An Existential and Phenomenological Approach to Coaching Supervision

Monica Hanaway

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2021
• Topic: Psychology
• eBook ISBN:
  9781000439731
• Subtopic: Mentoring & Coaching
• Index: Psychology

As the methodology for coaching supervision has grown and developed in recent years, so too has the need for comprehensive engagement with the needs of supervisees. This ground-breaking and much-needed new book from Monica Hanaway presents a unique existential approach to coaching supervision.

This book includes an introduction to the model, with emphasis on the philosophical focus of the existential coaching approach and concepts such as uncertainty, freedom, emotions, values and beliefs, meaning, and relatedness. Hanaway offers supervisors ways of working with their supervisees on each of the key existential themes, as well as a comparison with other coaching supervision models.

This book describes how a supervisor can bring an existential approach into their work, both with existential coaches and with those working in different modalities who are interested in adding to their portfolio of service. It will be of immense value to academics and students of coaching psychology.

PART ONE

• The meaning and role of supervision in professionals concerned with the support, development, and treatment of others
• The current position of coaching supervision

1 The meaning and role of supervision in professionals concerned with the support, development, and treatment of others

DOI: 10.4324/9781003130895-1

The verb to ‘supervise’ has its origins in the Latin ‘supervidere’. In business it is usually linked with hierarchy and it sits within a management function. The word comprises of two parts: ‘super’ meaning ‘over’ or ‘from above’, and ‘videre’ meaning ‘to see’. In supervising something you are generally overseeing a project, or the people working on it; this may include assessing what needs to be done, assigning the work, and making sure it gets done to a certain standard. In business it is focused on the needs of the organisation.

Within a broader definition of its meaning its importance has long been recognised in professions that provide interpersonal support and development, such as psychotherapy, social work, psychology, and mental health services where staff can be under both personal and professional pressure. In these professions, supervision needs to straddle aspects of both the professional and personal needs of the supervisee. Although it remains focused on the professional, it recognises that the key tools for those working in these professions are the individual’s psychological resources and resilience. Supervision provides a safe place to keep those tools sharp and to ensure that the correct tool is being used for the job in hand. Thus, supervision is widely accepted as being an essential aspect of ethical and effective practice and the cornerstone of continuing professional development.

Although coaching often focuses on business issues, business is made up of people, not issues or components, and each of these individuals experience deep, rich, and diverse human dilemmas which can at times become important elements in the coaching process. So, it would be strange not to refer to the thirty years’ experience, debate, and analysis which have taken place in those psychological professions where supervision was adopted much earlier than in coaching. Indeed, many practising coaches are professionally trained, and practise or have practised as counsellors or psychotherapists. Even where this is the case, it is important to remain clear about the different focus and boundaries in psychotherapy and coaching. Whybrow and Palmer (2006) suggest that even non-clinical populations contain potentially vulnerable clients, and it is essential that when coaches find themselves working with such clients, they are aware of their own personal and professional limitations. This immediately flags up the potential advantage of having a supervisor who is very clear on these boundaries and who is able to signpost the supervisee to more appropriate support if this is what the client requires. The supervisee may enable the client to access such services rather than trying to substitute for them.

Despite the need to remain conscious of these different professional foci, it is necessary to provide a brief overview of the main models of supervision. I am starting with looking to psychotherapy, with its long history of requiring clinical supervision for all therapists throughout their professional careers. There are many excellent books available which provide detailed analysis of these approaches for those wanting to know more; here I aim to just provide an outline.

The practice of clinical supervision started as a form of ‘apprenticeship’ in which a supervisee with minimal skill and knowledge would observe, assist, and receive feedback from a more experienced professional. It was assumed that such an experienced professional would automatically make a good supervisor. Although it may be correct to assume that the relational skills held by such a person would help them in their role as supervisor, it soon became clear that a more considered approach, which included providing training opportunities for supervisors, would provide a better experience for both supervisee and supervisor. Indeed, Falender and Shafranske (2004) noted that clinical knowledge and skills are not as easily transferrable as the master–apprentice model implied, and that observation was of little use without reflection. At the same time, the hierarchical nature of such a master–apprentice model began to be questioned and ideas developed to build models of supervision which recognised the complexity of the relationship between supervisor and supervisee, as well as that between supervisee and their client. This movement resulted in a number of different supervision models which can be briefly divided into the following categories.

Psychoanalytical/Psychotherapy-based supervision models

The Psychoanalytic/Psychotherapy models emerged in the first phase of the development of supervision, during the 1920s. These models leaned heavily on psychotherapy/ psychoanalysis theory and held closely to the fundamental belief that supervisees learn best if they experience the qualities of therapy in the supervisory relationship (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009).

In the early days of Freudian analysis, supervision was largely informal, but in 1922 the International Psychoanalytic Society formulated a set of standards within which personal analysis of the trainee was the cornerstone. This was considered by some people to have created a tension between psychotherapy and supervision as some supervision models required the supervisor to provide both supervision and personal therapy to the supervisee. Psychotherapy-based models of supervision often feel like a natural extension of therapy itself, within which ‘theoretical orientation informs the observation and selection of clinical data for discussion in supervision as well as the meanings and relevance of those data’ (Falender & Shafaanske, 2004:9). The supervisor is intent on develop the supervisee as a person as well as a practitioner.

Counselling/Psychotherapy-based supervision models

By the 1950s we see developments in supervision based on broader counselling/ psychotherapy orientations. These continued to use interventions and counselling techniques (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009) and covered a range of approaches including Psychodynamic, Person-Centred, Cognitive-Behavioural, Solution-Focused, and Narrative. The approaches were still quite therapy-focused, with supervisors focusing on elements such as defence mechanisms, transference and countertransference, affective reactions, etc.

The more psychodynamic approaches continued to draw on psychoanalytic theories and were classified by Frawley-O’Dea and Sarnat (2001) into three groups: patient-centred, supervisee-centred, and supervisory-matrix-centred.

Patient-centred supervision

This focuses on the patient’s presentation and behaviour, with the supervisor taking a didactic role aiming to enable the supervisee to understand and respond to the patient’s material. The supervisor is considered to be analytical, detached, experienced and knowledgeable, and to hold ‘considerable authority’ (Frawley-O’Dea & Sarnat (2001). Due to the focus on the patient, there is little or no focus on the supervisor–supervisee relationship, and as long as both hold the same theoretical beliefs there is little space for disagreement or conflict. The authority of the supervisor can provide a feeling of safety for the supervisee, leaving them fully open to learning from the supervisor. However, should there be a disagreement the supervisee might be left feeling very vulnerable.

Supervisee-centred supervision

This draws on several psychodynamic theories including self-psychology, ego psychology and object relations. It focuses more on the supervisee’s experiences in their work and explores any anxieties, resistances, and problems in learning. The supervisor remains a detached authority figure but moves away from being didactic to become more experiential. The aim of the supervision is to enhance the supervisee’s understanding of their own psychological processes (Haynes et al., 2003).

The supervisory-matrix-centred supervision approach

This attends to the material of both the client and the supervisee and introduces the need to also examine the relationship between supervisee and supervisor. The supervisor is no longer seen as the uninvolved expert but as a participant in the supervisory relationship who must also reflect on their own personal processes and the relational themes within their relationship with the supervisee. This calls for an awareness of any parallel processes in which the supervisee’s behaviour with their client parallels their interaction with the supervisor (Haynes et al., 2003).

Developmental models of supervision

From the 1970s, supervision models moved away from counselling and psychotherapy theories and started to place more emphasis on education, and on the developmental stages of supervisees across their professional lifespan not just in the early stages of their careers, moving from ‘novice’ through to ‘professional’, ‘experienced professional’, and then to ‘senior professional/expert’. The growing focus on reflecting on practice was a major shift in supervision. It separated supervision from counselling and historically marked the point when the focus of supervision shifted from the person of the worker to the work itself.

Developmental and social role frameworks/models began to be developed (Skovholt & Ronnestad, 1992; Carroll, 2006; Bernard & Goodyear, 2009). These were often categorised into three main groups: stage developmental models; process developmental models; and lifespan developmental models.

Stage developmental models describe supervisees moving through progressive stages in their professional maturity and within the supervisory relationship. The beginner is seen as highly motivated, but with only limited awareness and quite dependent on the supervisor. Over time and through the experience gained, the supervisee becomes more consistently motivated, more fully aware, less self-conscious, and more autonomous.

An example of a stage developmental model is The Integrated Developmental Model (IDM) developed by Cal Stoltenberg et al. (1981) which was based on Hogan’s (1964) descriptions of trainee levels of development, and Hunt’s (1975) application of Conceptual Systems Theory (CST) (Harvey et al., 1961) in the teaching environment. Hunt broke down the development phases into four from neophyte to master counsellor and used dimensions of interpersonal perception, identity, motivational orientation, emotionality, and cognitive structural attributes to characterise each of these levels. CST theory is concerned with the cognitive variables, referred to as CL (conceptual level). Hunt (1978:78) described CL as ‘a personality characteristic that describes persons on a developmental hierarchy of increasing conceptual complexity, self-responsibility and independence’. Stoltenberg’s model used these concepts to promote personal and professional growth through three development levels by closely attending to three overriding structures:

• Self and Other Awareness (Cognitive and Affective)
• Motivation
• Autonomy

These were considered under the following categories:

• Intervention Skills Competence
• Assessment Techniques
• Interpersonal Assessment
• Client Conceptualisation
• Individual Differences
• Theoretical Orientation
• Treatment Goals and Plans
• Professional Ethics

Another influential developmental supervision model is that of Loganbill et al . (1982) which is based on processes which are ‘continually changing and recursive’ (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009:94) and expressed by characteristic attitudes towards the work, the self, and the supervisor. This model dismisses any ideas of linear progression through stages, in favour of continual cycling, ‘with increasing…levels of integration at each cycle’ (Bernard & Goodyear, 2009:94). The model was influenced by the theories and assumptions of developmental psychology, particularly those of Margaret Mahler, Erik Erikson, and Arthur Chickering and was based on four assumptions:

• The training experience is more than the incremental build-up of skills but rather ‘the integrated formulation of a therapist with an identity’ (Loganbill et al., 1982:15).
• There are distinct, sequential, hierarchical, and necessary stages just as ‘infants learn to crawl before they learn to walk, though the ultimate goal is not to crawl well…So, it is with the supervisee some of the stages and processes may be very painful, but it is developmentally important for the supervisee to experience them fully’ (ibid:4).
• Although the stages are sequential, different learning tasks may be at different developmental levels.
• To progress one assumes ‘a careful sequence of experience and reflection” (ibid:15). Development is not restricted to the life of a formal training programme but continues throughout professional life. Loganbill et al. suggested that the stage model is actually one in which a counsello...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Endorsements
• Half-Title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Acknowledgments
• Introduction
• PART ONE
• PART TWO
• PART THREE
• PART FOUR
• Conclusion
• Bibliography
• Index