As coaching is increasingly being adopted within organisations, the maturity of the support systems for coaching is developing. I wrote about this in a previous article. One important ingredient when designing a framework within which coaching operates is coaching supervision.
Supervision of internal coaches is one of my favourite things to do, and I’m fortunate that I get to work with a number of organisations who take coaching really seriously. In some I’m a supervisor within a larger team. In others I manage the entire pool of supervisors, and it’s with that hat on I’m writing this article.The qualitative, developmental and resourcing functions of supervision to support internal coaches are all important, and supervision offers other benefits to the organisation as a whole.
The added value of supervision
One of those benefits is the insight people leaders can gain. When individuals across an organisation discuss their most pressing issues in coaching conversations the coach gets an important glimpse into their world. A problem from a people leader’s perspective is that the importance of not breaking confidentiality means that those insights often won’t reach those who might be interested in them in order to enact change.
When a coach has several clients across their organisation they’re in a better position to point out the sorts of things they’re ending up discussing, while still protecting their individual clients’ circumstances to a certain extent. This isn’t perfect, though. The number of coachees internal coaches have at any one time tends to be no more than 2-4, which is a smaller sample size than anyone would typically be looking for.
Supervision, on the other hand, operates on a different scale. One organisation I’m working with at the moment, for example, has an internal coaching pool of over 100, all of whom are in regular supervision. When the aggregate of those 300 or so coaching relationships is discussed across groups of coaches and across the supervisor pool it becomes possible to gain real insights without breaking confidentiality.
We can identify conclusions about the sorts of topics people are raising in their coaching, providing valuable information for people teams to develop their strategies and plans. We can observe trends as they develop, helping leadership to respond in a more agile way than would otherwise be possible. We can extract cultural themes, providing insight into the day-to-day experience of an organisation’s people behind the facade they might put up when conversing with a leader.
Four meta observations
With this in mind, I thought it would be interesting to do an analysis of my analyses, identifying the meta trends I’m observing through the supervision I’m responsible for delivering across multiple organisations. I could have written a fair bit about this but pulled out the five biggest observations here.
1) Burnout and overwhelm
Something that seems to be coming up across the board could be summarised as change fatigue. One of the most common topics people seem to be raising in coaching conversations is a level of frustration with employers that the continuous demand is to have to do more, faster, with fewer resources. In a supervision conversation with a coach recently I was told their organisation was needing to downsize a team in order to justify investment in technology that hadn’t been updated for 20 years, all while paying record dividends to shareholders. The level of motivation seems to be low.
Workloads across geographies and sectors feel high while job security feels low, and increasing adoption of hybrid workplaces is confusing office relationships and further blurring the boundaries between work and personal life.
Coaches need supporting with strategies to support clients with addressing burnout and establishing healthy boundaries, and organisations need to think more clearly and more systemically about adopting sustainable work practices.
2) Adoption of coaching across cultures
In some cultural contexts, it seems difficult to break coaching out from under its categorisation as a corrective measure rather than a supportive and developmental tool. Coaches themselves within some cultural contexts then often feel ill-prepared to challenge this thinking.
As remote working practices have become the norm, organisations are becoming increasingly global and diverse, increasing the need for coaches to develop cultural awareness and sensitivity. Coaching approaches that resonate in one cultural context may not be as effective in others, and yet the use of global coach development programmes rather than localised ones is increasing.
The maturity of processes required to integrate coaching into performance management processes and other related disciplines is higher than we think, and when we take a world full of cultural contexts into consideration alongside it the complexity only grows.
Most critical of all, however, is probably the topic of coachee readiness. Those organisations that are putting efforts into increasing coachability are those that see the greatest take-up of coaching and, unsurprisingly, also end up with the best stories to tell about the impact coaching is having.
3) Fundamental coaching skills and ethics
Apart from topics to do with specific coaching issues, the most common topics coaches are bringing to supervision tend to be the most basic ones. Where is the boundary line between coaching and mentoring? What should I do if the coachee wants to become my friend and I don’t want to become theirs? Am I allowed to extend to do a couple more sessions?
Not only are these topics often more tricky to navigate for internal coaches than for external coaches, it highlights the importance of a solid CPD and supervision programme. The process of consciously revisiting those foundational coaching beliefs and codes of ethics supports the steady reflective progress that’s so important for good coaches.
Similarly, internal coaches often ask for new coaching tools and models, as if every coaching topic a client brings just needs the right item from the toolbox applied to it – and don’t we all love learning a new model? Aside from supporting internal coaches through high-quality CPD, it’s important to remember the existence of external coaches! If a coaching need has been identified and internal coaches don’t feel well enough equipped to provide the right environment to support the client, that probably indicates that exploring an external coach is justified.
(If you’re looking for an external coach, I currently have capacity…)
4) The fast-changing world
Perhaps due to people finding out that I talk a fair amount about coaching and technology, the rapid pace of technology change is being raised more and more in coaching supervision. Coaches want to experiment to make their coaching more memorable, and want to understand what the impact of AI might be.
Technology isn’t necessarily the biggest disruptive change. Scandals revealed in the media, volatile politics and the climate crisis have all come up in supervision sessions and coaches sometimes feel uneasy to be supporting clients as they try to navigate them. How does one support someone find a solution to a problem when they think the problem is unsolvable?
Internal coaches’ abilities at times are being pushed to the limits, and the role of coaching supervisors has never been more important. As the world continues to accelerate supervisors will need to facilitate thinking around how coaches should respond to change in themselves and with their clients, what a good ethical response should be, and what role coaches need to play in their organisations to make a strategic difference into the future.
Conclusion: organisations need good supervisors!
As coaching continues to evolve in response to the world around it and in order to continuously improve, organisations’ use of coaching also needs to develop. Coaching could be used much more strategically than it often is in order to optimise its potential. I believe coaching supervisors play a vital role in this, supporting the professional development of coaches as well as adding value to those sessions through identifying emerging trends and providing organisations with an alternative lens to contribute to their thinking.
The systemic impact of high-quality coaching within organisations could be very great. By investing properly in the development of internal coaches, through well thought-through CPD programmes and supervision, organisations will benefit from their effectiveness by increasing the impact on individuals and the wider systems.
