What drives toxic supervision?
I am going to work through my supervision model outlining the various level of supervision quality. Toxic supervision sits at the bottom of the model.
Toxic supervision can be caused by an ego-driven supervisor, a supervisee that is very closed to learning, when supervision is confused with line management or if supervision is occurring within a toxic workplace culture.
When a supervisor is ego driven or judgemental, they may use supervision to put the supervisee down in order to feel better in themselves. This is clearly the anti-thesis of the intent of supervision.
Behaviours like this can occur on an individual or systemic level, where the wider workplace has a toxic or bullying culture. This specific issue has caused several medical specialist training programs to lose their accreditation in Australian hospitals. This has a terrible personal and professional cost and supervisees understandably learn that supervision is not safe.
Supervision supports the health and community sector workforce to cope with the high degree of emotional wear and tear in client work. Safework Australia’s research shows that the psychosocial climate of our sector is very low compared to other industries. What this means is that the emotional wear and tear of the client work is then compounded by the strain of an unhealthy workplace climate. In fact, the feedback I receive all too commonly is that the client work is easy compared to surviving workplace dynamics.
Finally, some employees are very closed to learning. This may result from previous negative supervisory experiences, or because they are quite defensive, egocentric and not able or willing to take the interpersonal risks of learning. This is quite challenging for the supervisor and for the workplace, as in our ever-changing field, the capacity to learn would be a non-negotiable requirement for employment in our workforce.
As we reflect on the different levels of supervision, what is happening in your workplace?
What do you think the experiences are for supervisees in your workplace?
Next Steps in Supervision
To review and book into my public programs please click the links below: