Supervision
Supervision is increasingly acknowledged as a crucial activity enabling coaches and consultants to develop excellence. This is true of both external and internal coaches and consultants. Supervision involves regular meetings with an appropriately qualified person, to reflect on all aspects of the coach's or consultant's work in order to develop their craft and maximise their effectiveness. It provides the opportunity for professional development, personal resourcing and quality assurance.
Practitioners are increasingly being required by their accrediting bodies and by users of their services to ensure their quality through supervision. Read the CIPD's paper for further information.
Polishing Your Skills . . .
External supervision can be a great energiser for in-house OD practitioners or coaches, providing challenging new viewpoints, sharing knowledge and best practice and ensuring the organisation has a truly top team to draw on. We provide external supervision or shadow consultancy to fellow professionals, either individually or in a group format.
. . . And Polishing Our Own
At Irving Allan we use qualified supervisors to ensure that our consultants and coaches offer a consistently excellent service. People who work for us are committed to their skill and capability development. They are active and deliberate learners who are prepared to challenge themselves to reach their full potential.
Organisational Benefits
Organisations are finding they benefit because supervision:
Supports individuals in organisations who can be relatively isolated as they attempt to instigate large scale change
Supports less experienced coaches and internal consultants so that they maximise their learning and capability improvement in a short time - this has often been particularly helpful where coaching training or the instigation of a 'coaching culture' has been called for
Supports experienced coaches and internal consultants who have been handed particularly complex challenges
Provides a learning space for groups of internal coaches to ensure aligned practice of the highest quality and ethical standards.
Our lead partner for supervision, Julie Allan, has been trained by Peter Hawkins and colleagues at the Bath Consultancy Group and CSTD, who are acknowledged leaders in establishing the evidence base for the benefits of supervision for coaches (Hawkins and Schwenk, CIPD research 2006).
Supervision is widely accepted as an essential part of ensuring that coaches and consultants stay at the top of their game. It goes beyond quality assurance to the development of excellence and wise practice. We are committed to supervision within our own practice; we are pleased to provide external supervision to organisations committed to their own excellence.
