Coaching Supervision

Coaching supervision can be seen the same as eating well and exercise is vital to a healthy lifestyle. It is not just as a “nice to have” but an essential and crucial part of being a coach.

Even the most experienced coaches need help to constantly re-examine their practice, to continue to develop their skills and self-awareness, and to avoid being drawn into organisational systems.

Coaching supervision is fundamental to good practice; for coaches:

• a way of gaining clarity from difficult and complicated work situations
• a opportunity to receive support in a practical sense or by form of ideas, inspiration and emotion
• sharing issues and when suitable reassurance
• ongoing learning and professional development
• a time and place to reflect on one’s coaching work with either a senior colleague, a leadership group or with a number of peers

However, supervision means different things at different stages to developing practitioners. Someone just starting out, who may still be training will have different requirements to the executive coach who has been working in the role for numerous years. Clearer guidance and closer attention may be required by the ‘trainee’ to manage anxieties that often come about in the early days. The more experienced coach/mentor will probably want more consultative dialogue.

Coaching supervision is fundamental to good practice; for organisations:

• a way to assure quality by opening up practice to peer scrutiny and by making sure that coaches are regularly attending to their personal and professional development
• an ability to monitor the quality of coaching provided and to improve the quality and effectiveness of the coaching
• support network and resource for the coaches
• generates organisational learning:  collective patterns may emerge across the various coaching relationships

Our coaching consultancies Bath Consultancy Group and Clutterbuck Associates and have years of expertise in this field in both the private and public sector.