September 20, 2023
Coaching Supervision – Voices from the Americas
By Ken Giglio, Principal of Mindful Leadership
To all leaders and coaching clients, please know the quality and integrity of the coaching you receive is of critical importance to those of us who have the privilege of working with you. In support of our coaching work with individual leaders, teams, and groups, our professional governing bodies—the predominant ones being EMCC Global, the International Coaching Federation, and Association for Coaching—have developed competency models, guidelines, and rigorous credentialing processes. They also require ongoing professional development for coaches so we can learn continuously and grow personally and professionally.
Coaching Supervision is one of the ways our profession takes care of its own. Among the various definitions of supervision, I offer here the one from the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) I had a part in developing (I am a member of the Center for Excellence for Supervision): A safe space for reflective dialogue with a practicing supervisor, supporting the supervisee’s practice, development, and well-being.
Our international team of volunteers supports and guides EMCC members and all professionals globally—coaches, mentors, and supervisors—on all matters pertaining to supervision. We act as ambassadors, advocates, and educators for all those in our profession who do not yet know or fully understand the purpose of supervision. The EMCC Supervision Guidelines are an excellent resource for leaders and coaches for better understanding supervision.
For the coaches reading this, please know here I speak with the intention of creating clarity around what coaching supervision is and what it does. As part of this effort, I recommend highly adding Coaching Supervision: Voices from the Americas to your bookshelf. It is a rich resource on supervision as practiced today from the perspective (voices) of a diverse and experienced group of supervisors from the Americas.
Researcher and author Richard Boyatzis calls the book “a valuable compendium that is provocative, insightful, and totally human!” He highlights in his foreword to the book, “Coaching supervision, as a regular reflective practice with a trained professional, is essential to the renewal and to the personal growth and sustainability of the coach. Insights gained through such reflection effectively help the coach to more effectively support the client and the wider system within which we work.”
The book has 18 chapters; I contributed to two: one on “Supervision in in Globally Challenging Times” and the other I co-authored with Lynne DeLay entitled “A Framework for Group Presence in Group Coaching Supervision.” The book’s editors Francine Campone, Joel DiGirolamo, Damian Goldvarg, and Lily Seto are researchers, authors, and advocate-leaders of supervision, particularly in the Americas where supervision is relatively new, not as well known, understood, or leveraged by coaches as in Europe. Hence, there is good reason to publish this book now because it contributes fresh and wide-ranging thinking and practices about supervision for an evolving coaching field.
Voices covers a lot of ground in three sections on supervision: Who We Are; How We Work; and How We Learn. As Lead Editor Francine Campone points out in her introduction, diversity is a main theme woven through the chapters. A second major theme is how the word “supervision” is perceived in the Americas. All supervisors and the coaches work within a systemic context that influences the way supervision is communicated, practiced, and received. “Working effectively as coaching supervisors requires close attention to context and willingness to customize and adapt as needed.”
The authors of Voices reinforce for me the work of supervisors is to bring intentional reflection into our dialogue with coaches. We invoke reflection and claim this non-judgmental, present-moment space because we experience its value for ourselves and our clients. We stretch ourselves and our supervisees to examine the inner world of thoughts, feelings, and narratives for clues on how best to engage with coachees.
From my experience as someone who teaches supervision and has supervision clients from around the world, there is still much work to be done to get the word out about the importance of supervision. The well-being, development, and ethical maturity of coaches in the Americas depends on defining clearly and clarifying what supervision is all about and how it supports coaches. This is why many of my colleagues (some of them authors for Voices) frequently provide educational and experiential opportunities at coaching conferences and ICF chapter meetings in the Americas and internationally.
For this post, I focus attention on one of the book’s chapters: “Resistance to Coaching Supervision in the Americas” by Lily Seto, Damian Goldvarg, and Sarah Eustice, which presents research to help us understand what’s behind resistance to supervision. The authors’ aim was also to provide supervisors with strategies around how to counter the resistance and better engage coaches around supervision.
The themes that emerged about resistance to supervision from their interviews with supervisors from the Americas were lack of awareness and understanding, expenditures, and vulnerability. These themes are not surprising to supervisors and coaches working primarily in the United States, as I do, where, as the study points out, there is still a lot of “confusion in distinguishing the role of supervisor from that of a coach, mentor coach, therapist, or peer source of support.” The strategies suggested to counter resistance are educating and explaining, exposure and experience, and promotion and professional support.
From my many conversations with coaches and supervisors, what is causing the most confusion, and by extension often resistance, is “distinguishing the role of supervisor from that of a mentor coach.” As I’ve written previously, mentor coaching plays an important and distinctly different role from supervision in supporting coaches through the ICF certification process. “Mentor coaching” is an ICF-only distinction; the broader term “mentor” is used by other professional bodies.
Coaching supervision, as highlighted above, supports coaches through reflective dialogue and the building of their personal and professional capacity. Coaching supervision has its own professional role and certification process. For those confused about the distinction, I also recommend the ICF resources on the topic including “Coaching Supervision vs Mentor Coaching.”
The expertise, experience, and diverse perspectives of the authors in Coaching Supervision: Voices from the Americas serve to countering resistance to supervision. Those of us who are supervisors and supervisees can all contribute to raising awareness around supervision’s role in the coaching field. We need to be clarifiers who remove the sediment of confusion from coaching’s waters.
For all the efforts to bring greater clarity, we need to acknowledge the other voices in the field muddying the waters. We need to listen to their concerns, engage them with education, and provide them with supervision experiences. Through this ongoing engagement, my hope is more and more coaches will come to benefit from the reflective space of supervision and feel the support for their practice so critical to maintain their confidence, competence, and creativity.
Patience and perseverance are needed as we look ahead for what’s next for coaching supervision in the Americas. (I am aware I tend to be better at perseverance than patience.) After all, the first coaching supervision training program from the Coaching Supervision Academy (CSA) was carried across the Atlantic a mere ten years ago by supervisor trailblazers Lynne DeLay and Sam Magill. Their vision and perseverance has laid the foundation for much of the supervision work being done today in the Americas. In fact, three of the four editors of Voices are graduates of CSA, as am I and a good number of other authors in the book.
I am grateful to have Lynne and Sam as my friends and collaborators. Their voices and those in the Voices book continue to open our minds and hearts and encourage and challenge us to incorporate coaching supervision as an essential part for our professional practice.
“Supervision offers a safe place that invites and allows in all voices and energy into the room (supervision group); we democratize group input and minimize egocentrism.” Lynne DeLay
“My most experienced supervisees engage in supervision because they know maturity as a practicing coach is a never-ending quest.” Sam Magill
A closing reflection – What will the executive coaching field look like when coaches, and the coaching field, fully acknowledge and appreciate the importance coaching supervision, and coaches engage in it consistently?