Challenges in Professional Supervision

Current Themes and Models for Practice

Liz Beddoe, Allyson Davys

• Publisher: Jessica Kingsley Publishers
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781849054652
• eBook ISBN: 9780857008435
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Nursing
• Index: Social Sciences

Challenges in Professional Supervision draws on the latest research and theory to explore issues, trends and developments in supervision work.

The provision of excellent supervision is strongly linked to improved performance and staff retention. In this book, supervision is examined across a broad range of settings, addressing concerns common to a range of professions, including health, social work and counselling. The book is divided into two sections: the first describes the contemporary themes in professional supervision and the second discusses the models and skills being employed to deliver it. Issues such as supervising ethically, practitioner wellbeing and managing the process are all explored. There are also chapters on group supervision, supervision of managers and how to have difficult conversations.

This book is ideal for managers and senior practitioners in health and social care with an active interest in developing, energising and inspiring their supervision practice, as well as academics interested in keeping up-to-date with developments in the field.

Part One

CONTEMPORARY IDEAS AND DEBATES IN PROFESSIONAL SUPERVISION

Chapter 1

Supervision in Context

Surveillance or Support?

Discussion seemingly adopts a dialectical approach, seeing supervision as largely introspective (a therapeutic model) or its antithesis, depicting it as instrumental – a tool for surveillance and the soft exercise of power and authority. In the latter model, supervision is seen as symptomatic of enduring tensions between professional autonomy and managerial accountability. (Manthorpe et al. 2013, p.54)

Although writing specifically about supervision in social work, Manthorpe et al. (2013) could be writing about supervision within most of the helping professions. That such contradictory perspectives lead to some tensions concerning supervision is an enduring theme and is consistent across the professions. For example, in 1998 Cutcliffe et al. also detected a dichotomy within supervsion in the nursing profession and wrote:

There appears to be some confusion within nursing as to the purpose of clinical supervision. There are two distinct schools of thought. One sees clinical supervision as an opportunity for a more experienced nurse to monitor, educate and support a less experienced nurse in relation to how he/she carries out practical skills. The other sees clinical supervision as an opportunity to help and support nurses reflect on their dilemmas, difficulties and successes, and to explore how they reacted to, solved or achieved them. This school views supervision as a forum for considering the personal, interpersonal and practical aspects of care, in order to develop and maintain nurses who are skilled and reflective practitioners. (p.920)

Tensions between the various functions of supervision have continued to preoccupy many authors over recent decades (Beddoe 2010; Jones 2004; Noble and Irwin 2009; Northcott 2000), and may pose barriers to the development of supervision in some professional contexts (Calvert 2014). Supervision is, and remains, a contestable practice. Rather than reprise the tensions discussed above, it may be useful to consider how supervision is seen through several different lenses in the current era. Echoing Manthorpe et al.’s introspective and therapeutic perspective, the first lens might be described as the lens of personal survival in one’s chosen profession, with its gaze firmly on the supportive or restorative function of supervision. There is a meditative aspect to this perspective, allowing as it does some potential for advocacy of supervisees’ needs within organisational or professional contexts. While missing from the dichotomy suggested in the commentary cited above, the second lens encompasses professional development, a focus in which the supervisor is committed to facilitating the practice and career of the supervisee. The third is the lens of quality assurance in which supervision is supported as a mechanism for the employer or the professional body to retain some control over the quality of practice within its orbit. In this chapter we will explore the current scholarship of supervision, keeping these three lenses in mind as they capture the contemporary essence of supervision in the helping professions without straying too far from the classical formulation of administrative, supportive and educative supervision functions. The quality assurance lens will be the main focus of this chapter. We are interested in exploring the current literature to examine this aspect of supervision, which is still the subject of much attention and is perhaps where supervision attracts the most ambivalent gaze. Finally, we will undertake a search to better understand the effectiveness of supervision and briefly address an emerging focus in supervision on the involvement of service users.

THE PERSONAL SURVIVAL LENS

The personal survival lens locates supervision as a key process in protecting professional practitioners from the impact of their work and, increasingly in a risk-averse world, some defence from the risk of exposure to risk itself. Literature on retention and the experiences of early career professionals has increasingly recognised that supervision plays a part in the development of resilient practitioners. Adamson (2011) has described the influence of resilience theory and how this has become integral to supporting the healthy progress of professional practitioners. She writes, ‘a resilience lens underscores the importance of the relational, both within and external to the supervision relationship. Current concepts of resilience are predicated upon the fundamental assumption that social support is one of the main buffers against stress’ (2011, p.192). This lens has focused our attention a great deal in recent years on identifying the factors which contribute to resilient practitioners (Adamson, Beddoe and Davys 2012; Grant and Kinman 2014). In a review of literature relating to resilience in the health professions, McCann et al. (2013, p.74) found a set of significant interacting factors: individual, professional and contextual. Individual factors included ‘demographic characteristics (age, gender, experience), personal characteristics (having a work – life balance, laughter, relaxation) and professional characteristics (continuing education, professional identity) and the contextual factors included partner or family support, clinical supervision and culture of the discipline’. McCann et al. (2013) note that it is the interaction of these sets of factors that enables the maintenance of personal and professional wellbeing in the face of on-going work stress and adversity in the health professions.

Adamson (2011) urges caution in going too far down the path of resilience building as a major function of supervision as there is a danger that this intensifies a shift towards ‘responsibilising’ of practitioners for their own wellbeing to the extent that employers need not address workplace problems such as high workloads, risk-averse and defensive practice, lack of adequate supervision and limited opportunity for professional development. As Bottrell (2009, p.334) wisely noted: ‘resilience building in a neoliberal framework may shift the emphasis from positive adaptation despite adversity to positive adaptation to adversity’. Johnson et al. (2014), writing about the application of resilience in early career teachers, identify four key concerns with the conventional notion of resilience. First they argue it relies too much on ‘atomistic and reductionist models of human coping and adaptation’; second, there is an almost ‘inevitable reversion to individualized explanations of human problems’ and their solutions; third, that such traditional understanding of resilience ‘promotes a very narrow set of normative criteria’ about the social, cultural and historic origins of what constitutes a successful life; and last, that it is used as a ‘psychological construct which is assumed to “exist” in manifested forms of human behavior’ (p.533). Johnson et al. (2014, p.533) prefer to conceptualise resilience ‘as a guiding metaphor that helps us focus our attention on the dynamic and complex interplay between individual, relational, and contextual conditions’ that exist in the environment in which early career professionals find themselves.

A more richly constituted notion of resilience provides greater opportunity to ‘analyse the interrelations of individual and collective biographies, social identity, cultural and institutional practices that may produce evidence to guide practice that supports individuals and groups, and that locates key points for change in policy and regulatory processes’ (Bottrell 2009, p.335). This is a useful juncture to consider what the role of supervision might be in contributing to the survival of practitioners in the social context of work, rather than in an individualising approach.

Supervision has long been associated with practitioner safety. Ash (1995, p.22) reported the various metaphors for the role of the supervisor provided by supervision training participants, including:

•a warm wall to give me support and bounce ideas off

•a deep well from which I can draw strength and wisdom

•a helicopter ready to winch me out of danger

•a pilot to make sure I steer the right course through difficult waters

•a harbourmaster to ensure I have a safe haven in time of storm and stress.

In a similar vein, Carroll (2014, p.15) identifies the following supervision metaphors: ‘a torch which illuminates my work’ and ‘a container where I feel safe and held’, reminding us of the important aspect of containment of practitioner anxiety and distress explored by Hughes and Pengelly (1997).

In recent years several studies have noted the recurrence of ideas about supervision as a ‘place of safety’. Beddoe (2011) noted that supervision was often conceptualised as a safe space or place for reflection away from the workplace and McPherson et al. (2015, p.5) conceptualise safety as a ‘fifth dimension’ of supervision. They report from a study of child and family practitioners and supervisors that: ‘overwhelmingly, both supervisees and supervisors talked about the need for safety within the context of a professional supervisory relationship. Safety, they believed, lies at the heart of effective supervision and was considered vital by all participants interviewed’. They note that, while the importance placed on safety in the supervisor relationship was to be expected, the extent to which safety was central to supervision was consistent across their study participants. An illustrative comment from one supervisor: ‘Supervision has to be built on a concept of safety, and safety, in this context, is relational safety’ (McPherson et al. 2015, p.5). This arguably reflects the very particular focus of risk in the child welfare environment where the risks are both personal and political, being focused on children, parents’ rights and safeguarding, along with fears of organisational and governmental reputational damage. Whether safety as a fifth function of supervision can be demonstrated across professions and fields of practice requires a larger study.

In Chapter 4 we will examine the personal survival lens in greater detail in an exploration of the role supervision can play in developing and supporting the resilient practitioner, albeit with these cautions in mind.

THE PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT LENS

Of the three perspectives, professional development is probably the least visible in recent literature. Professional development is a ‘career-long process within which, via diverse learning activities, professionals refine and augment their knowledge and skills and undertake personal professional supervision to enhance critically reflective practice’ (Beddoe 2015b, p.89). Professional development is held to be vital to ensure practice remains competent, ethical and optimistic. In order to live up to these as...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• By The Same Authors
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• List of Tables
• List of Figures
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: Contemporary Themes in Professional Supervision
• Part One: Contemporary Ideas and Debates in Professional Supervision
• Part Two: Modes, Models and Skills
• Afterword
• References
• Subject Index
• Author Index