model

The 7 eyes are nested within two complimentary systems:

There is the coach-client system and the coach-supervisor system. Each of these systems sits within a wider systemic context that any of the three parties (client, coach, supervisor) may belong to.

This context may be having an influence on what is happening in the coaching relationship, but may be forgotten.

Mode 1. The coachee
Mode 2. The coach’s interventions
Mode 3. The relationship between the coach and the coachee
Mode 4. The coach’s awareness
Mode 5. The supervisory relationship
Mode 6. The supervisor’s self-reflection
Mode 7. The wider context

Let’s go through each of the eyes, or modes, or foci.

Mode 1. The coachee

In this mode we refresh the coach’s awareness of the client. Our aim is to make the client become vividly present in the room.

It is human nature to allow for our subjective interpretations of reality to become our truth. The same can be the case for a coach presenting a client. A picture of the client discussed in supervision can become skewed by the interpretation or the emotions of the coach.

The supervisor’s skill in this mode is to help the coach to stick to observations rather than interpretations. Supervisor’s questions help to return to facts, to separate data from preconceptions.

This can mean painting a full picture of the client, re-introducing information that may have been deleted, or probing in search for evidence behind certain statements (e.g. “the client was sad” – “how do you know? what exactly did they say or do?”). This can help the coach return to what happened in the session.

Mode 1 questions could include:

Describe the client. What three things about the client you would like me to know?

How did the client present herself/himself during the session?
If you imagine yourself as the client, how do you feel in your body?
Embody the client. Leave the room and come back as the client.
What was the energy of the client like?

Mode 2. The coach’s interventions

This mode focuses on the way in which the coach works with the client. In particular, it’s about exploring the interventions that the coach made, didn’t make or might make in the future.

An intervention is anything that happened in the session that originated from the coach. This does not necessarily mean the use of specific techniques or models. An intervention can be a question asked, a humorous remark, or a moment of silence. Choosing to interrupt, or not, is also an intervention.

Abraham Maslow famously said: “If the only tool you have is a hammer, you will treat everything as a nail”.

In this mode, one of the supervisor’s jobs is to help the coach avoid this effect by broadening his or her repertoire of interventions. The work can include brainstorming different options and exploring their impact. It can extend into a role-play of different scenarios, helping the coach to experiment and choose how they wish to proceed in the next session.

This mode requires a careful balance between the supervisor being informative (sharing knowledge and additional resources) and catalytic (supporting the coach to come up with their own options). The ultimate objective here is to learn to be creative in his or her practice rather than rely on the supervisor to provide ready-to-swallow options.

This can include exploring interventions that seem quite challenging and wild.

Robin Shohet believes that we may at times tend to “pussyfoot around our clients, under the guise of unconditional positive regard”.

For this reason, this mode could also include voicing unthinkable interventions. Even if they are unlikely to get picked for the session, it can be cathartic to voice them and bring the coach’s thoughts and feelings to the surface. Rather than letting them remain hidden, playing with options in a safe space of the supervision session can result in powerful a-ha moments.

Mode 2 questions could include:

Tell me about the moment where you felt stuck. What did the client say exactly? What did you say?
Brainstorm 10 other possible ways of how you could respond. Include at least one wild one.
Who else do you know who would handle this well? What would they do?

Mode 3. The relationship between the coach and the coachee

This mode is about helping the coach to stand outside of the relationship so that they can experience it afresh.

In their book “Coaching and Mentoring Supervision: Theory and Practice“, Tatiana Bachkirova, Peter Jackson and David Clutterbuck quote the Chinese proverb that says “the last one to know about the sea is the fish, because they are constantly immersed within it”.

Mode 3 is about helping the coach to move above the ‘relational water’ in which they are usually swimming.

It’s about noticing any dynamics that may be at play between the coach and the client that may be impacting the effectiveness of the coaching.

It is also about exploring if the coach-coachee relationship could be a mirror for what is happening in the coachee’s world.

This mode lends itself well to an exploration of a variety of metaphors of the relationship. This encourages detachment and introduces a fresh perspective on dynamics that may be at play.

Mode 3 questions could include:

If you were on a dancefloor together, what would be happening?
If you were both animals, what kind of animals would you be and why?
Become a fly on the wall in your last session; what do you notice about the relationship?

Mode 4. The coach’s awareness

In this mode, we are taking a step away from the coachee and we focus on the feelings that the client elicits in the coach. In other words, this is about what is happening to the coach when they see the client.

This process, also called countertransference, can present itself in many “flavours”, including:

the client reminds the coach of someone in their lives (e.g. a parental figure),
the coach over-identifies with the client and their situation,
the coach feels the need to “rescue” the client,
the work triggers coach’s unresolved issues,
the work is affected by the coach’s desire to succeed as a coach and bring on a transformation,
coach’s own feelings, e.g. of envy, curiosity, care, bias.

[Different types of countertransference are covered in John Rowan’s book “The Reality Game” (1983: 110-111, and expanded on by Joan and Robin Shohet in “In love with supervision” (2020: 101-102)]

Whether we tune into them or not, those feelings are always there. They may be behind that satisfying feeling of great chemistry with a client, as well as behind the feeling of dread before a meeting with another.

At times they may be getting in the way and causing the coach to be stuck. At other times they may present themselves as a great resource to be used. Our job as the supervisor is to help the coach become aware of what may be going on for them, noticing what the client’s material stimulates. This eye can also be about the exploration of the coach’s assumptions, beliefs and values as they relate to the client.

This has a few advantages. First, it helps the coach to become more self-aware, separating what belongs to them from the coachee’s material, growing their capacity to be fully present for their client.

Secondly, those feelings can serve as additional valuable information that may be worth bringing to the coachee’s attention.

Mode 4 can also cover a discussion about the coach’s practice more broadly, including learning edges and the development of skills.

As supervisors, we may discover that we naturally spend a lot of time in this mode in a session as we focus on the supervisee in front of us. If that is the case, it is worth being mindful of that “single-eyed vision” and creating space to explore other modes as well.

Mode 4 questions could include:

What thoughts and bodily sensations are you experiencing as we discuss your client?
Who, if anyone, does your client remind you of? [In what ways are they similar? In what ways are they different?]
What would you least like me to know about you and your client?

Mode 5. The supervisory relationship

This mode is about the relationship between the coach and the supervisor.

Central to this is the concept called the parallel process. In its simplest form it can be described by Joan Wilmot and Robin Shohet as “the supervisee will do to the supervisor what the client has done to them”.

There are of course variations to this. One of them being that the parallel process can also work in the opposite direction where the supervision dynamics are mirrored in the coaching relationship, but for the purpose of this article let’s stay with its most basic form.

For example: the client feels and expresses anger during coaching sessions, and the coach behaves in a similar way towards the supervisor.

This is largely an unconscious process for the coach which can be a form of discharge or an attempt to solve the problem by re-enacting it here and now.

In supervision, this eye is about noticing the relationship and examining how it is similar or different from the relationship between the coach and the client.

The job of the supervisor in this mode (also as part of mode 6 below) is to notice their own reactions and feed them back to the supervisee in a non-judgemental way. The skill is to not become submerged in the process but remain detached and work on this with the coach to resolve the challenge.

A particularly telling sign that there may be a parallel process at play is when the relationship dynamic doesn’t feel like our usual way of interacting, but rather it appears slightly “out of character”.

For example, as a supervisor, I may feel I’m becoming critical of the supervisee, but it is not how I usually act. It may be worth paying particular attention to this dynamic and bringing it to the coach’s awareness if appropriate, in case this happens to be a parallel with the coach – coachee relationship.

One thing to be aware of is that it can at times be tempting to see parallel processes where there aren’t any. Our feelings may actually have to do with countertransference at play rather than being an insight somatically transferred through the system. As a supervisor, I may be critical with the supervisee because he reminds me of my brother who I may feel some judgement towards.

Mode 5 questions could include:

When we discuss your client our voices seem to be louder than usual – I wonder if that could be in any way reflective of the coaching relationship?
I’m curious as to how the dynamic you are describing might be at play in our relationship here and now?

Mode 6. The supervisor’s self-reflection

This mode is all about the supervisor’s “here and now”. It’s about sharing our own feelings and reactions in an attempt to spark further discovery and dialogue.

Mode 6 can be closely linked to mode 5 – sharing what is going on for the supervisor could shed additional light onto the coaching relationship as those feelings may be somatically transferred.

The skill of the supervisor is to be able to listen to what is being said but simultaneously attend to their own internal process. This can include sharing thoughts, feelings or images as they come up during the session. It’s about naming things as they come and avoiding self-censorship since everything has a potential to be of use in supervision.

What can be challenging with this eye is having enough self-awareness to know when a feeling is imported from elsewhere and when it is our own. If not careful, we may run the risk of misattributing a simple feeling like tiredness or boredom during the last session of the day to insights relevant to the client situation.

An interesting subcategory of mode 6 is mode 6a called the fantasy relationship with the client. It may be helpful to feedback any feelings that we may be developing towards the client during the session, in case this could be a useful point to explore.

Mode 6 questions could include:

The actual questions and feedback will largely depend on what emerges for the supervisor in the moment, for example:

I notice I’m feeling x (sad/angry/impatient/relieved etc.) (mode 6). Can you make any sense of that as you’re thinking of your client (mode 5)?
I notice that I’m starting to feel envy towards your client, which is unusual for me (mode 6a). Does that feeling make any sense to you?

Mode 7. The wider context

This mode is about getting a view of the system and exploring what or who is not in the room, but is having an impact.

The supervisor, the coach and the client all operate as part of their own wider contexts, e.g. organisational, social, cultural, or ethical. These systems will have their own power and cultural dynamics at play.

Eye 7 is about consciously re-introducing them into the picture. The goal of the supervisor is to help the supervisee take a high-level perspective and explore if and how the system may be affecting the mindset, behaviours, ambitions, expectations or emotions of their client.

Systemic influence is such a broad term – in reality it can mean anything from company culture, through societal norms, to family members who are not in the room, but who influence the progress of the coachee.

Mode 7 questions could include:

Who are the other people mentioned by the coachee in your sessions?
What have you learned about the values, rules and assumptions that are present in the client’s world? How are they showing up in his or her relationships?
How are wider social, political, economic pressures manifesting themselves for the coachee?

In summary

The key advantage of the model is the diversity of perspectives that it invites and its power to broaden the field of exploration.

As with any model, this is a framework that is there to assist us as supervisors while remaining fully present with the supervisee. These perspectives can be explored in a short space of time, during a single session as well as throughout the journey.

It trains us to shift between various focal points and to consider viewpoints that may not be habitual. This results in an increased awareness of other perspectives and factors that may be at play for the client and the relationship overall.

The model focuses on where to look rather than what to look for. This makes it timeless and universal, applicable regardless of theoretical approach or style of the supervisor.

Bringing the Solution-Focus to Coaching Supervision

Tue, 25 Aug 2020 16:05:25 GMT

From its inception, coaching was steeped in the traditions of solution-focused practice. Models such as GROW and OSKAR are predicated on the efficacy of knowing where we want to get to, taking incremental steps towards it and noticing what works.

In recent years, however, coaching has become increasingly interested in dimensions that focus on the roots of behaviour, underlying beliefs systems, relational dimensions of coaching and other approaches that draw from schools of psychotherapy.

As welcome as this diversity of practice is, there has been a creeping tendency to dismiss solution-focused approaches as potentially superficial and short-term.

To some degree, this is even more pronounced in coaching supervision, which given its roots in psychotherapy supervision is perhaps not overly surprising.

In this article, I’d like to invite you to take a fresh look at Solution-Focused practice in supervision by exploring one of its key approaches and demonstrating how it can be used in practice. I’m talking about The Miracle Question.

The Miracle Question, sometimes known as the “Magic Wand” question, essentially places the client in the hypothetical realm that their challenge or problem is gone. From there, they can envision how the future would look like, if the problem was no longer there.

Because this is such a catalytic question, over time the Miracle Question was borrowed across many self-development practices, starting from therapy (where it originates from) to coaching and business mentoring.

The Miracle Question has many variations, but the essence of it is this:

If I waved a magic wand, and the problem was gone, what would be different?

Even in this basic form, the Miracle Question is so powerful because it transports the client in the realm of possibility.

However, at its core, the Miracle Question is in fact not a question – but a series of questions, or a journey that the practitioner takes the client on. The extent of the transformation it can generate depends largely on how skilfully it is being applied.

The series of propositions and questions is this:

I have a strange, perhaps unusual question, a question that takes some imagination…

Imagine…

After we finish here, you go home, watch TV, do your usual chores, and then go to sleep…

And, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens…

And the challenges you brought here now, are somehow solved… just like that.

But this happens while you are sleeping, so you cannot know that it’s happened.

Once you wake up in the morning, how will you notice that a miracle has happened?

Even though this script looks pretty straightforward, the effectiveness of this tool depends on a few elements of nuance – so it’s not so much about what we ask, but how.

Here are some of these key elements that form the how:

Timing

Bringing a coaching challenge to supervision is usually accompanied by a degree of vulnerability. The Miracle Question, which ultimately brings the coach into thinking about outcomes, can feel jarring if applied too early in the conversation. It’s often important to acknowledge the experience that the coach is having, and gently guide the conversation towards introducing the Miracle Question. Because developing this question can take time, it’s important to take this into consideration before using this tool, and not try to rush it or apply it quite late in a session – it can even take a whole session to fully develop the Miracle Question.

Pause

While applying the Miracle Question – or the “Miracle Journey”, it’s important to pause at every step, and metaphorically invite the client to take each baby step forward with us.

Think of the Miracle Question not as a question – but as a precious gift, that we slowly and gently unwrap together with our client.

Below is a script that can be used as the process for unwrapping this gift.

(This script is based on Steve de Shazer’s observations in applying this question with clients in therapy, with additional guidance for the supervisor, based on Peter Szabo and Daniel Meier’s book “Coaching, plain and simple”)

The process, zoomed in

I have a strange, perhaps unusual question, a question that takes some imagination…

Pause. The client has many reasons to consider that dealing with their challenge is more important than thinking about a miracle. This is why, by letting them know that this question we’re about to ask is unusual, we prepare them to shift their thinking.

Imagine…

Pause again. “Imagine” is the magic word that starts building a bridge between two completely different perspectives that weren’t previously connected. On one side of this bridge, our client is facing difficult challenges, and on the other side of the bridge, their challenge was solved – just like that.

After we finish here, you go home, watch TV, do your usual chores, and then go to sleep…

Pause. This is the metaphorical “crossing of the bridge” from the client’s current reality, to the miracle. Allow the client to slowly cross this bridge, without rushing this important step.

And, while you are sleeping, a miracle happens…

Pause. Crossing this metaphorical bridge allows the client to make this connection with the miracle. The idea of a miracle that takes place while asleep, removes the client from the realm of “what I must do to change my situation”. We invite them to consider that the miracle takes place without their active contribution. It is an invitation to let go of “working hard”. The idea of a miracle enables a sense of wonder and curiosity. This is why it’s important to offer the client a pause at every step, and give them the sacred time to allow these ideas to integrate.

And the challenges you brought here now, are somehow solved… just like that.

Pause. As the supervisor, you don’t need to explain the result or changes that take place after the miracle – this allows the client to later build their own miracle.

But this happens while you are sleeping, so you cannot know that it’s happened.

Pause. This part intensifies the surprise element of the exercise. This step is important, in order to clarify that there is no way to find anything out about how the miracle took place.

This is the point where we start focusing on what’s inside our carefully wrapped gift – or the actual content.

Once you wake up in the morning, how will you notice that a miracle has happened?

Pause. It’s important that the Supervisor doesn’t interrupt this pause, and doesn’t start adding helpful information for the coach. The answer to this question may often be “I don’t know”, in which case the Supervisor can maintain the silence, and give the coach space to reflect. When we allow this space, usually, ideas will start to come up.

For some people, it can be useful to describe this miracle from other people’s perspective, so this question can be interchangeably asked as “what will your spouse/mother/best friend notice?”

What else is different tomorrow after this miracle happens?

Sir John Whitmore, creator of the GROW model, said the “what else?” question will give clients the deepest insights if it’s asked at least five times. The “what else?” question enables the client to look at this miracle from different perspectives.

After the Miracle Question

The real work starts once we’ve helped the client connect with this idea of a miracle.

Supporting the client to bring the idea of a miracle into something actionable, can be done by using a few tools:

Integrating the mind-body-emotions

Similarly to the “Future Pacing” exercise from NLP, it can be useful for the supervisor to support the client to truly connect with this imagined outcome, or miracle. Some additional questions that can be useful are:

What do you notice in your immediate surroundings?

How do you feel? (Where is that feeling in your body? What shape is it? What colour?)

What thoughts go through your mind as you experience that?

Anchoring questions

As a by-product of using the Miracle Question in supervision, we often help our client connect with an internal state that’s resourceful and integrated. It’s a space where problems are already solved. In Transactional Analysis, we would call this the Adult Ego state, or the Self.

Anchoring questions can support the client to reconnect with that resourceful internal state they experienced after the miracle.

“What can you do to anchor this feeling in your body, so you can access it again next time you need it?”

Some clients like physical prompts, such as a post-it note on the mirror, but this can also be a certain posture, for example touching fingers together. The more they rehearse this behaviour and reconnect with the emotion, the better it becomes anchored, and easier to access as and when they need it.

Possibilities

“What can you see more clearly now, after this miracle, that you couldn’t see before?”

“What would you do differently, if this miracle had happened?”

“How would you handle this situation if this problem disappeared?”

Recall previous similar situations

“When is the last time you can remember feeling/thinking in this way like after the miracle?”

“What connections can you make between that last time, and this time?”

This usually enables the client to make connections to previous situations where they have found solutions – and discover tools that can support them to solve their current challenge.

Focus on positive language

Even if the people we work with in supervision are coaches, we are all still humans. It’s very often that we will hear answers like “well, if a miracle happened, then I wouldn’t feel so frustrated.”

In a Solution-Focused approach, we emphasise focusing on positive language, to get our clients to constantly shift their focus from problem to outcome. The supervisor will stay alert to answers about what our client doesn’t want, and ask “And if you didn’t feel so frustrated, how would you feel instead?”

Scaling questions

“On a scale from 0 to 10, 0 being “the worst” and 10 being “the day after the miracle” – where are you now relative to your challenge?”

Let’s say the client says “I’m a 2” – the next question would be “Why is it a 2 and not a 1? What’s already working?”

This enables the client to focus on resources they already possess.

“And what would make this a 2.5?”

This enables the client to focus not on the gap between 2 and 10, but on the next, achievable baby step they can take to move forward.

Action bias

Whichever way you choose to go with your Miracle Question and combining it with other tools, the Solution Focused approach is biased towards action, so it’s important to bring the client back into what action they can take to move towards that end result.

Questions like “What action will you be taking as a result of this conversation?” can help bring the client back to the current reality, but with renewed resources and after seeing something they previously thought wasn’t possible.

Future sessions after using the Miracle Questions, can be focused again on the Scaling principle, by asking questions like “What is better now?” This enables them to focus on their progress, and to acknowledge it.

I started this article by comparing the solution-focused orientation to more recent developments in coaching and I’d like to end by acknowledging the power of these lenses working in a complementary fashion. This is not an either/or but a both/and. Even though a Solution-Focused practice is more outcome-focused than a transformational practice, being a transformational practitioner adds a layer of depth to the solution-focused approach, in particular when using the Miracle Question.

Our ability to hold space and allow comfortable pauses, allows the Miracle Question to develop a new sense of possibility and transformation in the client’s mind, one that didn’t exist before.

The Miracle Question exercise can be particularly useful with clients or coaches who are very self-aware and self-reflective, and are likely to have explored this problem from every angle already – before coming to supervision. The Miracle Question allows us to bypass cognitive loops and find new connections that weren’t possible before.

Ethical Responsibility and Decision-Making in Supervision

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 21:39:03 GMT

Described by Aristotle as part of our human quest towards the good, ethics is a system of moral principles that governs a person’s behaviour and how they conduct an activity. A system of ethics guides us in making decisions and choices between good or bad, right or wrong, congruent or misaligned.

Despite the strong ethical position of the professional bodies in this field – best represented by the EMCC and Association for Coaching’s joint Global Code of Ethics – the fact remains that the coaching profession is self-regulated and individual coaches must frequently navigate their work using individual assessment of ethical behaviour.

Coaching throws up many ethical dilemmas that face the client and coach. There are seldom clear and easy answers to the ethical questions that come up in coaching and it’s this uncertainty that makes it vital that supervision supports coaches to address ethical dimensions in their practice.

In this article, I aim to shed light on how supervisors can support their supervisees to confront complex ethical situations and also attend to their own ethical stance as a supervisor.

Holistic approach to the realm of ethics

To expect a single ethical framework – a professional body’s code of conduct, for instance – to be the source of all ethical decision making would clearly be both simplistic and reductive.

To rely solely on a supervisee’s own ethical sense-making would be equally insufficient and problematic. After all, whatever our personal ethical stance as a supervisor or coach, we are also part of an organisation or professional body that has an ethical code and ethical procedures that we feel subscribed to and commit to following.

As a supervisor, therefore, we need to recognise that ethical practice exists within a series of nested systems and, as such, calls for an holistic approach.

To better understand the idea of nested systems, it can be useful to imagine the Russian doll structure. The smallest doll is the individual’s personal values and conscience which is nested inside a slightly bigger doll. The slightly bigger doll is the ethical framework of their profession, as well as the work context and code of conduct of the organisation in which they work. These two exist within the bigger doll which is the cultural context and laws of the country in which they work. And finally, the biggest doll is a moral, universal human ethical framework which is commonly (but not exclusively) summarised by the Golden Rule (ethic of reciprocity) and suggests that one should treat others as one would wish to be treated oneself.

It is the presence of these nested systems that can create situations where supervision becomes complex and difficult, confronting ethical dilemmas that have no simple solution.

To supervise well, then, we need to be ethically informed and equipped to help ensure that a supervisees’ practice is congruent with their own personal values as well as that of the profession, organisation and culture in which they work.

Ethical responsibilities of supervision

For many people, especially as they enter a new profession like coaching, ethics is about conformity to clear ethical codes. If the code says it is forbidden then it is forbidden; if the code doesn’t forbid it then it is acceptable. Many new coaches focus more on following rules than enriching their experience through experimentation precisely because the adherence to codes offers certainty and clarity.

These codes and frameworks usually contain principles to guide members in making ethical decisions as well as clear, unambiguous directives on what should or should not be done in certain circumstances.

Although these are a good place to start, it soon becomes clear that, in practice, it is not possible to cover every eventuality in a code of conduct.

Rather than being a rigid set of rules or laws, ethics serves as an inspiration for higher forms of craft and practice. It is neither a tick-box exercise nor a final destination. It is a journey of developing one’s ethical capacity and flexibility, recognising that there is no ‘one size fits all’ solution that can fix seemingly similar ethical challenges. Ethical responsibility of supervision is to use reflection to discover what fits best for this client in this situation.

In response to earlier editions of Supervision in the Helping Professions, Peter Hawkins recognised the emerging need to address situations where supervision becomes more complex and difficult. As a result, the fourth edition of this book (2012) introduces a set of ethical responsibilities in supervision to enable supervisors to navigate complex situations ethically and provide some guidance around the ethical dimensions of supervision.

The four ethical responsibilities are:

Ethical Reflection
Ethical Maturity
Ethical Role Modeling
Ethical Decision Making

Ethical reflection

The first ethical responsibility of supervision is to help the supervisee ethically reflect on their practice from both internal and external perspectives, and to consider the way in which their practice matches up against both their internal values and the external ethical values and frameworks of the nested systems in which they operate.

A lack of reflection is a slippery slope to unethical behaviour – we fall into habitual and mindless ways of behaving that are neither thought through nor reflected upon for alternative meanings and possible actions.

By contrast, reflection brings mindfulness, attention and deliberation to the process of ethical decision-making.

Ethics comes alive in practitioner-client relationships through dialogue and reflection. And although supervision may start asymmetrically (i.e. the supervisee might look up to supervisor), it is the supervisor’s role to empower the supervisee by creating dialogue as the format for the conversations, in which they begin to share power, so that power moves “within” the supervisee. That doesn’t mean supervisors give up their power: they still hold it but move backwards so that the supervisee can take on more and more power (Kees de Vries).

Ethical maturity

The second ethical responsibility of supervision is to help supervisee not only resolve current ethical dilemmas, but to use these ethical challenges to develop ethical maturity.

“Engaging with the ethical field is like entering a minefield of uncertainty.”

As defined by Caroll and de Haan (2012), ethical maturity is:

having the reflective, rational, emotional and intuitive capacity to decide whether actions are right and wrong, or good and better, having the resilience and courage to implement those decisions, being accountable for ethical decisions made (publicly or privately) and being able to learn from and live with the experience(s).

Coaches often find they are faced with ethical dilemmas that cannot be resolved within their current frame of thinking. As Einstein stated so eloquently, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”

This is where supervision offers a vital space. But it is often at this point that supervisors can feel acutely the pressure to give advice and come down on one side or other of a dilemma, rather than focusing on how the dilemma can be used to help grow the ethical capacity of their supervisee.

To use another well-worn analogy, ethical maturity is about teaching a coach to fish, not giving her the fish!

But what does ethical maturity mean in practice?

According to Carroll, there are 5 elements:

Ethical sensitivity: creating ethical antennae that keep us alert to when ethical issues or dilemmas are present
Ethical discernment: being able to make an ethical decision in line with our ethical principles and our values
Ethical implementation: implementing the ethical decision(s) made
Ethical conversation: defending the decision; being able to articulate and justify to stakeholders the reasons why the ethical decisions were made and implemented
Ethical peace: achieving closure on the event and being at peace with it even when there were other possible decisions or better decisions that could have been made. Learning from what has happened and living with the consequences of decisions made.

These five components of ethical maturity outlined above are not stages or steps in a chronological sequence but rather ethical skills that influence one another.

Supervisors help supervisees make sense of and understand them and, in doing so, they and their supervisees are committing themselves to higher standards and excellent practice by building ethical character – something not attained by simply looking to ethical codes which too often ask for the lowest common denominator (fall below this standard and you are acting unethically).

Ethical role modelling

The third ethical responsibility of supervision is the ethical practice and, by extension, ethical role modelling of the supervisor.

One shouldn’t underestimate the power of learning by imitation – the form of learning through which we model ourselves after and imitate others. As parent coaches often say, ‘Don’t teach your kids, teach yourself. They do as you do, not as you say.” So it frequently is with supervision – supervisees watch their supervisors intently and imitate them in more or less conscious ways. Working with ethically mature supervisors will impact supervisees in how they think about ethics and how they make mature ethical decisions (Carroll, 2014).

Some of the qualities of ethically mature supervisors are:

Ability to mindfully respond (vs react) to what has happened in the particular supervision relationship;
Ability to see the ‘bigger picture’ from a number of perspectives (i.e. the nested systems);
Self-knowledge and self-awareness of one’s personal decision-making ‘style’ and potential agenda;
Holistic approach towards ethical decision-making (more on that in the ‘Ethical decision making’);
Ability to empathise with others and to have compassion.

Helping supervisees to practise ethically and develop their ethical maturity requires a supervisor to espouse sound ethical principles and to have a mature ethical capacity themselves. This includes being clear about the purpose of supervision as well as its principles and process.

An important aspect of ethical practice is for the supervisor to manage (and role model) the boundaries of the supervisory work particularly around contracting, stakeholder management and congruent relationships with all parts of the supervision system – avoiding collusion, naming conflicts of interest, challenging behaviour that subvert the client system, and similar behaviours all role model an ethically mature stance.

In summary then, it’s clear that ethical responsibilities in supervision go beyond “mere” rule-following and show how one’s ethical stance is not a destination or a tick-box exercise, but rather a journey of continuously developing one’s ethical capacity and flexibility by being mindful of the nested systems at play and unique circumstances of every ethical decision.

Ethical decision making

There are times when we are morally confused and just don’t know what to do.

And even when we behave ethically, we are sometimes unable to articulate why we did what we did or explain coherently the processes that went into the decision-making that resulted in our action. In making ethical decisions it is worth noting the difference between intention and action, and the supervisor supports their supervisees to intentionally reflect on what they intend to do and what they actually do, to ensure that their practice is congruent with their personal values and feelings, and not out of alignment.

Sometimes we cannot fully be confident we did the “right thing”. And even if we are able to connect our actions to the ethical guidelines and standards of our profession, we might still feel unsure whether we made the right decision. Supervisees will rightly bring to supervision situations that are troubling and which they have not been able to resolve by themselves. They also bring the emotions that emerge from their work which they cannot process alone.

Hindsight, after-action reviews and occasional rumination keep our previous ethical decisions alive for us and we can easily end up replaying them over and over. Such activity, although potentially useful for some retrospective insights, can feel draining and unsettling so it is important to restore our energy and ensure that our emotional wellbeing and feelings are returned to the state of balance before we can give our best to our clients (read more about the restorative function in supervision here).

There is a tendency to see ethical decision making as a purely logical process with reason as the main factor in decision making. Immanuel Kant, the 18th century philosopher, was the champion of basing ethical decision making on reason and logic alone.

The ability to work logically and thoughtfully towards any conclusion and decision, as well as thinking critically, examining and challenging concepts or ideas, is a key feature of being human and one of our best gifts. However, while important, rational deliberation is not the only faculty we can employ to arrive at ethical decision making. To be in touch with our emotions and those of others in terms of what is happening is a further dimension we consider crucial to ethical decision-making (Hawkins and Shohet, 2012).

Awareness of the role of emotions in decision-making in general has increased over the years and insights from neuroscience support the concept that connected to emotion are our intuitive senses where decisions are made unconsciously or using the adaptive unconscious (Wilson 2002). After the emotions have made their decision, the rational circuits in the neocortex are activated to make sense of, and even justify, the decision. People come up with persuasive reasons to justify their moral intuition (Lehrer 2009:165).

And so, it is the supervisor’s role to not only encourage supervisees to think rationally and give reasoned arguments for their decisions, but also help them trust their intuitive responses, since intuition plays such a large part in ethical decision-making.

Kees de Vries captures this beautifully by saying, ‘Ethics is not a story from the head. Ethics is about the whole body, head and heart.” (Jo Birch, Peter Welch, Coaching Supervision: Advancing Practice).

Navigating ethical challenges

Most often ethical dilemmas are just that – dilemmas. And if some cases can be more straightforward in deciding whether a behaviour has been unethical or not, some might require a more careful consideration and, subsequently, the more difficult decision.

The more ‘straightforward’ cases, which might require an immediate response, can be in relation to ‘gross professional misconduct’, such as abusive coaching behaviour, a sexual relationship with a client, or using a client for material gain. Typically, if such misconduct occurs, the supervisor prescribes the supervisee to terminate their work with their client immediately and may pass the case to the ethics committee for further investigation and handling of what can potentially be identified as an ethical breach. In such cases, when the situation requires the supervisor to act immediately, a prescriptive type of intervention (as per Heron’s Six Categories of Intervention) might be the most ethically appropriate way forward, as long as the supervisor then shows an ability to reflect on their own reactivity rather than act from it.

Ethical dilemmas, on the other hand, are not so black and white. They require the supervisor and supervisee to work through the situation carefully and explore options rather than looking for simple, if-then equations. An example of an ethical dilemma might be a supervisee coaching spouses individually, where a husband has referred his wife to a supervisee. The danger here is for the supervisee to potentially end up doing “couple coaching” without the actual couple in the space, especially if part of the coaching goal is in relation to their relationship. An ethical risk in this is that the supervisee makes the situation worse by taking the ‘side’ of one client over the other or using the content of the coaching conversations with one spouse in the coaching space with another.

It’s not that the coach shouldn’t coach both partners separately but that he or she should be aware of the ethical risks and challenges posed by the situation in order to be more sensitive to these arising. This goes back to the idea of the antennae of ethical maturity.

Ethical navigation of complex situations in supervision is no mean feat and can demand, at one and the same time, a strong moral compass and an openness to unseen possibilities. To supervise ethically, there are some vital elements which can help to strengthen one’s moral compass and align it with the ethical frameworks in supervision:

Consciousness – the ability to be aware of what is being done, having some insight into our intentions and being alert and watchful about when ethical issues, problems and dilemmas emerge.
Ability to make ethical decisions based on not only rationality and logical thinking, but also compassion and empathy.
Seeking supervision for yourself from an ethically mature supervisor (i.e. supervision for supervision) to not only role model and further inspire the ethical behaviour in supervisees but also shed light on how supervisees can serve their clients best with all the ethical frameworks in place.

One article alone will never be enough to capture the depth, breadth and complexity of such a fundamental topic as ethics. In this blog, we have discussed what it means to be an ethical practitioner and introduced a number of concepts, such as the nested systems in the realm of ethics, ethical responsibilities in supervision, ethical maturity and decision-making. As part of “Diploma in Coaching Supervision”, Ethics in Supervision is taught in a designated session within Module 1 and teaches best practices on how to supervise ethically (to check the curriculum, click here).

Using Clutterbuck’s Seven Conversations in Supervision

Fri, 14 Aug 2020 18:34:25 GMT

On the journey to becoming an effective coach, we continuously expand our awareness and ability to build great rapport, engage in highly effective listening and ask powerful questions which help clients go into the layers of their unconscious thoughts and actions.

When we face challenges within this coaching relationship, we might naturally reflect on the dialogue between the coach and the client to explore what might have been misunderstood, what might else we might have asked or how we missed a critical issue.

However, as Clutterbuck and Megginson describe in their book Further Techniques for Coaching and Mentoring (2007), there are, in fact, multiple conversations taking place and each might hold the clue to where the challenge could be resolved. He points out that both coach and client are engaged in reflective conversations before, during and after each session and that the solution to the challenge might well be outside of the spoken dialogue and within the unspoken/reflective inner dialogue.

His, now well-known, Seven Conversations of Coaching model provides an exceptionally useful tool for considering these conversations and how they might help us achieve better outcomes from a coaching relationship.

The Seven Conversations model offers a practical framework to review the coach’s and client’s spoken and unspoken conversations as follows:

The Coach’s self-reflection and inner conversation before the session
The Client’s self-reflection and inner conversation before the session
The Coach reflection-in-action/inner conversation during the session
The Spoken Conversation between coach and client during the session
The Client’s reflection-in-action/inner conversation during the session
The Coach’s self-reflection and inner conversation after the session
The Client self-reflection and inner conversation after the session

It’s clear just from listing these seven conversations, that the inner conversation is a major piece of the jigsaw, yet, when we think about coaching, we tend naturally to think about the external dialogue.

The key aim of the Seven Conversations model, then, is to expand the supervisee’s awareness of these multiple conversations and to explore how such awareness might support the coach.

The spoken dialogue becomes just one facet of an ongoing matrix of conversations when we expand our awareness of the unspoken dialogue and self-reflection.

Practical Questions for the Seven Conversations

The effectiveness of the coaching conversation will be affected by the mental preparation, thoughts, feelings and actions of both the coach and client prior to the session.

A supervisor then might want to explore what the coach and client were thinking before the session.

Questions relating to conversations before the session might include:

The Coach’s self-reflection and inner conversation before the session

How were you feeling as you came to the session?
What was on your mind?
What concerns did you have?
What were you hoping for from the session?
What outside issues were you thinking about?

Whilst preparation of the coaching conversation is important, being present and “holding the space” as a coach is equally vital and ensuring sufficient space between the reflection and beginning of the coaching session may be useful to support this. Indeed, supervision provides the perfect space for this.

The Client’s self-reflection and inner conversation before the session

Whilst we can’t know what a client was thinking before a session, we can certainly use supervision to help the coach guide the client to think in a more reflective manner.

Clients might not be used to thinking in this particular way and the coach can usefully guide them. Some useful reflective questions for the client would be:

What are my key takeaways since our last session?
What support do I need from my coach?
What would I like to focus on in this session?
What is my motivation for overcoming my challenges?
How do I feel about my relationship with the coach?
Is there any other support I need from my coach?

An additional element that can be brought in to supervision, along with helping the coach to more clearly guide the client in their reflective thinking, is to the impact of the imagined conversation of the client. What does the coach imagine the client was thinking and how did that affect the coaching?

During the session:

Once the coaching session is underway, it might be tempting to think that the spoken dialogue is the only conversation taking place. But we all know what it’s like to be having an inner conversation even as we speak with someone else! Acknowledging and exploring the inner conversations during coaching is a core part of supervision then.

The Coach reflection-in-action/inner conversation during the session

Our inner dialogue during the coaching conversation will be running in parallel to the spoken dialogue, this is also known as reflection-in-action, and requires us to hold our observations lightly, whilst remaining present to the spoken dialogue, some reflective thoughts we may want to observe as a coach are:

What is the current level of my listening?
What assumption might I be making?
Am I present?
How am I feeling in the space? (Awareness of any discomfort)
What am I noticing about the client’s unspoken dialogue?
How might my client be feeling?

The Spoken Conversation between coach and client during the session

As mentioned, this is usually the main area of focus on reflection by both the coach and client. Whilst less experienced coaches may not yet be aware of the inner dialogues taking place, experienced coaches will have an awareness of all three dialogues whilst remaining observant of the dynamics of the spoken conversation, whilst reflecting on questions such as:

Are we exploring multiple perspectives?
What am I noticing about our body language in relation to the conversation?
Is the depth of this conversation sufficient?
What direction is the conversation taking?

One of the biggest barriers to this process can be the coaches desire to follow a structured coaching model like “GROW”. As the supervisor, we would aim to support the coach to “let go” of an outcome, remain present and release any anxieties that the coach may have around serving the client.

The Client’s reflection-in-action/inner conversation during the session

The client’s awareness of their unspoken dialogue will increase when they are aware of the coach’s ability to act as a “mirror” for their inner conversation.

Whilst the client may initially hold back whilst making choices around how vulnerable they chose to be in the space, relevant interruptions, frequent silence and pauses can allow the client to reflect on some of the following questions:

How am I feeling? If I am feeling uncomfortable, why?
What assumptions or filters am I adding to the questions?
How can I help my coach understand my challenges?
What do I want to say? What might I be holding back?

Again, given that the client is not present in the supervision, the supervisor’s role here is to support the coach in helping the client become more aware of their own inner dialogue.

After the session:

The Coach’s self-reflection and inner conversation after the session:

A crucial part of the coach’s development journey and growth is reflecting with a learning mindset on their work, also known as reflection-on-action.

Whilst this is best done whilst the session is fresh in the coach’s mind, the coaching supervisor can actively explore these during a session with questions that get the coach to ask themselves:

How did I help? – What did I do to help enhance the client’s thinking? What breakthroughs did the client have?
What choices did I make? – What questions did I ask? Was I challenging? What did I focus on?
What did I learn? – What would I do differently? What am I noticing about my client?
What concerns do I have? How do I feel about the next session? What could I bring to supervision?

The Client self-reflection and inner conversation after the session:

Adequate time and space for the client to reflect immediately after a session is vital for them to process their thoughts into actions and progress between sessions. The coach can support the client to process their thinking in these three critical areas:

Learning: What did I learn? What do I need to think about in more depth?
Intention: What learning will I put into practice? What else do I want to explore? How might my expectations have changed?
Process and Behaviour: Was I open and honest? What could I do differently in advance of my next session? How am I feeling about my next session?

And once more, the supervisor is ideally placed to support the coach in developing their client’s reflective capacity.

Summary

The seven conversations have proved to be a practical and flexible tool within the supervisors toolbox…it therefore provides a practical framework, around which the supervisor can help the coach both identify development needs and resolve issues with current clients

David Clutterbuck – Coaching and Mentoring Supervision (2011)

Each of the Seven Conversations requires a sufficient amount of space and time for reflection, here are some of the challenges a coach may present for exploration:

Feeling like they “failed” the client
Feeling frustrated by their client or the client’s progress
An awareness of feeling attached to the outcome
Disconnection with the client or feeling like they are missing crucial information
Overwhelm or anxiety about the coaching session/relationship or journey

This process enhances the seven-eyed model (Hawkins and Smith) as it examines the conversation from the perspective of the client, the coaching relationship and non-verbal communication. This also extends as a framework for the supervisor and supervisee to reflect their observations around the verbal and non-verbal communication within supervision.

It is useful to experiment with ways in which you can use the Seven Conversations in practice during supervision. It is not a rigid, process-driven model but rather a set of lenses that you can use creatively and flexibly.

This framework creates a space for coaches to think methodically about their practice and it offers a powerful tool for self-analysis to identify when coaching relationships do not progress as expected. The best place to start exploring the Seven Conversations of Coaching is within your own practice. It can be informative to compare some of your supervision case studies to those within your own coaching relationships. Most importantly, remember to hold the model lightly and enjoy using it.

Reflections on the Restorative Function in Supervision

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 03:01:48 GMT

In a previous article, Nick Bolton, founder of ICCS, has described the three core functions of coaching supervision.

In it, he details Inskipp and Proctor’s well-known framework that categorises supervision as serving three purposes:

Formative
Normative
Restorative

In this article, I want to explore the restorative function in more detail.

What is the restorative function?

Let’s quickly set the Restorative Function in the context of the three core functions.

The Formative Function focuses on the coach as a coach, exploring their coaching skills and supporting them to be more effective in their work so improving the experience and outcomes for the coach’s clients.

The Normative Function, by contrast, focuses on the coach as an ethical practitioner. It helps the coach work within ethical guidelines, understand best practices and unpick thorny issues and dilemmas.

The Restorative Function, put simply, focuses on the wellbeing of the coach and how they are being impacted by their work with clients.

As the name implies, it seeks to restore, re-energise and rejuvenate the coach in order that they can continue their work positively. Or indeed, even to help them decide it’s time to take a break.

But why do coaches need to be restored? What is at risk of draining them or, worse still, leading to burn out?

The coaching relationship is one of collaboration and deep conversation. The conversational space can be exciting, invigorating and positively outcome-focused leaving both coach and client on a high, celebrating the client’s journey.

But it can also be a challenging place.

Coaches support their clients through transformations, shifting paradigms and significant and, often uneasy, changes in life, relationships and business. The conversations that coaches have are often powerful, with clients encouraged to go deep to unpick their challenges.

Within these conversations, the client may share things that can impact the coach emotionally or energetically. Conversations may trigger the coach’s own emotions, evoke painful memories or challenge their values and beliefs in a way that makes the neutral space of a coach hard difficult to maintain.

And yet they are there to hold all of these emotions, thoughts, feelings and reactions. They are supposed to hold that space and encourage growth whilst remaining unattached to the outcome.

Theoretically, at least, they are meant to be boundaried and professional throughout!

But coaches are, of course, also human.

What do they do with all of that stuff? What do they do with the things that impact them? Where does it go?

Most coaches have ways of decompressing: a walk after work; a drink with a friend; a ten-minute meditation; or any number of other techniques. But supervision goes further than that. Supervision allows the coach to not simply manage the impact of the challenging emotions and experiences but to learn from them, make sense of them, grow as a result of them.

The supervisor is someone who understands the profession, who’s been there, and is trained to support and check in with what the coach needs for themselves and their clients to allow them to restore.

In his book, Supervision in Action, Erik de Haan introduces the metaphor of supervision being a utility room. He identifies the utility room as this intermediate space between working in the garden and then fully participating in family or social life. He states that:

Supervision is where we wipe the sweat from our brows and the dirt from our faces, wash our hands, look at ourselves in the mirror and get ready to become an ordinary person again…to do so we need to bring our newly acquired experiences, impressions and reflections to the surface, review them…and then muster up the courage to process our emotions, undertake honest reflection and integrate our recent experience into our broader practice

How do supervisors provide the restorative function?

So how do supervisors provide this restorative function to their supervisees? How do they ensure they are creating this place for coaches “to process emotions, undertake honest reflection and integrate recent experience into broader practice”?

Coaching skills + supervision methodology

It goes without saying that the restorative work does not happen in a vacuum. The coach and coaching supervisor will have contracted for the nature of the sessions they undertake and part of this will be describing the restorative nature of supervision and the ability to openly share difficult moments and emotional stuckness.

So, contracting is a key to laying the foundations for restorative work where it’s needed. But I’ve often found that the restorative function seems to have a certain place within supervision as an exploration of an issue unfolds.

It can be helpful to examine a specific supervision process to see this in action. A great example of this is Page and Wosket’s Cyclical Model of Supervision. This sets out five stages to move through and around as a working partnership.

Contract – get clear on the ground rules, build a relationship, maintain boundaries, set expectations.
Focus- What is the focus of the session, what is the presenting issue, the coach’s approach and their priorities.
Space – Create and hold a space. Collaborate, support, challenge, affirm. Reflect. A key component of the restorative process.
Bridge – Consolidate, share information, client’s perspective, planning
Review – Re-contract. Discuss is working well in the supervisory relationship and what needs explored

As the supervisor moves through the cycle of supervision, they can encourage their coaches to feel what they need to feel, good or bad, to make sense of things, to offload, to acknowledge the impact of their conversations and, ultimately, to move on. All of these things help the coach to restore themselves or in more common parlance, to fill up the tank, take the weight off, get their head clear! In other words, to do what they need to do to ensure that their wellbeing is good, and they can continue serving their clients.

However, while the restorative function can be present in all five stages, it most fully reveals itself during the Space stage where the coach can fully attend to their feelings and notice the impact of their work.

Creating and holding a safe space for coaches, then, is vital. But how to do this properly?

Active Listening, Presence and Curiosity

One key, of course, is the conversation itself and the act of listening. It’s easy to underestimate the restorative power of being listened to. As the supervisor encourages the coach to take the time to think and notice what’s going on they begin to feel heard and understood, there is a lightening of the load.

Nancy Kline talks about listening with respect, interest and fascination, and staying present and curious is as necessary in the supervision space as it is in the coaching space. Creating ease, as Kline states, offers freedom from rush or urgency and “allowing sufficient emotional release to restore thinking”.

Kline believes that everything we do depends on the quality of the thinking we do and that thinking environments where we offer a non-judgemental space are optimal environments. A space to gain clarity, to unpick assumptions, and to be able to really think about who we are and how we are and how to achieve the best outcomes possible.

In order for the restorative function of supervision to happen, thinking needs to take place, prolonged, unhurried thinking.

Cathartic Questioning

Another key behaviour supervisors can use is that of evoking catharsis – a release of emotion – not with a view to fixing it, changing it or challenging it, but just simply to let it out.

John Heron, in his book Helping the Client, identifies six categories of interventions in the people helping professions and with the cathartic intervention being one.

But what is a cathartic intervention?

Quite simply, a cathartic intervention, is one where the supervisor somehow invites the coach to release their emotions. It might be question or a subtle gesture that gives permission and encouragement for the coach to express their emotions and frustrations. By expressing these in the supervisory space they are able to release and let go of strong emotions relating to their work, to restore, rejuvenate and return to the coaching space or to their daily life without this emotional load.

Supervision without the restorative function

The word supervision can conjure up thoughts of a top-down management, of rigorous oversight and authority. In reality, coaching supervision in coaching is never this. But there is something even more explicit in this with the inclusion of the restorative function. If we look at supervision through a restorative lens it immediately feels collaborative, compassionate, caring and equal.

In thinking about the Restorative Function of supervision a useful thing to ask is what would happen without it? What would be missing or lost?

Where or how would coaches be without that utility room to wash their hands and wipe the sweat from their brows? Without being able to restore, rejuvenate and realign what might happen to their practice?

It does not stand alone

The Restorative Function then is a crucial component of supervision. But it is just that, a component. The restorative function does not stand alone. Instead, it sits alongside the Formative and Normative Functions and compliments them. The supervisor’s job is to master how to move between them, to combine them, and know when to use each.

Summary

I started this article with a short explanation of the three functions of supervision identified by Inskipp and Proctor. The restorative, the formative and the normative. Let us leave with the idea that the three functions sitting alongside each other offer a powerful triad to help coaches explore their practice and ways of being within their profession.

This powerful triad of functions offers a structure that supports both coaches and their clients and helps supervisors do this valued and necessary work.

Why did we choose to be a wholly virtual school?

Sun, 02 Aug 2020 01:47:50 GMT

I’m sometimes asked, why I chose for the International Centre for Coaching Supervision to be a wholly virtual school. And, of course, the clue is in the name. The simple answer to this question is that we love the way virtual learning transcends borders, cultures, timezones and localised practices by removing the cost barriers incurred by travel, accommodation and time away from home and work. It makes supervision training a truly global opportunity.

But the story also began because of the coronavirus pandemic of 2020.

With the need to take our coaching school, Animas Centre for Coaching, online to enable new and existing students to undertake their coach training, we recognised that the state of technology was allowing a phenomenal learning experience without the traditional limitations of geography that in-person training imposes.

Having run the Diploma in Coaching Supervision as an in-person course from 2016 until 2019 as part of Animas, we made the choice to establish the International Centre for Coaching Supervision (ICCS) as a fully virtual school and to embrace the advantages we soon started to see with our virtual coach training.

Students were writing glowing reviews of the virtual experience and were loving the fact that they didn’t have to make a long journey into London, Berlin or Edinburgh, where we had been training until then. Of course, some were missing the more spontaneous elements of in-person training: the chats over coffee, the bonding during the walk to and from the tube, and so on, but overall we were seeing that virtual training worked very well!

One of the things that impressed us most was the extent to which almost any aspect of in-person training could be replicated. This was a new world for us and we hadn’t realised the degree to which virtual training could create such rich learning experiences. Along with the traditional trainer-to-group presentation one might expect of virtual training, we quickly discovered the power of virtual platforms to manage break-out groups, triad practice sessions, demonstrations, whiteboard collaboration, presentations and more.

In many ways, we found that virtual training was in-person training on steroids!

The long-standing challenge of in-person training in terms of the position of learners in relation to the facilitator (people feeling unseen, distant or awkwardly in a corner of the space) – all this was absent from virtual training as each participant takes the same space and has the same prominence. We loved the egalitarian feel.

And time-management was a breeze! No participants loitering on the way back from coffee and no staggered restarts as break-out groups rejoined the whole. All this disappeared.

But, of course, most important was the issue I began this piece with. Virtual training completely removes the barriers of geographical location, travel-time and associated costs.

The reality is that high-quality coaching supervision courses are few and far between and almost all are localised providers or universities. We only knew of Goldvarg Consulting who were offering virtual supervision training and the limited spaces on offer meant many highly-experienced coaches would be missing out. And whilst some schools such as the Coaching Supervision Academy have launched international satellite locations, they still remain local delivery centres with all the classic demands of travel and time away.

The fact remained that if you wanted to train as a coaching supervisor, you were going to have to travel to one of the very few major delivery centres.

For us, that felt like a big shortfall for an important and sought after discipline within the coaching world. With organisations increasingly stipulating supervision as a condition for working with them as a coach, there is clearly an ever-greater need for coaching supervisors. At the same time, with the maturation of life coaching and the professionalisation of that sector, there is a growing need for a new generation of supervisors needed with the skills and understanding to work with coaches who work outside of organisational structures.

For all these reasons, when the ICCS was established as a new school, separate from Animas, in 2020, the decision to go virtual was an easy one to make and we’re excited to help coaching supervision become a more fully international activity and profession by opening up quality training to more coaches around the world.

Shedding Light on the Normative Function in Coaching Supervision

Fri, 19 Jun 2020 21:31:20 GMT

“I don’t like the Normative Function. I don’t feel I have the right to tell another coach what they should or shouldn’t do.”

This statement, said by one of our new coaching supervision learners, reflects a misconception about the Normative Function that often leaves it the poor, unloved cousin of the more attractive Formative and Restorative functions!

Of course, implicit in this student’s statement is the assumption that she would know what they should do.

And as Hamlet would say, “there’s the rub!”

In this article, I aim to dispel the myth that the Normative Function is one of authoritarian prescription and finger-wagging. Rather, I want to show that it enables and empowers a truly collaborative conversation between the coaching supervisor and coach to address some of the most vital and challenging questions in coaching.

Far from the coaching supervisor telling someone what to do, the Normative Function is most often used when there is no clear answer about what should be done but a necessary conversation to discern the best way forward.

The 3 Functions of Supervision

First, though, let’s briefly remind ourselves of the three functions of coaching supervision so we can more clearly position what we are discussing here.

I have described the three functions of coaching supervision in more detail in a previous article, but to briefly recap, they are:

The Restorative Function: – the coach as a person.

The Restorative Function looks at the needs and wellbeing of the coach as a person impacted by the work they do and with a focus on restoration, renewal and recovery.

The Formative Function – the coach as a coach.

The Formative Function concerns itself with the coach’s skills, knowledge and attitudes to help them become more effective in their work and to improve the quality of outcomes for their clients.

The Normative Function – the coach as ethical practitioner

The Normative Function helps the coach assess their practice in light of questions of good practice, professional standards and ethical dilemmas.

It’s to this third function we’ll turn now.

The Normative Function

The Normative Function is concerned with the professional standards of the coach as it relates to how they conduct themselves, rather than simply their effectiveness.

At the simplest level, the Normative Function would include issues such as:

Membership of a professional body
Understanding of their code of ethics
Adherence to that code of ethics
Honesty and integrity in dealing with clients
Maintaining core behavioural norms such as confidentiality
Protecting client information and records

In truth, however, these are rarely issues that need to be discussed in supervision other than to establish an initial baseline around which professional body a coach is registered with and what assumptions steer their practice.

Put another way, a coach who willfully contravenes the most basic of ethical standards is unlikely to be receiving supervision in the first place! It’s not out of the question, of course, but the areas above are so much part and parcel of a good coach’s working practice that they will not often come up as issues to address.

Where the Normative Function truly comes alive within supervision is in relation to ethical dilemmas.

Ethical dilemmas and the Normative Function

A dilemma is a dilemma for a good reason! There is no clear right or wrong answer.

One might see the pros and cons of either option and still be no clearer on the best way forward or the most appropriate response.

A dilemma is also somewhat different from a more general question or area of uncertainty. Whether to use one particular coaching intervention or another might have no clear right or wrong answer but it’s hard to see it as a dilemma – it is merely a choice. Within supervision, this would fall most usually under the Formative Function – helping the coach choose and use their skills.

A dilemma has something more about it. It challenges our sense of right and wrong, it raises questions of risk and consequence, it leaves us feeling that, whatever we choose, we are compromising something, it leaves a residue.

It can even leave us questioning ourselves and our standing.

Ultimately, we are talking here about ethical dilemmas.

And that’s where the Normative Function comes into its own.

Ethical dilemmas present themselves in coaching surprisingly often and any conversation around noticing, facing up to, understanding, analysing, dealing with, explaining, and learning from such dilemmas enters the Normative Function’s field of view.

As coaches, we’ve all faced moments where we have had to ask ourselves what the right choice is, given competing factors and emotional pulls.

“What should I do with this piece of information my client’s just given me? How does it impact my relationship with her manager?”

“This session feels like I’m venturing into therapeutic work I’m not qualified to do but to halt it could be damaging right now.”

“I find myself rooting for my client against the very organisation who’s paying them to be coached and I feel like the organisation is our mutual enemy!”

“I need the work, I’m good at the work, I perform to my best – but I don’t have any respect for this client group.”

The Normative Function is not so much telling someone what they should or shouldn’t do but helping them achieve a clearer mind and sense of choice through dialogue. After all, the supervisor has no inherently superior ability to answer a dilemma…unless it is not actually a dilemma at all, but simply an absence of information which the supervisor has access to.

The Normative Function, at its best, is about creating the conditions for dilemmas to be noticed, talked about and, to the extent possible, resolved.

These conditions are not authority, dictate and imposition, but rather:

Openness and willingness on the part of the coach to consider ethical blindspots
Courage from the supervisor to name uncomfortable ethical dimensions
Trust and respect between coach and supervisor
A curiosity for what is not being seen as much as what is
A collaborative attitude to unpick together rather than a prosecutorial approach
The courage to face the situation
The non-judgmental attitude to minimise any sense of shame and fear of reproach
A sensitivity to the needs of all parties without there being a sense of side-taking

With these conditions in place, it becomes possible to address ethical dilemmas and challenges that might lie in a coach’s practice but which they had either not noticed or were holding to themselves out of fear, shame or confusion.

Depending on the stage in which the ethical dilemma is at (past, present or future), the normative conversation becomes one of:

Checking in whether the coach and supervisor share the same assumptions of what ethical practice within coaching looks like
An openness to explore those assumptions and establish common ground
Sensitivity to the expectations of the profession and any specific professional bodies the coach might belong to
Awareness as to what is challenging about the dilemma
Becoming clearer on any emotions, triggers, past experiences that might be shaping the response to the dilemma
Clarity around the choices and options available
Confronting the coach with any conflicts between their potential choices and professional standards
Consideration of the intent and motivations
Exploring the ethical dilemma from the point of view of all stakeholders – the client organisation, coachee, peers, professional bodies, profession
Exploration of what can be learned and adapted
Enabling the coach to reach a sense of closure and to draw from the experience what they need

“Being on the same normative page”

The first item in the preceding list is an essential starting point.

The caricature of the Normative Function as about telling a coach what to do rests on certain assumptions. Most typically, it rests on the idea that the supervisor is safeguarding the profession and knows what ethical practice looks like. To some extent this is true but as I mentioned earlier, it is rarely these cut and dry issues that come up in supervision. When it comes to dilemmas far more subtle understandings of the role of a coach will come into play and need to be understood first.

If the coach believes that the very nature and purpose of coaching is one thing, and the supervisor believes it’s another, then any conversation about norms and ethics will fall at the first hurdle as they proceed to talk at cross-purposes.

I recall supervising a supervisor on his practice. He was from an NHS mental health background in which coaching had been established with strict adherence to the ICF, non-advisory approach. He had been supervising a coach for whom giving advice was a core part of her practice. The two had become locked in a “death struggle” for who was right as he felt she was being unethical. He failed to establish that she wasn’t breaking rules but rather following different rules! In fact, neither was right or wrong – they had a different understanding of coaching.

The first step of any normative conversation must then be to understand the starting point of the coach.

The Normative Function and Ethical Maturity

An excellent model for considering ethical dilemmas from multiple angles comes from the work of Michael Carroll in his book, Ethical Maturity in the Helping Professions.

There is no better model for having a collaborative conversation around ethical dilemmas. The richness of the exploration enabled surely dispels any myth that the Normative Function is one of rules, rigidity and regulation.

Carroll introduces six dimensions to what he calls ethical maturity and I believe that the Normative Function both aids, and is aided by, all six dimensions.

The six dimensions of ethical maturity

Sensitivity
Discernment
Implementation
Accountability
Peace
Learning

Sensitivity

The first area is helping the coach develop greater sensitivity to where ethical dilemmas might exist.

It is entirely possible that the coach is not aware that there an ethical issue exists in a particular situation. Perhaps they haven’t fully understood the professional code of conduct. Or they haven’t spotted the conflict of interest. Or they felt so strongly about something that they didn’t notice how they’d been pulled into a “game”.

Whatever it might be, the first step in ethical maturity is becoming more sensitive to where ethical issues exist.

The Normative Function provides a critical lens over this and helps the coach develop a finer awareness of such possibilities.

Discernment

The next area concerns becoming clearer in what the ethical dilemma actually is.

It might start off as a niggling feeling, a discomfort, or something the coach finds themself loathe to bring up. Being able to discern what exactly it is and why it is a dilemma becomes a precondition for dealing with it.

The Normative Function enables a conversation that unpicks the issue and helps the coach become clearer in what they ar facing.

Implementation

Once the ethical dilemma has been understood, choices can be made and acted upon.

The Normative Function enables conversations that play out the possible ways forward, the implications, the specific approach to taking action and more besides. It allows a safe space to try out the ideas, even to practise them.

Accountability

Depending on the importance of the issue, ethical dilemmas can necessitate having to explain oneself to a professional body, an employer, client or another.

Accountability here is the ability to make a clear case for the choices made rather than simply “going with your gut”.

Again, the Normative Function allows a space for the coach to make sense of their choice in ways they can explain – the supervisor can act in the role of the “interrogator” in the sessions to help the coach make their case.

Peace

Often, the person we most need to make our case with is ourselves.

Ethical dilemmas, as I stated earlier, can leave a residue and, despite knowing how we came to our decision and being able to explain our reasoning, we can be left with a feeling of discomfort – “did I do the right thing?”

This is where Carroll talks about learning to be at peace with our decisions and moving on. Whilst this might lend itself to the Restorative Function, it nonetheless stems from the Normative Function that led to it.

Learning

Carroll’s sixth dimension of ethical maturity is that of learning.

“What did this ethical dilemma allow me to learn?”; “How can I preempt this next time?”; “How might I approach it differently?”

And so the Normative Function blends with the Formative Function to create new learning and greater ethical capacity.

Summary

I hope I have breathed new life into the Normative Function with this article. I believe it is absolutely critical that we enter into normative conversations but that we do so in a way that is collaborative, respectful, curious, engaged and productive.

Simply battering at someone else’s value system is, at best, ineffective, and, at worst, destructive of the relationship.

There are many dimensions to the Normative Function and there is no denying that they introduce a greater element of the supervisor’s own knowledge of the values and best practices of the profession but it is in the collaborative use of the Normative Function that the coaching supervision will thrive.

Expanding your supervision range: Using Heron’s 6 Categories of Intervention in Coaching ...

Sun, 07 Jun 2020 17:42:44 GMT

As a coaching supervisor, you have a wider palette to choose from than a coach.

Your landscape of exploration spans a greater range.

Your duty of care is no longer just to the person in front of you but also to their clients, the system you’re part of and the coaching profession as a whole.

Your core aims are now threefold as you take onboard the restorative, formative and normative functions of supervision.

All of this places a demand on the supervisor to bring more to the game than coaching requires.

As a coach, you become adept at facilitation and being a catalyst for the client’s thinking and self-awareness. Your client is the centre of attention and the assumption is that the client is the final arbiter of what’s right or wrong for them.

Given the new scope and responsibilities involved in coaching supervision, however, one of the biggest challenges a new supervisor faces is expanding their range beyond the core traits of humanistic coaching.

Step in John Heron and his 6 Categories of Intervention, identified in his classic book, “Helping the Client”.

In this article, I’ll explore how Heron’s 6 Categories of Intervention can help supervisors wear different hats as needed and become more effective in their supervision by broadening their repertoire.

Writing from within the field of therapy, Heron identified 6 Categories of Intervention – essentially different styles of input – which he considered cover the whole range of possible interventions in therapy.

Often shortened to the 6 Cats, these have frequently been co-opted for both coaching and supervision, though they lend themselves to the latter more fully, as we shall see.

Used sensitively, they become a useful model for the coaching supervisor to notice where their style and approach naturally lie and how and where they can more deliberately expand their range.

Becoming aware of our natural habits is a first step to expanding our options and the transition from coach to coaching supervisor is nothing if not expanding in terms of what we explore and how we explore it.

For the purposes of this article, I’ll be applying Heron’s concepts to coaching supervision rather than therapy.

Heron’s 6 Categories of Intervention

Heron identified two fundamental intervention styles and, within each of these, three specific approaches.

His fundamental intervention styles are:

Authoritative
Facilitative

The authoritative style places a greater level of power and authority with the supervisor to intervene to enable change.

The facilitative style places greater power for change within the client, with the supervisor acting as an agent to promote that change.

Even before we look at the specific interventions that lie within these two groups, we can see the potential challenge for coaches in transition. It can be hard to break with a deeply held commitment to facilitation in order to try on increased levels of authority. Yet there are times when it is necessary in supervision.

In my experience, time and again, the biggest hurdle for coaches transitioning to coaching supervision is the use of, and even the willingness to accept, the authoritative interventions.

Coaches trained in the humanistic approach are taught that the client is the source of their own answers and they build their practice muscles around facilitating the client to find, trust and act on their own ideas.

The use of authoritative interventions in supervision does not, however, undermine this. Rather, it expands options by introducing a greater authoritative element in which the supervisor can advise, teach and share their experiences in a more guiding manner.

Let’s now explore each group in more detail.

Heron lists the authoritative and facilitative interventions as:

Authoritative

Prescriptive
Informative
Confronting

Facilitative

Catalytic
Cathartic
Supportive

I have long said that all of these intervention styles, bar one, work for humanistic coaching just as effectively, and that it is only coaching schools’s predilection for an almost exclusive catalytic approach that leave many coaches unskilled in the wider set of approaches.

In its truest form, humanistic coaching precludes the prescriptive approach – put simply, we don’t give advice. We don’t prescribe.

But, of course, in many areas of coaching, prescription is not just “allowed” but expected. A business coach, presentation coach, parenting coach or health coach, generally would be expected to give advice. The context of coaching is all important!

Nevertheless, many coaches will come to this model and struggle with the idea of prescription as an intervention that they would use.

In coaching supervision though, all six are undeniably useful.

Before looking at how they help expand a coaching supervisor’s range, let’s first get clear on each intervention type, remembering that what we mean by intervention is simply the thing the coaching supervisor does and the intention behind it.

Authoritative

Prescriptive Intervention

As we’ve already alluded to, the prescriptive approach is one in which advice is given, a plan of action suggested, a next step proposed.

It is predicated on the expertise, experience and authority of the supervisor who can credibly, knowledgeably and appropriately administer such advice. The language, of course, evokes the medical model, unsurprising given its origins in the therapeutic field, but the prescriptive skill applies as much to the business coach and the coaching supervisor as it does the therapist.

There are times your expertise, clear guidance and advice is needed.

Informative Intervention

The informative intervention is more detached than the prescriptive. It is merely the passing on of useful ideas, models, information and concepts that the coach may find useful and may choose to use, or not.

This is where the teaching and educational elements of supervision sit and it will typically be used to a greater or lesser extent based on the experience level, or specialism, of the coach being supervised.

Confronting Intervention

The confronting intervention is one which many coaches are familiar and comfortably use – it is perhaps the one authoritative stance that has always been a natural part of coaching.

Whether in coaching, supervision or therapy, the confronting intervention is one where we help the person we’re working with confront something they don’t want to. We might term this “holding up the mirror”, confronting our patterns, seeing our blindspots, or just facing reality.

It sits within the authoritative stance because in these moments it is the supervisor who shines the light on the uncomfortable truth.

Facilitative

Catalytic Intervention

For coaches, this is typically the comfort zone! This is what they trained to do and where they are most at risk of remaining stuck as they transition to becoming a coaching supervisor.

The catalytic intervention is the supervisor as facilitator of self-awareness, thinking, ideas and decision. It’s helping someone think through their experience, options and future through questioning and reflecting.

Cathartic Intervention

The cathartic intervention certainly has its roots in some forms of therapy but it is also useful in supervision, especially when we consider the restorative function discussed in an earlier post.

The cathartic intervention is one which enables a release of emotion. It is the question that taps into the supervisee’s feelings, or their response to a distressing experience.

It is less about understanding the emotion than releasing it, which in turn can lead to a greater capacity to make sense of it through catalytic questions.

Supportive Intervention

The final intervention is one that many coaches will also be familiar with.

The supportive intervention is the short and humane comment by the supervisor that lets the supervisee know they are not alone, that they have been heard and understood for facing something difficult, that shows empathy. It is the comment that normalises yet doesn’t trivialise.

Comments like “That must have been difficult”; “I can imagine that was no easy decision”; “It sounds like you were doing your utmost” all sit within the supportive style.

Expanding your range in the transition to coaching supervision

Having briefly covered each, let’s acknowledge again that a coach transitioning into coaching supervision is going to be well-versed in the facilitative interventions. Most coaches’ work is predicated upon asking questions, reflecting, listening to understand and to see what’s not being said.

All of this is highly effective and continues to be absolutely necessary in supervision.

It’s the stretch to the authoritative styles where coaches often struggle. Yet it’s one they must begin to make.

As they carry out supervision, they must be alive to the three core functions of supervision:

The restorative function
The formative function
The normative function

And each, moment by moment, might call upon a different intervention style.

I wrote in an earlier post that the normative function is one where coaching supervisors often feel least comfortable. It doesn’t take much thinking to connect the dots that the normative function can potentially call more clearly on the authoritative stance of confronting, informing and potentially even prescribing.

An example – The use of the authoritative stance in the normative function

Imagine, for a moment, a coach who is actively colluding with the client against the organisation who is paying for the coaching (yes, it happens!) The two have become enmeshed in a belief about the organisation which means they are not acting in its interests but rather solely in the client’s. The coach has adopted the client’s beliefs and mindset about the organisation even though, in this case, the only source is that of the client themselves.

A coaching supervisor who limits themselves to the catalytic style may know there is something wrong in the situation but feel unable to name it, hoping instead that questioning the supervisee will lead to it coming out into the open.

If it doesn’t become explicit and the coach is unable, or unwilling, to see the risks and issues in the coaching, then the ethical issues in the case might remain unchallenged.

By contrast, a coaching supervisor who develops a broader range of responses might begin in a catalytic mode but realise that this is not moving where they believe it should.

They might then try a confronting intervention to more boldly point out the ethical issue at stake. Perhaps the coach can see it but feels it’s not an issue.

The coaching supervisor could offer to share information that might change the coach’s perspective and so describe aspects of the coach’s professional code of conduct, or some information on systemic collusion.

Ultimately, the supervisor might take a prescriptive approach by being explicit in the actions needed for the coaching relationship to remain ethical.

For many coaches, and even some coaching supervisors, this escalation up the authoritative ladder might feel alien and alienating. Yet, the art is to be able to have this conversation in a way that remains collaborative, egalitarian and respectful.

This is not about the supervisor laying down the law but rather being clear on what the “law” is, whether the coach understands how they might be contravening it, whether they care, and what is most appropriate to happen in order to remedy it.

An example – The use of the informative intervention in the formative function

Coaching supervision is not a teaching profession but that doesn’t mean it is never helpful to use a teaching approach.

The humanistic coach rarely, if ever, involves a teaching element and so it can be hard for a coach becoming a supervisor to allow themselves this ability.

Again, if they only remain in the catalytic space they miss out on the rich possibilities of the informative space.

Imagine, for instance, a supervisor working with a relatively inexperienced coach. They are working from a recorded session and so the supervisor has direct access to the audio element of the coaching.

As the supervisor listens to the session, she hear parts where the coach clearly feels stuck. The coach confirms this and says he didn’t know where to go next.

The catalytic approach might be an entirely appropriate response, asking the coach what he could have done differently as he looks back, what else he might try, where the feelings of stuckness came from and more.

But it might also be the case that the supervisor feels she has a model or an approach that could help. Remaining wedded to the catalytic approach, and fearing an imposition of knowledge, might stifle an otherwise useful exploration and sharing of knowledge.

Taking an informative stance, the supervisor might offer to share something that could help and, assuming the coach agreed, a useful, appropriate sharing of concepts could take place. Bookended by catalytic questioning this would feel like an entirely adult approach to the authoritative style of intervention.

Using Heron’s 6 Categories as a Developmental Map

Supervision is, of course, fundamentally a reflective space for development and as a supervisor, you will also be constantly reflecting on your work.

Heron’s 6 Categories provides an exceptionally simple model for assessing your natural preferences and tendencies as a supervisor and for noticing your own blindspots.

Taking a step back and noticing what intervention styles you called upon in a supervision session can open your eyes to your habits and begin to build the muscle of awareness for what else is possible.

Do you notice you fall back on the catalytic approach almost exclusively, then consider how you might introduce another approach and explore what difference it might make.

Perhaps you notice that when you take a more authoritative approach, it triggers post-session anxiety that you overstepped the mark. Consider how true that is and whether and how you might have done it differently or whether it’s just old beliefs about the role of a coach imposing themselves on you.

Both as reflection-on-action (after the session) and reflection-in-action (during the session), the 6 Categories allow us to expand our range as coaching supervisors. We get to notice our habits, create more options for action, move more fluidly around issues and become altogether a more competent and confident coaching supervisor.

The 3 core functions of coaching supervision

Fri, 05 Jun 2020 20:19:16 GMT

In many contexts, the word supervision denotes a close oversight and detailed management of someone’s work, with a particular focus on quality assurance.

Within the helping professions, however, supervision takes on a very different meaning.

In a previous post, I described it as a space for reflective inquiry into someone’s professional practice.

But what does this reflective space set out to achieve?

In this article, I’ll lay out the three fundamental aims, or functions, of coaching supervision and what these might mean in practice during a supervisory conversation.

In its early days, the aims of supervision were neither universally agreed nor always formally identified. Established first within the therapeutic field, experienced practitioners often progressed naturally to “supervising” less experienced therapists based on their own assumptions, style and understanding of what supervision should be.

Unsurprisingly, different practitioners and theorists developed their own concepts about what it was for, how it happened, what skills were needed, who could do it and much more besides.

Slowly but surely, however, consensus emerged and to a large degree there is now a shared understanding of the aims and principles of supervision in the helping professions. The specific practice may differ according to both the individual supervisor and their theoretical orientation, but the aims remain broadly consistent.

The functions of coaching supervision

One of the most enduring formulations of the function of supervision in the helping professions is that of Inskipp and Proctor. They describe three main functions that supervision attends to:

Restorative
Formative
Normative

Since then, there have been similar formulations including Hawkins and Smith’s:

Resourcing
Developmental
Qualitative

And more recently, Lucas and Larcombe’s:

Personal
Technical
Ethical
Commercial

Apart from the addition of the commercial element in the last group, all three are essentially subtle variations on the same theme.

Each emphasise supervision as focusing on:

The person of the coach and their emotional wellbeing.
The skills, knowledge and ability of the coach.
The professional standards and ethical behaviour of the coach.

These three areas of focus represent the core aims of coaching supervision which we’ll explore in more detail below.

Given the essential unanimity of these definitions, the choice of language is largely one of preference and nuance. But, as much for its more poetic qualities as anything, we use the Inskipp and Proctor’s restorative, formative and normative model within the ICCS.

The Restorative Function

The restorative function is concerned with supporting the coach to come back to themselves after long hours working with, absorbing, defending against, and sometimes being part of, the emotions of their clients.

I have always enjoyed Erik de Haan’s description of this in his book, Supervision in Action.

He writes that:

Underestimation is a major risk in organisation consulting and coaching practice. Unlike gardeners, deep-sea divers, police officers and many other caring or exploring professions, consultants and coaches don’t need any special equipment to do their work – although it’s not unusual for consultants to catch themselves unconsciously picking out clothes in an effort to fit in with the organisation they are going to visit. A uniform or protective clothing is a constant reminder of the role and the risks involved. Consultants usually lack such a reminder, so the risks of role uncertainty are much greater. As a result we forget too easily the extent to which we expose and hurt ourselves, or invite hurt, in the consulting professions. We can develop a ‘thick skin’ and disparage the constant stream of emotions that bombard us, such as enthusiastic promises, vain hope, defeated expectations, direct or indirect rejections, disguised criticism or jealousy, temptations to over-promise, etc – or act as though we don’t need any help and can bear and process all of it by ourselves. However, that is certainly not always the case: to process it all, we need the involvement of outsiders who have gone through similar experiences and can help us put our own into new contexts.
Erik de Haan, Supervision in Action

Of course, whilst de Haan is not suggesting that coaching is as dangerous as some of these other occupations, he is certainly bringing our awareness to the reality that we are part of a profession that immerses us in other people’s challenges, turmoil, deep emotions and relational struggles and that, over a period of time, this can create its own impact on us as practitioners and to develop the ‘thick skin’ he mentions.

In turn, this can cause us to care less for our clients as we push their impact away. At its worst, it can lead to a depersonalisation in which we see all clients as merely one more person unloading “their stuff”. The coach ceases to care as much, or even begins to dread the next coaching session.

Most coaches who have worked for long enough will have had those moments. Ultimately, it can lead to a sense of burnout and a desire to simply get away from the work.

The restorative function, then, is a kind of release valve or an emotional cleanser to wash away the unwanted and leftover emotions from the work. It allows the coach to let go of feelings that have built up through their work and which they are often carrying on behalf of the client, albeit unconsciously.

But it’s also about normalising and enabling the coach to remember that it’s OK to feel this way – that this work can evoke emotions and that, as a human being, they’re going to feel them. Sometimes, the simple act of being reminded you’re not alone – not a bad person or a poor coach for feeling frustrated, annoyed, bored, angry with your clients – enables you to come back to yourself and your clients afresh, regenerated, and ready to do the work.

It is easy to think of supervision from a managerial perspective, but in the helping professions, at least one of its main aims then is the emotional wellbeing of the coach – the human being – as it relates to their work, and enabling them to go back to it newly resourced.

The formative function is about the coach as a person – the coach as someone who is impacted by the kind of work she does and the aim to resource and strengthen them through release.

The Formative Function

The second of the three supervisory functions is perhaps the more obvious one when we think of the word supervision – supporting the coach to be more effective and skilled at their work.

The formative function concerns the skill, knowledge and practice of the coach.

But even here, the supervisory style in the helping professions is markedly different from managerial supervision or even mentoring.

Far from being a relationship of teacher and student, the supervisory relationship is one of exploration and discovery, a sharing of ideas and consideration of possibilities, rather than didactic lessons in how to coach better.

The formative function in supervision may indeed involve some educative elements from the supervisor if appropriate, but it might equally involve a dialogue that leads the coach to consider what they already know but have neglected, or to create fresh ideas simply by playing with what other options might be available.

The key aim of the formative function, however it is achieved, is the growth of the coach’s ability to make an impact through their skills, knowledge, attitudes, confidence and so much more.

But this is not merely about the tools of coaching – the knowledge and application of models or theories.

It is also how the coach shows up.

Formative supervision might explore how the coach allows themselves to be overawed by a particular type of client and how they regain their composure and confidence to work more confidently to support that client. It might surface the deeper psychological patterns that create this initial feeling for the coach, bringing awareness of what countertransference is impacting their work with this kind of client.

Notice, though, that although this is about the coach as a person, it remains formative as it centres around developing new skills and self-awareness to improve the quality of the work the coaches does.

Said another way, where the restorative function looks at the coach as a human and the impact of their work on them, the formative function is looking at the person as a coach and the impact of their work on the client and the system they work within.

The formative function ranges widely across the coach’s work exploring areas such as the interventions and approaches the coach uses, the relationship between the coach and their clients, the feelings and responses the coach experiences and even how all of this shows up in the supervisory space.

The aim of coaching supervision in this respect then is to ensure the continual development and growth of the coach throughout their lifetime.

The Normative Function

The final function, identified as the “normative function” by Inskipp and Proctor, as the “qualitative function” by Hawkins and Smith and as the “ethical function” by Lucas and Larcombe, is about professional standards.

My own belief, based on personal experience of being part of the supervision profession, is that this is the function with which most coaching supervisors are least comfortable.

Supervision in the helping professions is generally seen as a collegial relationship, two equals engaged in creating a reflective space around one person’s practice.

The normative function subverts this somewhat. It can feel as though it challenges some of the core beliefs upon which relationship is built – the equal relationship, the subjective nature of the work and the humility of not having the answer.

But yet the normative function is a core part and responsibility of the supervisor and it is possible – indeed, as we’ll see, necessary – to explore this issue with a non-authoritative stance.

To be clear, then, the normative function introduces the issue of professional standards into the supervision conversation – in other words, what is OK and not OK within the boundaries of the profession.

Some professions have rigorously defined and upheld norms and with regulated professions such as medicine misconduct can lead to professionals being “struck off” and unable to practise.

Coaching, however, like therapy and counselling, is unregulated and a coach can quite legally work in ways that contravene the general understanding of coaching. In such circumstances, the coaching supervisor has little to no real power to impose “professional standards” other than through engaging in a collaborative dialogue.

As an example, a coach who knowingly and persistently strays into therapeutic territory may be acting outside the bounds of what the profession considers appropriate, but they are not acting illegally. And whilst the professional bodies for coaching may have codes of conduct, it is not a legal requirement for a coach to subscribe to any of them.

This can present a real dilemma for a coaching supervisor.

On one hand, they have no real authority to impose a professional body’s code of conduct – there is no obvious punitive stick, so to speak! And yet, part of their role as a coaching supervisor is to raise potentially problematic working methods of the coach and to create the conditions in which the coach might look at these behaviours with fresh eyes.

The normative function, then, is not one of authority and imposition but of having the courage to confront ethical issues and to bring about a willingness on the part of a coach to explore these areas.

Where the restorative function sees the coach as a person and the formative function sees the person as a coach, the normative function sees the coach as an ethical practitioner.

Summary

These three elements make up the core work of supervision and together ensure that the supervisor keeps in mind the wellbeing of all parts of the coaching system: the coach, the clients and the profession.

The functions are not necessarily exclusive and a supervisor may be working across any one, two or three of them at the same time depending on multiple factors. These are not so much discrete areas of work as lenses that influence the coaching supervisor in the interventions they make, the direction they shine their light and the outcomes of the journey that coach and coaching supervisor go on during a session.

Of course, we have only scratched the surface here in revealing the core functions of supervision. How it is done, the methods, approaches, models and philosophies are for further articles.

But always, at the heart of supervision work, guiding the conversation that unfolds moment by moment, are these three vital pillars – the restorative, the formative, and the normative functions of coaching supervision.

What’s the difference between coaching supervision and coach mentoring?

Thu, 04 Jun 2020 00:02:41 GMT

If you’re coming to coaching supervision for the first time, you might be wondering what the difference is between it and coach mentoring? You might even be wondering whether there’s any difference at all or whether it’s all mere semantics.

Some coaching bodies, such as the International Coach Federation (ICF), require coach mentoring in order to achieve their professional credentials. Similarly, many coach-training schools will build a mentoring component into their requirements for completion of their course.

By contrast, other professional bodies, such as the Association for Coaching, require coaching supervision, not mentoring, to attain their credentials.

So, are they actually looking for the same thing?

The simple answer is, no!

There are distinct and important differences between the two and in this article, I aim to clearly lay them out.

There are 5 main areas of difference:

Eligibility to provide the service
Aims and remit of the work
Approach to the work
Duration of the work
Working relationship

Before we look at these, however, let’s see what definitions already exist that might suggest the difference.

The ICF, the world’s largest professional body for coaching, makes the distinction relatively clear.

It states that:

Mentor Coaching for an ICF Credential consists of coaching and feedback in a collaborative, appreciative and dialogued process based on an observed or recorded coaching session to increase the coach’s capability in coaching, in alignment with the ICF Core Competencies. Mentoring provides professional assistance in achieving and demonstrating the levels of coaching competency and capability demanded by the desired credential level.
https://coachfederation.org/mentor-coaching

For coaching supervision, the ICF states:

Coaching Supervision is a collaborative learning practice to continually build the capacity of the coach through reflective dialogue for the benefit of both coaches and clients. Coaching Supervision focuses on the development of the coach’s capacity through offering a richer and broader opportunity for support and development. Coaching Supervision creates a safe environment for the coach to share their successes and failures in becoming masterful in the way they work with their clients.
https://coachfederation.org/coaching-supervision

The European Mentoring & Coaching Council (EMCC) states that supervision is:

…the interaction that occurs when a mentor or coach brings their coaching or mentoring work experiences to a supervisor in order to be supported and to engage in reflective dialogue and collaborative learning for the development and benefit of the mentor or coach, their clients and their organisations.
https://bit.ly/304ZlnK

Based on the above definitions, we can already start to see some differences in terms of what they set out to achieve and these will be explored in more detail through the five areas identified earlier.

1 – Eligibility to provide the service

An interesting question, that points to deeper distinctions between the two activities, is around who can provide the service – who can be a coach mentor versus who can be a coaching supervisor.

Coach Mentoring

The ICF has strict guidelines about who can provide coach mentoring.

Without unpicking the somewhat byzantine specifics here, the criteria boil down to the requirement to hold a particular credential and to have a minimum level of experience working with the ICF’s own set of coaching competencies.

In other words, it doesn’t matter how experienced the potential coach mentor might be in a general sense, if they are not ICF-credentialed themselves, they cannot provide another coach with the mentoring required to gain ICF credentials.

Like most forms of mentoring, there is an assumption that to be a mentor is to have walked a certain path before and to be able to offer clear guidance to the less experienced person to follow that same path.

As we’ll see when we explore the differences in the remit of the work, this makes complete sense.

Coaching Supervision

So what about the coaching supervisor? Do they need to meet the same stringent demands?

Well, yes and no. They need to meet a different set of demands.

Here, the requirement is not an attachment to a shared set of competencies or a particular organisation, such as the ICF, nor even to necessarily having more experience to guide a less experienced coach along a path.

Instead, the supervisor is expected to have trained in the particular art of coaching supervision.

As the ICF points out:

Coaching Supervision is sufficiently different from coaching, so training to provide the knowledge and opportunity to practice Coaching Supervision skills is needed. As such, all Coaching Supervisors should receive Coaching Supervision training.
https://coachfederation.org/coaching-supervision

In supervision, the background of the supervisor, whether in coaching, therapy or something else, is far less important than their ability to offer a reflective space for the coach.

Indeed, unlike the coach mentor who must work with a shared set of competencies and behaviours, a coaching supervisor’s effectiveness is often enhanced through difference – a difference in their assumptions, professional background, theoretical perspectives, modalities, training and even core competencies.

The therapeutic supervisor, for instance, can create a powerful supervisory space for a coach without sharing the same coaching aims and behaviours.

But how can this be?

How can someone from a different professional background, such as therapy, supervise a coach but not able to mentor them?

Well, that all comes down to the aims and remit of the work.

The aims and remit of the work

The aims and remit of the work are where the crux of the difference between coach mentoring and coaching supervision really lies.

Coach Mentoring

We have seen how the ICF describes coach mentoring and we have seen that the criteria to be a mentor are very strict. And there’s a good reason for that.

The purpose of coach mentoring is to help a coach reach and demonstrate a level of competence around a specific set of skills, assumptions, behaviours and values. As such, the mentor needs to know them inside out, be highly-competent in them and be able to identify where their coach-mentee may be missing the mark.

Coach mentoring is not about open-ended questions such as how a coach might approach their work, find their unique self as a coach or explore their personal challenges are within their work. Rather, as already said, it’s about helping a coach meet a minimum standard against set criteria, usually to be able to be awarded a credential, qualification or accreditation.

I well remember this realisation striking home for me personally. I had long received supervision, with its spacious exploration of my work, and so when I sought out mentoring to achieve a particular professional credential, I was surprised by its overtly limited remit. I had expected a form of supervision but was quickly made aware that the work would be solely about the extent to which my work met the set standards for gaining the level of credentials I was seeking. In retrospect, it is obvious but, at the time, it felt strange, almost alien, to be so restricted in scope. However, the mentor was absolutely doing her job and was working in the way I needed rather than what I expected.

Coaching Supervision

The aims and remit of coaching supervision are significantly different from coach mentoring.

Unlike the relatively narrow focus of coach mentoring, with its key aim of meeting an agreed set of competencies, coaching supervision has a hugely expanded focus, enabling the exploration of anything that relates to the coach’s professional work.

The remit, in a nutshell, is the creation of a reflective space that enables the coach to bring attention to themselves, their work, their clients and the system.

I have written previously about the definitions of coaching supervision and so I won’t repeat it. But I think it’s useful to remember the three-fold aims of coaching supervision as being formative, restorative and normative.

These three areas open up a vast landscape of enquiry and, arguably, a coach could undertake supervision for a very long time without looking at whether their coaching skills matches a predefined competency, though in practice, coaching supervisors will often ensure they understand the competencies within which a coach is working, if only to ensure a more useful and informed conversation.

Ultimately, the remit of coaching supervision is the welfare of both the coach and their clients, the effectiveness of the coaching and the maintenance of professional standards, for instance, bringing awareness to where a coach might be straying outside of their competence into more therapeutic work.

Approach to the work

Of course, the aims and remit of these two disciplines also shape how the work itself is done.

Coach Mentoring

Since coach mentoring focuses primarily on supporting a coach to meet minimum standards against an agreed set of behavioural criteria, the approach is generally around identifying where development needs to happen.

And whilst coach mentoring is typically both appreciative and dialogic, it nonetheless cannot shrink from helping a coach to see where parts of their work are not meeting expectations.

This leads to much of the work being based around live or recorded coaching sessions with analysis between the coach and mentor around strengths and areas of development.

The coaching mentor is likely to point out ways the coach can more effectively or clearly meet the criteria. This can sometimes lead it feel more formulaic and restrictive. Indeed, in my own personal experience, even at the higher credential levels, there are moments of “game-playing” in order to be seen to meet the criteria of assessment whilst all the time knowing that this is not a behaviour that will stick in the long term. Therein, I would suggest, lies a weakness of the mentoring approach and the potentially-restrictive nature of external criteria.

Coaching Supervision

The approach in coaching supervision, based on its aims and remit, is more diverse.

Like coaching itself, it is fundamentally a relationship that fosters personal reflection. This allows many more and wider approaches.

Live coaching and recorded sessions can be used in supervision, though more often for less experienced coaches, but they are typically treated as launchpads for wider conversations rather than meeting agreed criteria. The conversation could equally explore how the coach was left feeling, what influences were shaping the coaching, the nature of the relationship between coach and client, the choice of coaching approach and even how the supervisor experienced the session.

In most cases though, there is no recording or live session and, instead, the coach and supervisor explore what the coach wishes to bring. This could be a challenge with a client, a pattern of behaviour they’ve noticed in themselves, a general ennui with their work, questions around who they are as a coach and much, much more besides.

Again, like coaching, there are many ways the coaching supervision may then engage in this dialogue. They may bring specific theoretical lenses to their work, for instance as an existential, gestalt, solution-focused or psychodynamic supervisor. Likewise, they may use creative processes, role-play, somatic response or physical movement.

In other words, whilst there are typically some common traits in supervision, such as socratic dialogue, informative interventions and reflective self-disclosure, there are many ways in which this could unfold, uninhibited as supervision by specific behaviours that must be met.

Indeed, its richness and diversity of practice is precisely why training is vital to bring out the essential qualities around the formative, restorative and normative functions.

Duration of the work

Another area of difference can be found in the duration of the work which can be summarised as fixed, short term and open-ended long term.

Coach Mentoring

With its focus on meeting minimum standards of agreed criteria, coach mentoring is typically of a fixed length and fairly short term.

For example, the ICF requires 10 hours of coach mentoring over a minimum of 5 months as part of the criteria to gain their credentials. Once achieved, this mentoring won’t be needed again until the next level of credentials is sought and an appropriately qualified mentor is found.

Coaching Supervision

By stark contrast, coaching supervision is of no fixed-duration and is typically undertaken through the professional life of the coach.

Indeed, recognised the vital importance of coaching supervision, the ICF state:

ICF supports Coaching Supervision for professional coach practitioners as part of their portfolio of continuing professional development (CPD) activities designed to keep them fit for purpose.
https://coachfederation.org/coaching-supervision

A coaching supervision relationship could last for many years and the guide to its lifespan is its ongoing usefulness and the extent to which the supervisor is still able to challenge and bring newness to the coach over a long period of time.

The working relationship

The final difference between coach mentoring and coaching supervision is the nature of the relationship. Whilst both are based on adult learning principles, and the coach in both cases has chosen to receive the support, there is nonetheless a clear difference in the underpinning relationship.

Coach Mentoring

In coach mentoring, the mentor is by definition someone who has more experience and has walked the specific path before and can clearly and confidently guide the less experienced coach in where they need to change and develop.

This is not to say that the relationship is one of master and apprentice nor is it authoritarian. But it is predicated on the mentor knowing what is needed and having the expertise to advise, even to teach, the coach specifically how to meet required behaviours and skills.

Coaching Supervision

Coaching supervision is essentially a relationship of equals. The coaching supervisor is not necessarily superior to the coach in expertise or experience, even though this is often the case.

Instead, this is about a relationship of exploration, uncovering and reflection. The supervisor is not “senior” but someone who can resonate with the human response throughout the system and who can use themselves as an instrument to bring out greater awareness of self, system and practice.

Conclusion

If you’ve read to this point, I hope you feel clearer now on the differences between coach mentoring and coaching supervision.

Both are valuable and necessary. But they serve different purposes.

The critical issue is for the coach to know what they need and for the mentor or supervisor to help the coach express this to ensure there is good fit. A coach seeking to meet specific criteria but receiving more open-ended supervision is unlikely to get what they need. But equally, a coach seeking a wider perspective on their coaching and developing a greater sense of self, will be ill-served by coach mentoring.

ICCS

Do Coaches Really Need Supervision? 7 Reasons Coaches Find Coaching Supervision Invaluable

How does supervision help coaches?

Develop your coaching style.

Stay emotionally balanced.

Expand your toolkit

Work through ethical issues.

“Know thyself”

Have a team behind you

Develop your “internal supervisor”

Do all coaches really need supervision?

References

The Seven Eyed Model: A Map to Navigate Your Coaching Supervision Practice

A map to navigate your supervision practice

The structure of the model

Mode 1. The coachee

Mode 2. The coach’s interventions

Mode 3. The relationship between the coach and the coachee

Mode 4. The coach’s awareness

Mode 5. The supervisory relationship

Mode 6. The supervisor’s self-reflection

Mode 7. The wider context

In summary

Bringing the Solution-Focus to Coaching Supervision

Here are some of these key elements that form the how:

Timing

Pause

The process, zoomed in

After the Miracle Question

Integrating the mind-body-emotions

Anchoring questions

Possibilities

Recall previous similar situations

Focus on positive language

Scaling questions

Action bias

Further Reading:

Ethical Responsibility and Decision-Making in Supervision

Holistic approach to the realm of ethics

Ethical responsibilities of supervision

Ethical reflection

Ethical maturity

Ethical role modelling

Ethical decision making

Navigating ethical challenges

Using Clutterbuck’s Seven Conversations in Supervision

Practical Questions for the Seven Conversations

The Coach’s self-reflection and inner conversation before the session

The Client’s self-reflection and inner conversation before the session

During the session:

The Coach reflection-in-action/inner conversation during the session

The Spoken Conversation between coach and client during the session

The Client’s reflection-in-action/inner conversation during the session

After the session:

The Coach’s self-reflection and inner conversation after the session:

The Client self-reflection and inner conversation after the session:

Summary

Reflections on the Restorative Function in Supervision

What is the restorative function?

How do supervisors provide the restorative function?

Coaching skills + supervision methodology

Active Listening, Presence and Curiosity

Cathartic Questioning

Supervision without the restorative function

Summary

Why did we choose to be a wholly virtual school?

Shedding Light on the Normative Function in Coaching Supervision

The 3 Functions of Supervision

The Restorative Function: – the coach as a person.

The Formative Function – the coach as a coach.

The Normative Function – the coach as ethical practitioner

The Normative Function

Ethical dilemmas and the Normative Function

“Being on the same normative page”

The Normative Function and Ethical Maturity

The six dimensions of ethical maturity

Sensitivity

Discernment

Implementation

Accountability