BookPDF Available

The Manifesto for Supervision

May 2019

Publisher: Henley Business School and Association for Coaching
ISBN: ISBN: 978-1-912473-24-3

Authors:

Peter Hawkins

University of Reading

Eve Turner

University of Southampton

Jonathan Passmore

University of Reading

The Manifesto for Supervision is a call to arms for a collaborative approach to exploring the nature and benefits of coaching supervision. The Manifesto starts by offering a comprehensive review of coaching supervision research over the past two decades, drawing on work by three of the leading authors in this field: Peter Hawkins, Eve Turner and Jonathan Passmore, and many other contributors. The Manifesto ends with a call for professional bodies, supervision training providers, supervisors, coaches and organisations to work together to on supervision practice and research.

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HENLEY BUSINESS SCHOOL

AND THE ASSOCIATION FOR COACHING

The Manifesto for Supervision

Peter Hawkins, Eve Turner and Jonathan Passmore

Peter Hawkins

Peter is Professor of Leadership at Henley Business School and has published widely. He is best known for his work on

supervision and on team coaching. He runs a successful consulting business, Renewal Associates.

Eve Turner

Eve is an award-winning coach, author and supervisor whose recent awards include Coaching at Work and

EMCC 2018 Supervision. She runs her own practice and teaches at the Henley Centre for Coaching, Henley

Business School.

Jonathan Passmore

Jonathan is Director of the Henley Centre for Coaching, Henley Business School, author of 30 books and over 100

scientic papers and book chapters. His most popular titles include Excellence in Coaching, Top Business Psychology

Models and Appreciative Inquiry for Change Management.

Authors

Henley Centre for Coaching

The Henley Centre for Coaching is a global leader in coaching

research and coach training. We are the only triple-accredited

coaching provider in the world oering both postgraduate

university qualications in coaching and accreditation from the

Association for Coaching (AC), the International Coach Federation

(ICF) and the European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC).

The Centre provides formal accredited coach training through

our Professional Certicate in Coaching and MSc in Coaching and

Behavioural Change, and accredited supervision training through

our Professional Certicate in Supervision. These programmes

are delivered in the UK at our Greenlands campus, and at venues

across the world.

The Centre provides continuous professional development

for coaching professionals through masterclasses, webinars,

conferences, and via online access to journals, ebooks and

coaching research. These are all delivered through our online

learning platform, meaning coaches can connect from anywhere

in the world to engage in professional development.

The Henley coaching team consists of leading practitioners and

academics who have shaped the coaching profession since the

late 1990s. They have written many of the most popular coaching

books and they continue to publish in leading management

journals and to contribute at conferences worldwide. Their writing,

thinking and research informs our teaching and ensures our

programmes are at the cutting edge of coaching practice.

The Centre oers annual membership to all professional coaches,

providing a virtual-learning environment where the members

shape research and practice in coaching. Check out our website

for details on how we can help you and your business come to life.

Executive summary

Supervision has a key role to play in coach development

– for novice coaches during their rst stages of training and

for experienced coaches engaging in continuing professional

and personal development. Supervision links theory and

practice through the whole action learning cycle and through

quality reective practice.

This manifesto is a call to arms. It provides an overview of

why supervision is needed and examines its functions. The

Manifesto summarises the main models, research and latest

thinking on supervision, including that of the professional

bodies, and it also considers ethics in supervision. Finally, it

calls for collaboration between industry stakeholders to take

forward supervision to its next stage of development.

Citation: Hawkins, P, Turner, E & Passmore, J (2019) The Manifesto for Supervision. Henley-on-Thames: Association for Coaching,

and Henley Business School. ISBN: 978-1-912473-24-3

Contents

Foreword ................................................................... 4

Acknowledgements .................................................. 4

Introduction .............................................................. 5

What is coaching supervision? .................................. 5

Why supervision is essential for quality coaching ...... 5

Dening supervision and its multiple functions ........ 6

The research story so far ........................................... 8

Guidance for supervision ........................................ 12

Ethics and supervision ............................................ 14

The Manifesto ......................................................... 16

Twelve points for action .......................................... 17

References .............................................................. 18

Further reading ....................................................... 19

Foreword

As coaching, in its many forms, continues to have

rippling eects within individuals, businesses and, in

turn, society, there is an ever-greater need for

us to take the responsibility of honing our craft within

the systems we operate.

The art and science of supervision is,

from the broadest perspective,

a reective practice to be done

individually and in partnership

That is why this compact yet insightful Manifesto,

meant to inspire, educate and inform our evolving

profession, is timely.

Like coaching, the art and science of supervision is,

from the broadest perspective, a reective practice; it

is to be done individually and in partnership. The intent

is to demystify and to put the spotlight of its greater

importance within our work.

We would like to thank the authors for the

contribution they have made, with the hopes that

this, too, will build and deepen the awareness of what

coaches do and of our collective impact.

Katherine Tulpa

CEO, Association for Coaching

We would like to thank Dr Michel Moral for his help in providing

information on examples of global coaching supervision

research, including providing a list of doctoral publications in the

eld. We would also like to thank Julie Freeborn, who gave useful

feedback on earlier drafts and showed how coaching supervision

can best be developed to work with supervision in psychology.

The views in this document are those of the authors and do not

necessarily reect the policy or views of the Association for

Coaching or University of Reading.

Acknowledgements

Introduction

The hardest thing to attend to is that which

is closest to ourselves, that which is most

constant and familiar. And this closest

“something” is, precisely, ourselves, our own

habits and ways of doing things.

John Dewey

At the core of continuing professional development (CPD) is

continuing personal development, where our own development is

weaved through every aspect of our practice. When this happens,

every coachee becomes a teacher, every piece of feedback an

opportunity for new learning, for producing practices that support

the balanced cycle of action, reection, new understanding and

new practice.

The authors of this manifesto believe that having supervision

is a fundamental part of continuing personal and professional

development for coaches, mentors, consultants and

psychologists. It provides a disciplined space in which the

supervisee can reect on particular work and client situations

and relationships, and on the reactivity and patterns they evoke

in the mind. The process of transforming these in supervision can

profoundly benet the client, their organisation and their own

professional practice.

What is coaching supervision?

As with most areas of practice, debate continues over the precise

form and nature of supervision.

One widely used denition of coaching supervision is: ‘a formal

and protected time for facilitating a coach’s in-depth reection on

their practice with a trained Coaching Supervisor’ (Association for

Coaching, 2019a).

There is continuing debate as to whether the term should be spelt

‘super-vision’ or ‘supervision’. The authors have agreed to use the

term supervision, while acknowledging that this does not imply a

hierarchical relationship between the supervisor and supervisee,

and that its purpose is to enhance insight and to deepen the

understanding of the coach, with a view towards enhancing the

coach’s practice.

There is also considerable discussion about the use of the term

‘coaching supervisor’ and who can be a supervisor. For the authors,

the term implies both a level of experience that the supervisor

is able to bring to the relationship and a level of formal training

in self-awareness, ethical practice and supervisor processes.

Through this combination of experience and training, our belief

is that supervisors are best placed to enhance insight and

deepen understanding.

Why supervision is essential for quality

coaching

When we train as practitioners, we learn many tools, techniques,

practical methodologies, ways of understanding clients, ways

of building working alliances and of contracting. All of this is

necessary and useful. But no matter how good or extensive

the training is, we cannot be taught to be great practitioners by

books, trainers or even solely through multiple hours of practice.

This is because our most important tool or instrument that we

bring to our coach, to our consulting and our leadership is our

selves, and this instrument of the self needs constant attention

and development and, at times, a service and repair. Alison

Hardingham, talks about the critical role of the self:

In developing as a coach, we need to develop

a deep understanding of ourselves. Who are

we; our histories, our narratives and our bias

and prejudices. What are our strengths, our

limitations, our blind spots. Only through

reective practice can we fully become.

Doug Silsbee notes: ‘we do the work on our “self” in order that we

might be granted the privilege of working with our clients’ (Silsbee,

2008). In this he mirrors Sir John Whitmore who told coaches, ‘if

you only have time for one piece of development, do it on yourself’

(see Turner & Palmer, 2019: xxviii). One cannot become a great

coach through training alone, for it is a lifetime’s journey and the

major teachers are not those we meet on our training, but are the

so-called dicult clients and situations that life provides us with

throughout our coaching career.

This learning from and in the midst of the heat of experience is

almost impossible to do by oneself.

Neither coach nor client can change until we are

able to step onto the balcony and gain new views

of ourselves – our habits, stories and beliefs; nor

can we as coaches change without these new

views.

McLean, 2019

It is nigh-on impossible to see the blind spots, biases and

prejudices that limit our perceptions, or to see the limiting mind-

sets and assumptions that interrupt us from being fully present

to the client, to what emerges and needs attention – present

with what Otto Scharmer describes as the ‘opening of the mind,

the heart, and the will’ (Scharmer & Kaufer, 2013: 23). For this, we

need the skilled help of a coaching supervisor who can help us to

learn from our clients – from the worlds in which they are living and

working, and from the reactions and judgements that they invoke

in us – and to learn and unlearn from being at the uncomfortable

edge of our development.

Supervision is a key element in the action learning cycle that

connects the competencies we learn on coach training, with

the practice of working with a great variety of clients and client

organisations. Through reection on this practice, we learn,

unlearn and relearn new ways of being a coach and new ways of

partnering challenging and changing clients.

We also need to grow our capacity to work systemically (Hawkins

& Turner, in print) in ways that deliver value, not only for the

individual or team client, but for all our client’s stakeholders. To

help coaching to evolve beyond what one young black manager in

Cape Town, South Africa described as: ‘Highly expensive personal

development for the already highly privileged.’

Supervision is not just a process for the learning and development

of the individual coach/supervisee. It is also ‘the learning lungs

of the profession’ (Hawkins & Shohet, 2012), where the craft of

coaching is constantly refreshing itself. What has made coaching

very successful in the last 30 years is not what will be needed

from coaching in the next 30 years; supervision needs to avoid

being the place where senior practitioners develop supervisees

to be more like themselves, enculturating them in yesterday’s

way of coaching. Instead it needs to be a place where we all

discover how to be ‘future-t’ coaches, at the forefront of shifting

human consciousness – our own and that of our clients, their

organisations, their stakeholders and ultimately our human

species itself. The purpose of all this is that we might learn how

to be t for this one earth we share with each other and with

‘the more than human world’. We share this wider purpose with

all those in the elds of people development, whether they be

coaches, counsellors, leaders, HR practitioners, psychologists,

educators, facilitators, consultants, mentors, spiritual teachers or

others.

Dening supervision and its multiple functions

Supervision has been widely dened. The Association for

Coaching (AC) do so as follows:

Coaching Supervision is a formal and protected

time for facilitating a coach’s in-depth reection

on their practice with a Coaching Supervisor.

Supervision oers a condential framework

within a collaborative working relationship in which

the practice, tasks, process and challenges of the

coaching work can be explored.

The primary aim of Supervision is to enable the

coach to gain in ethical competency, condence

and creativity so as to ensure best possible

service to the coaching clients, both coachees

and coaching sponsors. Supervision is not a

‘policing’ role, but rather a trusting and collegial

professional relationship

AC, 2019a

Hawkins and Smith have oered the following denition:

The process by which a coach/mentor/

consultant with the help of a supervisor, who is

not working directly with the client, can attend

to understanding better both the client and the

client system and themselves as part of the

client–coach system, and by so doing transform

their work and develop their craft. Supervision

also does this by attending to the transformation

of the relationship between the supervisor and

coach and to the wider contexts in which the work

is happening.

Hawkins & Smith, 2013: 169

Hawkins has written extensively (Hawkins, 2017, 2018; Hawkins

& Smith, 2013) about how the challenges in the world require all

organisations to step-up to learning how to do more, at a higher

quality and with less resource. Hawkins considers how we live in

times of quantum, rather than incremental change. In helping

leaders respond fully to the challenges of our times and the

often-conicting needs of their many stakeholders, coaches

also need to grow their own capacity. This does not mean their

capacity to work harder or longer hours, but instead to connect

more deeply, with a wider range of people and situations, to

embrace complexity and to be present and non-reactive in the

midst of pain, grief and anger. Coaches need to create great

partnership with their clients in which both parties can discover

the path together, through co-creative dialogue and through

ways of thinking and ‘being’ that neither of them had been

aware of previously.

Coaching is increasingly focusing not only on helping leaders and

managers with horizontal development, learning how to handle

their current situations better, but on vertical development as well

(Kegan, 1982; Petrie, 2014a, 2014b; Torbert, 2004), helping leaders

shift their ways of thinking and being in the world and to unlearn

their conceptual frames, action logics and emotional patterns.

In doing so, coaching can help leaders to increase their human

capacity to embrace greater complexity and achieve greater

ethical maturity. Otto Laske (2006) hypothesises that a coach is

incapable of eectively coaching a leader who exceeds the coach’s

own level of development.

[A] coach who is at the same developmental

stage as their coachee will not be able to help

them get to the next stage, and a coach at a lower

stage of development than their coachee may

actually impair progress.

Laske, 2006

This is supported by the work of Chandler and Kram (2005).

To enable vertical development in others requires that we are

constantly attending to our own vertical development and

expanding our own ethical maturity.

Increasingly, many of the issues that are brought to supervision

have an ethical dilemma embedded in the situation, and the ability

to attend to this ethical moment in a way that does not just solve

the problem but also develops the ethical maturity of the client,

coach, supervisor and the wider systems, is a core requisite to

good coaching and supervision.

In their denition, Hawkins and Smith make it clear that

supervision is not a process done by the supervisor as the supplier,

with the supervisee as the customer. Rather it is a process that is

collaboratively co-created between the supervisee, the supervisor

and the emerging work of the supervisee. It is the work, and the

challenges and learning that it is posing, that sets the agenda

and curriculum for the supervision, not the supervisor or the

supervisee, although the two of them need to jointly discover

what this agenda is.

We also indicate in this denition how supervision needs to

be systemic, attending to the coach, their clients, the client’s

organisations, the organisation’s stakeholders, the systemic

contexts of the clients, coach and supervisor, and the connections

between all these levels. David Clutterbuck, Visiting Professor at

Henley Centre for Coaching, believes that over 90% of what is

brought to supervision is not solely about the coach and clients

but involves the complex interfaces with the sponsoring client

organisation. This seems to be borne out by current research by

David Clutterbuck and Eve Turner with 100 supervisors globally;

it suggests that supervisors believe half of the issues brought to

them by executive/business coaches are related in some way to

the original contracting between clients and their organisations

(Turner & Clutterbuck, 2019).

We believe that coaching supervision has three elements:

1. The Qualitative function focuses on increasing the quality of

the work that is being done by the coach/supervisee with their

clients, and the client’s organisation.

2. The Developmental function focuses on helping the

continuing personal and professional development of the

coach, to grow their capacity and continually harvest their

learning from the challenges their practice presents them with.

3. The Resourcing function focuses on the coach increasing their

capability to work from ‘source’ rather than from eort, and on

how they sustain themselves and their practice and increase

their resourcefulness and resilience (see Hawkins, 2019).

This three-function model parallels the three functions that

Kadushin put forward for social work supervision in the 1970s

and that Proctor espoused for counselling supervision in the

1980s. Kadushin (1992) talked of the ‘managerial, educative

and supportive’ aspects of supervision and Proctor (1988) of

supervision being ‘normative, formative and restorative’. Peter

Hawkins worked with these two models for many years and found

both to be rather conned to their own elds. This led him to

develop his own model, which denes the three main functions

presented above (qualitative, developmental and resourcing).

While Kadushin focuses on the role of the supervisor, and

Proctor on the supervisee benet, the new distinctions focus

on the process in which both supervisor and supervisee are

collaboratively engaged.

The three functions are interconnected and work together, for as a

coach develops, they grow their capacity to resource themselves

and this in turn increases the quality of the work. Hawkins and

Smith have provided a model to understand the dierent places/

perspectives on which supervision can focus; the seven-eyed

model of supervision (Hawkins & Smith, 2013) is widely used

throughout the world. We believe that coaching supervisors need

The Henley Eight

1. What did I notice?

2. How did I respond – behaviourally, emotionally,

physiologically and cognitively?

3. What does this tell me about myself as a person?

4. What does this tell me about myself as a coach?

5. What strengths does that oer?

6. What pitfalls should I watch out for?

7. What did I learn from this observation/reection?

8. What might I do dierently next time?

not only be capable of using all seven approaches but also need

to be skilled in knowing when and how to move from one mode to

another, and to do this in collaboration with the supervisee.

Hawkins and Smith (2013) have also provided the CLEAR process

model. The model maps the various stages necessary in each

supervision meeting. CLEAR stands for: contract, listen, explore,

action and review. Behind this model are the following beliefs:

• Every supervision meeting needs to start by discovering the

work that needs to be done in that session and contracting

together how this will be done.

• There is a phase of generative dialogue involving listening and

exploring the issue that needs to be learnt from.

• It is important to not stop at having generated new insight

and thinking, but to move into an action phase – moving from

cognitive to embodied learning by engaging in ‘fast forward

rehearsals’, trying out the new ways of being.

• The nal review stage is not about the supervisee telling the

supervisor what has been helpful and what could be more

helpful next time; this would imply that it is the supervisor

doing the supervision. Rather this stage involves exploration

of what the stakeholders of the supervisee (current and future

clients, their organisations, their colleagues and employers

etc) would value about the joint work that has just happened

in the supervision and what challenges this would pose for the

supervisee–supervisor relationship.

There are other helpful models in use, including:

• Full spectrum coaching supervision model (Murdoch & Arnold,

2013)

• Three worlds/four territories model of supervision (Munro-

Turner, 2011)

• Seven conversations in supervision (Clutterbuck, 2011)

• Three pillars model (Hodge, 2016)

• Hawkins model of team coaching supervision (Hawkins, 2017)

Henley’s contribution has been to integrate reection into its

programmes, making self development an essential ingredient

of its coach training. One way that Henley brings this alive in its

Professional Certicate of Coaching is through the Henley Eight.

This is a series of questions to guide self-reection, enhance

situation awareness and support personal development.

The research story so far

Research has not kept up with coaching supervision practice, as

Turner and Palmer (2019) note. This is paralleled in therapy too,

with Beinart and Clohessy (2017) observing that ‘supervision

research has lagged behind therapy research despite almost all

therapy trials requiring supervision’ (2017: 6).Both Lane, Watts

and Corrie (2016) and Passmore (2011) share the view that the

enthusiasm for supervision currently outstrips the evidence base,

including the evidence that attests to its impact on practice Corrie

et al also suggest that relatively little attention has been paid

to the development of supervisors, as opposed to supervisees.

Others have made similar points. Reviewing coaching supervision,

Tkach and DiGirolamo, from the International Coaching Federation

(ICF) Research Team, note that there are currently ‘no universally

accepted guide-lines or best practices’ (2017: 56).

They advocate the ‘development and agreement amongst

researchers of standardised measures’ to move the industry

forward in its understanding of what takes place in coaching

supervision (2017: 59).

We do know that coaching and mentoring have been areas

of enormous growth since 2000. The ICF’s Global Coaching

Study (2016) estimated that the coaching industry had 53,300

professionally accredited coaches worldwide who generated

revenue of US$2.356 billion in 2015, representing a 19% increase

over the 2011 estimate. These gures are based on ICF’s own

survey and do not include unregistered coaches, so the market is

probably much larger than they indicate. Coaching has become

a signicant and regular part of most leadership development

activities, and approximately 70% of companies surveyed in

the UK and North America are investing in coaching (Chartered

Institute of Personnel and Development, 2011; Hawkins, 2012).

Despite this, coaching supervision was noticeable by its absence

in the rst 20 years of the growth of this new profession; at the

turn of the century it began to be advocated by several key writers

(see Downey, 1999; Flaher ty, 1999).

Coaching and mentoring have been

areas of enormous growth since 2000,

but supervision was noticeable by its

absence in the rst 20 years of the

growth of this new profession

In the early part of the twenty-rst century, very few coaches

were receiving supervision and those who did were approaching

supervisors trained in psychotherapy or counselling. While there

is much we can learn from these and other people professions

in which quality supervision has been practised for longer than

coaching, there are also dangers.

It was not until 2003 that the rst specic training was oered for

coaching supervisors and 2006 that the rst book on coaching

supervision was published (Hawkins & Smith, 2006). Since the

rst edition of this book, there has been a signicant growth in

coaching supervision, particularly in the UK, where it has been

endorsed by most of the major professional coaching bodies and

where there has been a number of new signicant publications

(such as Bachkirova, Jackson & Clutterbuck, 2011; De Haan, 2012;

Hawkins & Smith, 2013; Passmore, 2011; Turner & Palmer, 2019).

In 2006, Hawkins and Schwenk carried out research for the UK’s

Chartered Institute of People Development on the state of

Coaching Supervision in the UK and internationally. This research

focused on a number of key questions, as follows:

• What is coaching supervision?

• Why should HR professionals be interested in it?

• What do HR professionals need to know about coaching

supervision?

• What does good practice look like?

• How can supervision help coaching to be more eective?

Various methods were used: a web survey, with responses from

over 500 individual coaches and over 120 organisations; four focus

groups across the UK, which included both buyers of coaching

and experienced providers; and six best-practice case studies of

organisations that had committed to incorporating supervision

into both their internal and external coaching provision.

The research discovered the following:

• Coaching supervision was much advocated but poorly

practised.

• Eighty-eight per cent of organisers of coaching and 86% of

coaches believed that coaches should have regular ongoing

supervision of their coaching.

• Only 44% of coaches receive regular ongoing supervision and

only 23% of organisations provided regular ongoing coaching

supervision.

• Of the coaches receiving supervision, 58% had started within

the last two years.

• Many of those who were receiving supervision were consulting

with supervisors of counselling or psychotherapy, and some

with peers without supervision training.

• There was a shortage of training courses in coaching

supervision.

• There was a shortage of research in the eld.

• There was an absence of specic models and methodologies

for coaching supervision.

(Hawkins & Schwenk, 2006)

This research also explored the reasons for the lack of

development of coaching supervision. In both interviews and

focus groups with experienced coaches, a number of dierent

explanations emerged:

• Lack of clarity about what supervision involves.

• Lack of well-trained supervisors.

• Lack of commitment to personal development as it provokes a

sense of vulnerability.

• Lack of discipline among coaches.

• Addiction to being in the role of the person enabling others,

rather than receiving enablement.

In 2014, Hawkins and Turner carried out follow-up research to the

2006 survey on coaching supervision (Hawkins & Turner, 2017).

This was part of a larger research project that studied multi-

stakeholder contracting in coaching (Turner & Hawkins, 2016).

Four hundred and sixty-eight coaches completed the supervision

elements of the survey, of which 54.7% were in the UK, 21.7% in

Europe and 9.8% in North America. The results showed that there

had been a signicant increase in the number of coaches reporting

that they received regular supervision compared to the 2006

percentages.

• Given that the majority of respondents in 2006 were UK-

based, we can see a massive increase in the UK, from 44% to

92.31% of UK coaches having supervision.

• Supervision spread widely across dierent regions of the

world, with 83.18% of respondents globally reporting that

they had supervision.

• North America had the lowest number of coaches reporting

having supervision (43.64%), although this is still slightly ahead

of where the UK was in 2006.

• The reasons that coaches gave for having supervision had also

shifted, with the top two areas being: ‘it is part of my personal

commitment to good practice’ and ‘it contributes to my

continuous professional development’.

• Less positive was that the majority of coaches only had

supervision every 2–3 months, and that although most

organisations say they think it is important that all coaches

have supervision, very few insist on it.

(Hawkins & Turner, 2017)

Another recent, larger study with 2,791 participants from a total

of 45 European countries, of which nearly one thousand were

from the UK, found lower levels of engagement with supervision

(Passmore, Brown & Csigas, 2017). One thousand and sixty-one

said they had formal supervision with a qualied supervisor (2017:

15). Thirty-four per cent said they did not engage in supervision,

and of more than 2,000 responses, 35.3% said they expected to

get reective practice free, with a further 17.5% expecting it to

cost less than 50 Euros per hour. It is possible that these gures

may even be an over-report: rstly, supervision may be seen as a

socially desirable activity. Secondly, those responding to coaching

surveys have tended to belong to professional bodies who are

more likely to engage in such activity (although the Passmore et al

[2017] research did use social media interest groups extensively).

Research has found that coaching

supervision is much advocated but

poorly practised. Most organisations

think it’s important, but few insist on it.

This variety in practice and training is borne out by other research.

Grant (2012) found that only half of Australian coaches who

provided formal supervision had received supervision training

themselves. Participants reported as a major issue ‘the diculty

of nding training in coach supervision and being assured of the

quality of any such training’ (Grant, 2012: 28). While 82.7% of 179

experienced coaches completing the online survey were having

some form of supervision (peer, formal, informal), only 25.7% were

having formal supervision and 30% reported having had a negative

experience (2012: 17) in the form of poor supervision skills

and problems with peer group supervision, such as individuals

dominating (2012: 26). Perceived barriers were seen to be the cost

of supervision and nding a supervisor.

In a smaller-scale study of 33 coaches and 29 purchasers,

Lawrence and Whyte (2014), researching in Australia and New

Zealand, found that while coaches said they’d use supervision if

they needed emotional support, in reality few had felt that need

often, and only just over a third (36%) referred to supervision as

part of their ongoing learning. In contrast, purchasing clients saw

the purpose as quality control and yet ‘only 21% of purchasing

clients insist on supervision as part of a quality assurance process’

(Lawrence & Whyte, 2014: 39).

Hodge’s (2016) doctoral research on the value of coaching

supervision as a development process was carried out with six

executive coaches and ve coach supervisors, who ‘acknowledged

that what occurs in the coaching space is unpredictable

and challenging’ and were ‘clear about the need to support

themselves’ (2016: 95). In contrast to Lawrence and Whyte’s

research, the participants were all in regular supervision and

Hodge found that mutual trust, safety and respect developed

over time and were key ingredients to creating a safe place for

coaches to explore their practice and clarify dilemmas and doubts

in working with their clients. By doing this, coaches ‘are able to

engage eectively and consistently with their clients thus avoiding

“burnout” or “compassion fatigue”’ (2016: 98).

A survey on the state of supervision in France found that those

describing themselves as supervisors were highly experienced

and nearly all received supervision (94%). However, 80% had

not received training and only just over a third (36%) planned to

get training (Professional Supervisors Federation, 2014: 22–5).

The main fears around supervision were seen as dependence

and amateurism for both supervisors and coaches, and the key

benets were sharing methods and standing back (2014: 35).

Interestingly, 40% of respondents were unaware whether their

supervisors were supervised, and this mirrors a nding by Turner

and Hawkins (2016) where almost half of coachees (48.3%) did not

know if their coaches were supervised (2016: 34).

Bachkirova (2011, 2015) conducted interviews with six very

experienced coaching supervisors on self-deception in coaching.

Various manifestations emerged, from not noticing their own

good work to not noticing ethical dilemmas or boundaries with

psychotherapy, forgetting the organisational client, ‘pretending

to be non-directive with no agenda’ and extending coaching

unnecessarily (Bachkirova, 2011: 96).

Day and colleagues (2008) interviewed 28 experienced coaches to

study critical moments in coaching relationships and noted that

‘Coaches reported using supervision to help them to make sense

of critical moments, to gain reassurance that they responded

appropriately and to learn from these moments’

(Day et al, 2008: 207).

Mutual trust, safety and respect develop

over time and are key ingredients

to creating a safe place for coaches

to explore their practice and clarify

dilemmas and doubts

Critical moments are considered to be unforeseen emotional

episodes that can create tension and stress in the client–coach

relationship, leading to anxiety and self-doubt in coaches.

Outcomes could include a learning opportunity for the client and/

or coach if the coach can ‘contain heightened emotions and stay

with the client’s experience’, thereby providing an opportunity

for self-learning; alternatively, it could lead to a break in the

relationship (2008: 216). As with Bachkirova, anxieties included

boundary issues (contracting, triangulations) and issues around

being more or less directive. There were also issues around

satisfying outcomes (expectations from stakeholders) and advice.

Lamy and Moral (2015), based in France, have been at the

forefront of research into supervision. Moral has uniquely

examined whether there is a ‘specic personality prole of

supervisors, or of coaches who want to become supervisors’

(2015: 126). He explored whether they have a specic defensive

style, concluding that little dierence has been noted between

coaches and supervisors and the general population. Moral

argues that ‘a better understanding of the defence proles of

coaches and supervisors will help to design new supervision

techniques’ (2015: 131).

Moral and Lamy (2016: 168) have started to consider what group

supervision process would ‘best serve the system formed by

the group, the supervisor, the supervisees and the context

of the client’, and they assess there are currently around 100

processes in use. They state, ‘Our objective is to open new

areas of investigation that could be studied with quantitative

methodologies’ (2016: 169) and, as yet, they have not tested a

hypothesis.

In 2019, Turner and Palmer noted there were several publications

relating to supervision ‘and, in particular, the relationship between

supervisor and supervisee’ (2019: 8). This is mirrored in the

therapy world with Beinart and Clohessy (2017) describing a

range of models with some empirical underpinning which shows

that ‘by far the strongest and growing evidence base lies with the

importance of the SR [supervisory relationship] itself’ (2017: 29).

De Haan considered trust and safety in supervision and

concluded that levels of trust are high. The research, with

518 coach respondents from 32 countries, shows that the

vast majority (85%) had explored in supervision ‘…the most

concerning, worrying and/or shameful episode in the coach’s

practice over the last few years’ and found supervision helpful

(De Haan, 2017: 42). Of those who hadn’t used supervision,

nearly half (7%) felt they could have brought the incident to

supervision but didn’t, 1% felt it was ‘too shameful’ and 2% ‘did

not trust their supervisor’. Five per cent had found supervision

unhelpful (De Haan, 2017: 42–44).

Sheppard’s (2017) research looked at what enabled and inhibited

supervision and focused on supervisees. Her aim was to support

supervisees to get more from their coaching supervision and

identied four distinct themes on how supervisees get in their

own way during supervision: ‘anxiety, fear of judgment and

shame, I’m blocking myself, lack of agency and not seeing myself

as an equal partner’ (2017: 115). Sheppard noted four ways in

which supervisees had learned to enhance their supervision:

‘…adopting a positive mindset, co-creating the relationship,

participating actively in the process and undertaking supervisor

training’ (2017: 117).

Palmer (2017) used an online survey to investigate the

supervisor–supervisee relationship, with two-thirds of the 112

respondents, based in 22 countries, who had been in practice

for six or more years.

Ninety per cent rated ‘trust’ within a coaching

supervision relationship as ‘very important’ and

88% reported that their current supervisor was

‘very trustworthy’.

Palmer, 2017

Palmer notes that:

Supervision Enhancing Thoughts (SETs),

attitudes or beliefs held by respondents included:

It’s challenging but required for growth

personally and professionally.

This is a space where I can be vulnerable and feel

safe and supported.

Supervision is a quality guarantee for my clients,

and a protection for myself.

In contrast, Supervision Interfering Thoughts

(SITs), attitudes or beliefs included:

I may be judged as a coach.

Imposter syndrome is my main interfering

thought.

I would hate my supervisor to think I was a

rubbish coach!

Respondents also reported that supervision

enhanced coaching performance and their well-

being, the latter being an under-researched area

of the benets of supervision.

Palmer, 2017

Less than half of organisations are

condent that all their coaches are

in supervision

The sixth Ridler Report, which is 74% UK-based and draws on 105

completed surveys and 28 phone interviews among organisations,

demonstrates a clear commitment to coaching supervision

(Ridler Report, 2017: 67). Eighty-eight per cent of organisations

believed that coaching supervision ‘is a fundamental requirement

for any professional executive coach.’ Despite this, ‘less than

half of organisations are condent that all their coaches are in

supervision (47%)’ (2017: 50).

A substantial, global piece of research on coaching supervision

was conducted in 2018 with 1,280 respondents from 72 countries

(McAnally et al, 2019).

McAnally et al’s research had two objectives:

1. To learn about the current state of coaching supervision

around the world.

2. To better understand what coaches perceive as the value

of supervision to themselves and their practice, as well

as supervision practice characteristics and possible

opportunities.

Key ndings include:

• geographical dierences

• individual versus group supervision

• types of challenges brought to coach supervision

• the benets of coach supervision as reported by supervisees

• what coach supervisors did that was seen as most helpful for

supervisees

• supervisee’ wishes for more or less from their coach

supervisors

• earnings for coach supervisors

McAnally et al observed that while coaching supervision is a well

accepted practice for executive and leadership coaches in Europe,

and especially in the UK, globally, it is not as common a practice

elsewhere. This has meant relatively little data for some countries

or regions, such as the Americas. 11

Research by David Clutterbuck and Eve Turner (mentioned above),

with 100 supervisors and 149 coaches globally, suggests that

supervisors believe that half of the issues brought to them by

executive coaches (51%) were related in some way to the original

contracting with their clients (Turner & Clutterbuck, 2019).

Interestingly, executive and business coaches believe the gure

to be lower, with just over a third of issues relating to contracting

(34%). This disparity may indicate that contracting could be

given more emphasis – for example, in coach training, to improve

practice and condence in this area. In the same research, the

same three themes emerge as most important in contracting with

a client or supervisee. However, there is a gap of 21.3% between

the number of coaches and supervisors, with more of the former

believing the relationship is one of the most important areas

(see Table 1, above).

Finally, as supervision becomes more engrained in practice, so

does the need for those who can help supervisors reect on their

work. To date the area of supervision of supervision has been little

researched or written about. Hawkins and Smith (2013: 183) do

talk of supervision of supervision for new supervisors, helping

them ‘to become eective and proactive supervisees’

and the need for ongoing supervision of supervision to provide

‘the essential connectivity that links learning about supervision

on courses with learning from the practice of supervising’.

Little attention to date has been paid to any other ongoing CPD

for supervisors of supervisors (or even for just supervisors).

Several conferences on supervision of supervision were held in

Austria, Switzerland, Germany and The Netherlands in 2008 and

2009 and a number of publications resulted around that time,

mainly in German (Moral & Turner, 2019). But generally, references

in the English-speaking literature have been minimal.

Findings show that limited training is

available and ‘access to experienced

and trained practitioners is at best

patchy globally.’

In 2017 a unique global study was done by The Global Supervisors’

Network (published 2019) on supervision of supervision for

coaches and mentors to aid understanding of the eld, to consider

how supervision of supervision diered from supervision and to

look at the support and learning that current supervisors sought

(Moral & Turner, 2019; Moral, Turner & Goldvarg, 2017). Of 119

respondents, 54 (46%) practised as supervisors of supervisors.

The ndings showed that limited training is available and ‘access

to experienced and trained practitioners is at best patchy globally.’

Respondents ‘…highlighted the importance of supervision on

supervision for example in developing their professional identity

and growing in the role of supervisor’ (Moral & Turner, 2019).

Professional development in this eld emerges as a need, with the

training that exists tending to be a one-to-one discussion with

an experienced supervisor of supervisors, or done through peer

reection, with few examples of specic group training.

Guidance for supervision

In Hawkins and Schwenk’s (2006) pioneering research on

supervision, they quoted the Oxford School of Coaching and

Mentoring’s recommendation for trainees to have one hour of

supervision for every 20 coaching hours and for fully trained

coaches to have one hour for 35 coaching hours (2006: 6).

In the years since, the coaching professional bodies have provided

some guidance, both for membership and accreditation – this can

be found on their respective websites (AC, 2019a; Association for

Coaches

(when contracting with a client, n = 142)

Supervisors

(when contracting with a supervisee, n = 99)

Shared understanding of the coaching assignment between the

coach and coachee (57.7%)

Shared understanding of supervision (67.7%)

Clarity of contracting (55.6%) Supervisor-supervisee relationship (63.6%)

Relationship between coach and coachee (42.3%) Clarity of contracting (54.5%)

(Turner & Clutterbuck, 2019)

Table 1: Top three ‘good practice’ themes in contracting

Professional Executive Coaching and Supervision, 2019; European

Mentoring and Coaching Council, 2019; ICF, 2019). For example,

the AC uses the Global Code of Ethics supervision requirements

(see Ethics and Supervision, below) for members to join, and for

those seeking accreditation there are specic guidelines to:

Ensure that you can full the following

requirements for supervision by participating in

one or more of the following:

One-to-one coaching supervisor to coach

One-to-one peer coaching supervision

Group coaching supervision

Peer group coaching supervision

AC, 2019b: 23

For accreditation, the AC recommends supervision in the following

ratios, depending on the level a coach is seeking (Table 2, below).

The European Mentoring and Coaching Council (EMCC) also

gives specic guidance and ‘believes that coaches/mentors

should undertake no less than 1 hour of supervision per 35 hours

of practice, ensuring a minimum of 4 hours per year, evenly

distributed if possible’ (EMCC, 2019). Another of the professional

bodies, the Association for Professional Executive Coaching and

Supervision (APECS), does not stipulate an amount, but does

require accredited members to provide an annual supervision

report from their supervisor alongside a continuous personal and

professional development plan. They suggest that ‘Each Executive

Coach will choose a form of supervision and a supervisor that best

ts their learning needs’ (APECS, 2019).

The largest coaching professional body, the ICF, requires coach

mentor support for those seeking a credential but does not

require supervision.

ICF recommends coaching supervision for

full-time professional coach practitioners as

part of their portfolio of continuing professional

development (CPD) activities designed to

keep them t for purpose. ICF does not require

coaching supervision.

Their belief is that:

[b]ased upon the fact that no robust studies exist

identifying the ecacy of coaching supervision,

one would be hard-pressed to defend a position

mandating coaching supervision on an ongoing

basis

ICF, 2019

The APECS, AC and EMCC bodies all provide lists of accredited

supervisors on their websites, many of whom work virtually,

providing access to supervision globally, one-to-one and in

groups. Where this is impossible, then peer supervision with

Table 2: AC reommended supervision ratios

Level of coach Coaching hours per 1-hour supervision

Foundation Coach 15 hours

Coach/Executive Coach 15 hours

Professional/Executive Coach 30 hours

Master/Executive Coach 40 hours

(AC, 2019b: 25)

an experienced coach, is another possibility. Henley’s position

on supervision is that where possible, coaches will work with a

qualied supervisor, because this means the person providing

supervision will have undergone specic study, including

dealing with ethical challenges and underlying dynamics. As

with Matile, Gilbert and Turner’s (2019) recommendations for

peer supervision, Henley appreciates that ‘peer supervision is

a valuable part of a practitioner’s portfolio of reective practice

activities, and groups or chains without qualied supervisors

are encouraged, supporting deeper exploration and additional

perspective. However, ideally some supervision will be delivered

by a qualied supervisor’ (Matile et al, 2019: 175). Further guidance

on being a supervisee and on peer supervision can be found in the

literature (Carroll & Gilbert, 2011; Clutterbuck, Whitaker & Lucas,

2016; Turner, Lucas & Whitaker, 2018).

Ethics and supervision

As has been alluded to, one of the roles of supervision is to help

raise standards. The Global Code of Ethics (GCE) (2019) has six

professional body signatories including the AC and EMCC, who

created the code in 2016, and more recent joiners like APECS and

the International Mentoring Association. Their collective position

on supervision makes clear the link to ethics:

4.3 Members will engage in supervision with a suitably

qualied supervisor or peer supervision group with

a level of frequency that is appropriate to their

coaching, mentoring or supervision practice, the

requirements of their professional body and the level

of their accreditation, or evidence engagement in

reective practice, ideally with peers and/or more

experienced colleagues.

4.4 Members need to ensure that any other existing

relationship with the supervisor does not interfere

with the quality of the supervision provided.

4.5 Members will discuss any ethical dilemmas and

potential, or actual, breaches of this Code with their

supervisor or peer supervision group for support and

guidance.

GCE, 2019: 6

Ethics in coaching, mentoring, organisational practice and

supervision is not a simple case of ‘right or wrong’ (Turner &

Passmore, 2019: 26). Malik writes of the responsibility we each

have to make our own ‘moral map’ (2014: 344). Meanwhile, Carroll

and Shaw (2013) reect that it is not easy to practise ethically:

My mind is a moral maze where I end up continually

facing yet another dead end. I long for the easy answer

that removes any responsibility for having to go on an

ethical journey where the destination is unclear.

Carroll & Shaw, 2013: 19

Despite a decade of encouragement

from professional bodies, and even in

the UK, many accredited coaches are still

not making use of supervision.

Supervision and other reective practices are an important part of

the journey. Turner and Passmore have been actively engaged in

research in this eld, particularly related to supervision (Passmore,

Brown & Csigas, 2017; Passmore & Turner, 2018; Passmore, Turner

& Filipiak, 2018, 2019; Turner & Passmore, 2017, 2018). This

has involved exploring coach, coachee, supervisor, professional

body and stakeholder attitudes towards ethics, and has involved

surveys and interviews. As Turner and Passmore noted:

‘This collection of studies has highlighted signicant

inconsistencies in how coaching practitioners deal with ethical

concerns’ (2019: 29). In the last couple of years, activity by the

professional bodies has increased.

A group consisting of the Association of Coaching Supervisors,

AC and representatives from the EMCC and ICF has been

exploring the role of ethical guidelines in coaching supervision

since 2017 (as yet unpublished), while the EMCC launched its own

survey into ethics for the EMCC International Provocations Report

(EMCC, 2017) and has sought volunteers for what it describes as

ground-breaking research into ethical dilemmas in 2019.

Ethical decision-making models can help. For example, the

APPEAR model (Passmore & Turner, 2018) is shown in Figure

1. But it can only ever be a guide to aid consideration of the

key questions, as opposed to a statement of the specic right

or wrong answers. (There is no way one model could hope to

encompass the full complexity of the situations that coaches,

mentors, supervisors and other organisational practitioners face,

nor could it capture the full spread of cultural and social diversity.)

Passmore, Brown and Csigas (2017) have also shown that

the European coaching market is widely diverse in its use of

supervision across the fty nations they surveyed. Countries

like the UK (Passmore, Brown, Wall et al, 2018) and Germany

(Passmore, Brown, Greif et al, 2018) have a relatively high rate of

supervisor use, while countries like Bulgaria (Passmore, Brown &

Georgieva, 2018 ) and Ukraine (Passmore, Brown & Timonkina,

2018) have relatively low rates. There was, however, consistent

evidence that despite a decade of encouragement from

Aware of

ethical best

pracce /

ethical code

Ethical

dilemma

Aware of

personal

values, beliefs

and cultural

inﬂuences

Peer

coaching

Ethical

opon 1

Ethical

opon 2

Ethical

opon 3

Ethical

opon 4

Ethical

opon 5

Super

-vision

Journal

/diary

wring

Personal

reﬂecon

Experienced coach

/ supervisior

Supervisor

Professional body

/ethical codes

Organisaonal

contract and policies

Legal/statutory

requirements

Coachee

/mentee contract

Contract lead

(if working as

subcontractor)

Own values, beliefs,

cultural inﬂuences

Professional

insurers

/legal helpline

Organisaonal

contract

Coachee

contract

Code of ethics

Stage 1

Awareness

Stage 2

Pracce

Stage 3

Possibilies

Stage 4

Extending the ﬁeld

Stage 5

Acng on reﬂecons

Stage 6

Reﬂecng

on learning

Ethical

acon plan

Review with

supervisor

Reﬂect on

the process

and stake-

holders

Reﬂect on

the issue

and self

Ethical

acon

The Manifesto for Supervision

Abstract

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