Coaching Supervision

Advancing Practice, Changing Landscapes

Jo Birch, Peter Welch, Jo Birch, Peter Welch

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• eBook ISBN: 9781000011814
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

Coaching and mentoring supervision is a rapidly expanding field. This book is a curated collection of contemporary thinking; presenting cutting-edge contributions from international writers, leaders in the professional field, academics and practitioners who offer a range of accessible applied research, practice examples, case studies, guidelines and reflective prompts to readers. As in art galleries, some pieces require reflection – and return visits may be necessary. The work is edgy and new, and yet totally grounded in the coaching and mentoring supervisor experience, bringing pragmatic solutions to current complex challenges.

Over the last decade coaching supervision has moved from a rare and privileged audience to being common place amongst 'best practice' coaches. This book harnesses the current surge in curiosity, knowledge and practice in coaching and mentoring supervision and provides a collective statement of our times. Each chapter, in its highly individual way, equips us to face the demands of the VUCA environment. In turn, the book resources coaching and mentoring supervisors to support their supervisees – coaches and mentors who work with leaders, grappling with global, community and personal challenges, in this uncertain, fast moving world. Supervision for mentors is developing alongside coaching supervision and at present there appears to be no obvious distinctions with little current research focussing on the mentoring supervision experience. However, its distinctive identity is still forming. We invite mentors, and mentor supervisors, as they read these works, to consider the emerging similarities and differences in addressing requirements for mentoring supervision.

The book brings together pioneering research and practice and as such will remain current for many years. This book will be popular with experienced professionals who want to stretch and deepen their practice, keep up-to-date with current studies, challenge and catalyse their own thinking, and embrace learning from real-world practitioner examples and applied research.

1
Supervision and the seventh eye

Katherine Long

We must be willing to get rid of the life we’ve planned, so as to have the life that is waiting for us. The old skin has to be shed before the new one can come.

Joseph Campbell (Campbell, 1991)

Introduction

This chapter explores coaching and coach supervision through the ‘seventh lens’ of the Seven Eyed Supervision model (Hawkins and Shohet, 2000), particularly examining some of the core assumptions which have shaped coaching as we know it today, as well as the relationship between the twin systems of coaching and supervision, and how they stay relevant in a changing world.

Given this seventh lens invites our awareness of the macro systems and trends which encompass the work of coaches (or coach-mentors) and supervisors, the focus of this piece is intentionally broad-ranging, attempting to bring both an ‘emic’ (as seen from within a professional or social community) as well as an ‘etic’ view (as seen from the outside).

This chapter also attempts to weave in some of the themes which have surfaced when practitioners gather to explore their work from a meta-perspective, and what may be crystallising from those inquiries. The research data for this chapter is therefore emergent and dialogic in nature, and includes conversations which I have hosted across different groups of coaches and supervisors including: live research with coaches (Long, 2014); the ‘Squaring the Circle’ session at the International Conference on Coach Supervision (2014) exploring the role of supervision in the transfer of learning from individual interventions to the wider organisation; workshops exploring so-called macro ‘Ego to Eco’ shifts with alumni of OCM, Ashridge and the International Centre for Reflective Practice, as well as with the Critical Coaching Research Group; conversations at the ‘Across Boundaries’ international supervision Open Space event co-hosted by the Association of Coaching Supervisors (AOCS) and OCM in 2016; the West Midlands Organisation Development Network Europe (ODNE) community and AOCS joint event (‘Systems of Change – Joining the Dots’ Theory-U based inquiry) in 2017; and conversations with several cohorts of students in the Master’s in Coaching programme at Warwick University. These discussions have focussed on a central question exploring how both practitioners and the professional bodies constantly evolve to remain relevant and ‘fit for practice.’

To avoid confusion, it’s important from the outset to clarify the terms ‘coaching’ and ‘supervision’ as they are used in this chapter, as depending on your viewpoint, you might interpret them in one or more of the following ways:

• As practice, i.e. the actual activity of coaches (or coach-mentors) and coach supervisors (or coach-mentor supervisors if you prefer) as it occurs in real life, in all its hybrid forms, including virtual and AI coaching platforms, such as MIT’s Coach Otto, or the Pocket Confidant self-coaching app;
• As a set of widely recognised definitions, ethical standards and competences created by professional bodies to which practitioners are expected to adhere;
• As the global community of all practitioners (irrespective of professional membership), operating within diverse niches, markets and cultures around the world;
• As coaching and supervision are understood and experienced from outside the profession by individual or organisational clients, by adjacent professions (counselling, organisation development, training and teaching, etc.) or by society at large;
• As referring to the formalised practice of a timeless skills set and dialogic approach to human development which will continue to exist whether coaching, mentoring and supervision as we currently know them remain as distinct professional activities or not; or
• As a meta-perspective of the conjoined fields of coaching and supervision as a whole, which includes but does not purely consist of professional bodies and academia, and the way in which this dual system engages with its neighbours and stakeholders.

Reflection

• Notice your responses to the previous list of possible meanings. Which feel familiar or strange? Which do you resonate with? Do you have any strong reactions to any? Was there anything else you would have changed or added?
• What does this tell you about the way your supervision practice is focussed, as well as what you may be privileging, and what may be in your blind spot?
• What might be the response(s) of the professional bodies or communities of practice which you may be aligned to or be a member of, and what does this tell you about their way of seeing the world?

In this chapter, we will be considering coaching and supervision from the final description in this list, i.e. a meta-perspective on a dual system, which can be seen as a composite of each of the other previous interpretations. In this way, coaching and supervision are not seen as just one ‘thing,’ or even as two separate things, but as a dynamic exchange between multiple players which creates a macro entity. This description may feel unfamiliar to those whose habit or preference is to clearly delineate these activities, as opposed to viewing them as interacting and changing elements within a wider whole.

Here you are invited to adopt a more environmental, systemic perspective, which sees coaching and supervision as interconnected activities occurring within a broader and highly diverse ecology. To use an analogy from nature, whilst it is possible to analyse a woodland by categorising its separate species, it provides little understanding of how a woodland actually functions. In a dynamic and more holistic understanding of a woodland, we pay attention to how pioneer species create soil through the help of enabling micro-organisms to colonise and make way for an increasing diversity of life-forms inhabiting complex and mutually sustaining niches. Similarly, held in the matrix of overlapping socioeconomic, political and environmental systems, coach-mentoring and supervision can be seen as a twin system which has evolved through time and which includes individual practitioners, academia, course providers and professional bodies.

Indeed, when it is seen in this way, one could argue that supervision, given its competences and parameters are currently determined by the coaching bodies themselves, depends upon a very close relationship with the professional bodies for its own survival; supervision therefore can be seen as both a product and a partner of the coaching profession, and unlike the relationship between some other professions and their regulatory bodies, there is very little ‘arm’s-length’ relationship. Furthermore, supervisors may also be coaches and providers of coach education, and therefore have an interest in meeting standards set out by professional bodies, and indeed may be embedded within them as active members. This is not an attempt to argue for separation, but an invitation to acknowledge that there is a symbiotic relationship between supervision and coaching, and this will be important to consider in relation to the arguments explored throughout this chapter.

As is hopefully becoming clear, the intention for this thought piece is to provide a springboard for reflection and dialogue, to consider practice and professionalism from a more ecological frame, and from time to time you will be invited to pause and simply notice your own relationship to the content, and what it suggests to you regarding further inquiry or possible next steps, including ideas for exploration in group supervision. Assuming you are either a coaching or supervision practitioner (and quite possibly both), you have a stake in their combined futures and are therefore not a passive reader, but one who has a role to play in what each becomes.

A brief timeline of coaching

I think calling it climate change is rather limiting. I would rather call it the everything change. Everything is changing in ways which we cannot yet fully understand or predict.

Margaret Atwood (Finn, 2015)

Before we attempt to look forward to how coaching and supervision lean in to the challenges and opportunities of the future, it may be helpful to take a retrospective look at how they evolved into their current forms, and to remind ourselves of world events happening at the time. Coaching as we know it today does not have a precise start date, but according to Brock (2014), one of the leading researchers of the history of coaching, the earliest coaching programmes or companies emerged within the UK and the US in the early 1980s, following publications such as Gallwey’s Inner Game of Tennis in 1974, the year Nixon resigned, followed by Fournies’ Coaching for Improved Performance in 1978, the year the first IVF baby was born, and Megginson’s A Manager’s Guide to Coaching in 1979, the year Britain elected Margaret Thatcher.

Whilst coaching has a mixed provenance, whose roots extend back much further in time, drawing as it does on a number of philosophical traditions, we can see that the 1980s and 90s were a significant period for coaching, which was marked by the successive founding of many professional bodies: the European Mentoring and Coaching Council in 1992, not long after the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and Mandela’s release in 1990, then the European Association for Supervision and Coaching in 1994, International Coach Federation in 1995, Société Francaise de Coaching in 1996, Worldwide Association of Business Coaches and Association for National Organisations for Supervision in Europe in 1997 and Association of Coaching in 2002, the year following the destruction of the World Trade Center. A later clustering of organisations such as Coaches and Mentors of South Africa and Asia Pacific Alliances of Coaches established themselves in 2007, signalling the spread of coaching globally, the year the first iPhone came out. Although a number of these organisations have advocated for supervision right from the start, the widespread acceptance of supervision as a key element of professional practice has taken much longer to be adopted, with ICF only formally recognising supervision (in contrast to mentor coaching) much later.

To put this timeline into a wider socio-economic context, the launch of many professional coaching and supervision bodies pre-dates the advent of the major social media platforms which shape today’s global communication (LinkedIn was founded in 2002, Skype in 2003, Facebook in 2004, YouTube in 2005, Twitter in 2006). Indeed, e-mail was still a relatively new phenomenon when EMCC was founded. As well as preceding social media, the founding of most of these coaching and supervision bodies pre-dates the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008 and the subsequent worldwide financial crisis from which economies are still recovering today. Both the rise of social media and the global banking crisis are just two of many mega-trends and events occurring since the foundations of coaching as a profession were laid, and it is worth considering how even just these two, and their combined ripple effects, have had a significant impact on the wider contexts in which coaching and supervision take place.

For example, in response to the ongoing legacy of austerity which the banking crisis created, we see many organisations, and especially the public sector, under constant pressure to do more with less, and consequently needing to explore partnerships with a wide range of organisations operating across their geographic footprints to deliver shared services (Cullen, Willurn, Chrobot-Mason and Palus, 2014; Senge, Hamilton and Kania, 2015). This has forced a different perspective on leadership, with early adopters of living systems thinking such as Bateson, Capra, Maturana and Varela increasingly influencing more mainstream approaches to change, a radical shift from purely transactional and even transformational paradigms regarding leadership.

We also see the rise of a new generation of platform-based enterprises disrupting traditional organisations, which must either re-invent themselves or be left by the wayside. According to Matt Kingdon, co-founder of? WhatIf!, almost three-quarters of the UK’s largest companies in their 2014 survey admitted to reliance on fading revenue streams, and more than a quarter feared that their current business model would no longer work by 2017. “Despite recognising the acute need for innovation, most corporate leaders are struggling to create the conditions for new ideas to thrive. With a few notable exceptions, our research shows efficiency-focussed leadership, disconnected structures and laborious processes are stunting hopes of an innovation-led UK recovery. Swift action is needed to generate sustainable economic recovery” (Groom, 2014).

Broadening the historical and environmental context yet further, there is a significant debate within scientific communities (Crutzen and Stoermer, 2000) to rename the geological era we are now living in, proposing that the Holocene, a relatively stable inter-glacial period which started approximately 11,650 years ago, has already ended, and that humanity has now entered the Anthropocene, where human activity is the dominant influence on the climate and environment. In ways which are unprecedented and far-reaching, human beings now have the single greatest impact on the planet, and we are already starting to witness what is being termed as the sixth mass extinction of species. When we deeply engage with this reality, it invites us to profoundly examine our moral purpose, and hopefully to be brave enough to question our actions and our paradigms. In Einstein’s words, “We cannot solve our problems with the same level of thinking that created them.”, and it is above all a crisis of perception that the planet is facing.

As coaching and therefore supervision are prima...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Contributors
• Series editor foreword
• Introduction
• 1 Supervision and the seventh eye
• 2 Seven simple rules: an alternative lens
• 3 Neuro-behavioural supervision: applied neuroscience in the context of coaching supervision
• 4 The power and influence of the unconscious mind
• 5 Working in the shadows: pain and suffering in coaching and supervision
• 6 A new dimension? Using observational data creatively in supervision
• 7 Attending, daring, becoming: making boundary-play conscious
• 8 Extending ourselves as supervisors: stepping outside our cultural conditioning
• 9 Moving from frozen code to live vibrant relationship: towards a philosophy of ethical coaching supervision
• 10 Supervision for internal coaches
• 11 Guidelines for team coach supervision
• 12 Supervision’s oasis for leaders and people practitioners
• 13 Supervision of supervision
• 14 Co-evolution: exploring synergies between Artificial Intelligence (AI) and the supervisor
• Summary
• Index