#120 Questions: What’s the point of coaching supervision?
Answer: It depends on where you're looking from.
Supervisors want supervision to be worthwhile and meet the needs of coaches at different stages of their development: novice coaches developing core skills and ensuring coaching quality, mid-career coaches focusing on individual development goals, and advanced practitioners engaging in a journey of discovery without set goals. However, there is a risk that the supervisor, not the supervisee, harbours a desire for the supervisee to develop in a certain way so that their supervision can continue to support them.
Coaches engage in supervision to gain feedback, enhance their skills, and achieve personal and professional development goals. However, these goals change over time, so it is hard to pin down an enduring, precise purpose of supervision from their perspective.
The coaches’ clients at the individual and organisational levels are interested in coaching outcomes. Whether they acknowledge it explicitly or not, they want supervision to ensure coaching quality. Perhaps this is the universal point of supervision?
The coaching profession strives to ensure quality practice and recommends supervision to support coaches’ development at different career stages. They do this by promulgating competency frameworks and codes of practice and accrediting or credentialling coaches using these frameworks. Commentators have argued that assessing behavioural indicators of competence levels is too narrow a focus for maintaining quality, and that supervision better serves the profession by focusing on coaching capability by establishing, deepening and extending reflective practice as coaches mature.
We might bring these perspectives together, if:
Supervisors let go of pre-conceived notions of coach development as a linear path and focus on developing their supervisees’ capability by enabling and encouraging their reflective practice.
Coaches embrace their clients’ need for supervision to ensure quality coaching and use this to inform their personal and professional development.
Professional bodies recognise that coaching capability and maturity go beyond competency frameworks.
I believe this is achievable if supervisors invite their supervisees to answer the following questions, perhaps even in this order as the coach gains experience:
How can we ensure the quality of your coaching? (focus on Performance)
How can you become an even more capable coach? (focus on Growth)
How will we explore your learning horizons; who are you becoming? (focus on Maturity)
I suggest there may be a universal purpose of coaching supervision to help coaches mature into who they are becoming. Maturity is not a destination but is concerned with developing practical coaching wisdom and a deeper sense of one’s coaching identity.
See also:
Bachkirova, T. and Jackson, P. (2019). The 3Ps of Supervision and Coaching, in The Heart of Supervision (Eds. Eve Turner and Stephen Palmer), London: Routledge.
Rajasinghe, D., Garvey, B., Smith, W.A., Burt, S., Barosa-Pereira, A., Clutterbuck, D., and Csigas, Z. (2022). On becoming a coach: narratives of learning and development, The Coaching Psychologist, 18(2): 5-20.
