Coaching Supervision …Powerful Perspectives

By Mary Musselbrook of Koru

As a coach, I continually seek (very selfishly) to keep myself excited and engaged with my work and (more altruistically) to keep building my capacity to do meaningful work with my clients. Supervision is core to enriching and growing my capability and contribution as a coach.

All the same, I have to confess to some initial discomfort with the word Supervision. For me it conjured up exams … scrutiny … being watched in the schoolyard in case you did anything that could warrant being marched off to the headmistress … (and for all you psychologists out there, this reflects my independent spirit, not a propensity for getting into trouble … honest!)

So, I had to take the word apart and build up new meaning for myself that has enabled me to integrate it as a sustaining element of my coaching practice. What I work with is the notion of “super-vision” as “powerful-perspective”

Why would we want “powerful perspectives” on our coaching?

We want powerful perspectives in order to grow and invigorate our coaching practice. We want perspectives that will enable us to see with fresh eyes – to encourage us to notice what we are doing and how we are doing it; and to help us to become aware of what we are not doing and what we could do differently.

What perspectives can be powerful?

The powerful-perspective of a formal supervisory relationship: A one-to-one relationship with an experienced practitioner whom we have engaged as our coaching supervisor – the coach’s coach. This is the “powerful-perspective” that most of us think of when we talk about coaching supervision. This creates a healthy habit of opening oneself to scrutiny which transitions into an integral part of the coach’s continuing professional development activities. Peter Hawkins and Michael Carroll, amongst others have written extensively on frameworks for the supervision of coaching practice.

The powerful perspective of peer groups: A peer supervision group can provide a space to learn from the experience of others; to be supported in working through challenges in your own practice; and to have robust debate on ethical and professional issues. Many coaches are independent practitioners. So an added bonus of establishing a peer supervision group is the sense of connectedness it can bring. Within a larger consultancy it can strengthen the organisational ethos.

Good one-to-one supervision or peer group supervision can derive from observation, but primarily it enables you to surface and examine the information and impressions you glean from self-reflection and from client feedback.

The powerful perspective of Self: To paraphrase Donald Schon in “The Reflective Practitioner”: “Through reflection we … can make new sense of the situations of uncertainty or uniqueness which we may allow ourselves to experience.” And in coaching, what are our clients if not uncertain and unique?

The challenge, of course is to be able to reflect on our practice without detracting from the client’s coaching experience. We aim in a coaching session to focus our energy and attention on the client. But at some level we will also be experiencing a sense of how we are “performing” (are we “in flow”; was that question effective etc). It can be useful to make margin jottings that provide you with reminders of what was happening at particular points in the coaching process. In a coaching relationship where trust has been established and the permission of the client has been given, you can record the session. Video-taping is usually impractical outside the training environment, but it is now amazingly easy to buy a reasonably-priced, good quality voice-recorder. Listening to the recording not only enables you to notice and evaluate the impact and effectiveness of your coaching in that particular session, it gives you a chance to deepen your understanding of the client’s issues and to bring that to bear in subsequent sessions thus improving your contribution.

The powerful perspective of the Client: The client has a uniquely “powerful-perspective” on our capability and contribution as a coach. The client’s perspective can also be the hardest one to access. Not least because it is the hardest to ask for as it requires us to really make ourselves vulnerable. As always, the value of any invited feedback will be strongly determined by what is asked for and how it is asked for. In addition, it is important to create time for a feedback conversation that doesn’t “steal” from the client’s coaching time and it can be very helpful to give the client advance notice of the areas you want to receive feedback on.

So … super-vision can be accessed from a multitude of perspectives … and a good coaching supervisor will assist you in harvesting and integrating the learning from them all.

About the author

Mary Musselbrook, Koru, Coaching for Leaders and Teams
Web: www.koru.org.uk
Email: marym.koru@btinternet.com
Tel: 01600 869132
Mobile: 07803 287416