From Toxic to Transformative: Let’s Talk About Supervision
It’s widely accepted that supervision can significantly support positive outcomes in our health and community sector workplaces - for supervisees, the clients we care for and the organisation itself.
Professional and clinical supervision is an essential component of our continuing professional development. The primary focus of good supervision is to provide a customised learning experience and environment for all employees. Life long learning is critical to our work. If we’re doing the same things we were doing five years ago we are going backwards.
Even though there is extensive research in professional and clinical supervision, other research has often pointed to the confusion that tends to exists in the professional literature around effective models and methods of supervision.
To support savvy leaders and organisations to invest meaningfully in their employees’ professional development, I’ve developed a simple framework that shows how supervision can move from toxic to transformative supervision - and the incredible impact this has.
First Things First: Why is Supervision So Important?
Professional and clinical supervision is essential for enhancing professional skills and support needs, whilst building workforce capacity in our sector.
Research shows supervision provides wide-ranging benefits for employees and workplaces, including:
Improving quality of clinical care and reduced clinical errors.
Enhanced skill development and engagement in reflective learning.
Encouraging safe, reflective practice where we are more aware and sensitive to the patients needs.
Increased professional confidence and job satisfaction.
Employee retention.
Development of one’s professional identity.
Prevention of burnout, minimisation of compassion fatigue and vicarious traumatisation.
To name just a few!
From Toxic to Transformative: A Look at the Framework
Extensive research in professional and clinical supervision, adult learning principles, psychological safety, interpersonal neurobiology, emotional intelligence, and workforce wellbeing provide a sound foundation for building supervisory practice.
If the evidence is ignored, supervision can end up being ineffective, or worse, toxic.
Below is an infographic that illustrates different supervisory experiences and the impact on learning, the supervisee, the supervisor and the workplace:
Here’s a brief overview of what each of these supervision qualities might look like in the workplace:
TOXIC
Toxic supervision can be caused by:
An ego-driven supervisor.
A supervisee that is very closed to learning.
Supervision is confused with line management.
Supervision is taking place within a toxic workplace culture.
BENIGN
Benign supervision usually stems from a place where there is limited understanding of what supervision can or should be:
Supervisors and supervisees are unclear about how to prepare and utilise supervision.
Supervisors or supervisees see it as more about evaluating, monitoring, or bringing supervisees up to a minimum competency standard.
Supervisors and supervisees fail to form a positive, trusting learning alliance.
A general lack of understanding or knowledge to develop learning goals and explore reflective learning practice.
POSITIVE
Positive supervision is focussed on learning and skill development:
Supervisors support skill development and problem-solving.
Supervisees are provided with relevant information and resources to grow in their practice.
Supervisors may lean more towards reactive learning and less towards reflective and proactive learning.
Supervisee and supervisor are both open to learning and actively participate in building a trusting learning alliance.
TRANSFORMATIVE
Transformative supervision, as you may guess, looks very different:
Transformative supervision is founded on open, trusting supervisory relationships.
Supervisors understand their role is to build psychologically safe relationships that facilitate rich learning.
Supervisors are highly invested in their supervisees’ growth and development, keen to support them to maximise their potential and build long-term capacity.
Supervisees are highly engaged, self-directed learners who feel safe sharing their learning goals, concerns, and questions.
Supervisees feel ‘professionally nourished’.
Take a moment to reflect on each of these and your own recent experiences as a supervisor or a supervisee. Which one describes your experience?
With this framework in mind, can you start to see ways you can foster the experience, to move towards positive and transformative supervision?
I encourage you to spend time reflecting on this - it’s a useful exercise to come back to the next time we find ourselves in the supervision relationship.
Moving Towards Transformative Supervision
To perform at their peak, our health and community sector workforce needs an environment that supports learning and best practice supervision.
A clear roadmap for supervision amplifies the opportunity that life-long reflective learning provides to unlock capacity in the workforce.
The learning culture and level of psychological safety are potent forces in supporting best practice supervision. A workplace that values learning is a thriving ecosystem where it is safe to take the interpersonal risks of learning, where it is safe to be vulnerable, ask questions, and seek guidance.
This is the ideal culture for transformative supervision.
Would You Like to Get More Out of Supervision?
I have a few resources and workshops that can help: