Professional Supervision

Regular external professional supervision paired with positive internal relationships with your line manager is instrumental for developing good practice, skills, and strengths. Professional supervision provides a purposeful space to work through challenges and build evidence base and practice confidence. Inner Vision’s Professional Supervision model offers a space where you can delve into your practice and truly work through what you do well and what is holding you back. It offers an opportunity to explore what is happening organisationally or culturally in a space that is separate to the organisation where you can continue to develop the skills, you need for best practice as well as to better manage tension, stress, trauma, and conflict.

According to the Australian Association of Social Workers Supervision Standards (AASW, 2014) professional supervision is an integral aspect of practice development. AASW defines professional supervision as … “a forum for reflection and learning. … an interactive dialogue between at least two people, one of whom is a supervisor. This dialogue shapes a process of review, reflection, critique and replenishment for professional practitioners. Supervision is a professional activity in which practitioners are engaged throughout the duration of their careers regardless of experience or qualification. The participants are accountable to professional standards and defined competencies and to organisational policy and procedures” (AASW, 2014; Davys & Beddoe, 2010, p. 21).

Inner Vision Consulting provides a supervision process based on respectful learning relationships, developing trust and purposeful practice reflection and knowledge sharing.

Some key things to consider

Ensure you get the most out of professional supervision sessions:

• Find a supervisor who has the relevant cultural knowledge, skills, experience, and qualifications to your role.
• Decide on some goals you want to achieve through supervision – it could be developing confidence as a practitioner or leader, learning to have the difficult conversations, developing practice knowledge, unpacking cases, reflecting on actions, beliefs, values, and responses, and working through some professional relationship differences, etc.
• Share those goals with your supervisor and develop an intention for the work you will be doing together.
• Share your expectations and wishes for supervision with your supervisor, including how often you would like sessions, preferred times, cancellations, payment, etc.
• Spend time before hand to warm up to the session. Have a think about where you left off at the last session, what is relevant for you right now and how you want to spend your time with the supervisor. Check how the issues relate to the original goals and whether anything needs to be amended.
• Bring as much of yourself to supervision as you can and work on being honest about what is present for you. There is no need to impress your external supervisor. They are there to support you to work through the real issues.
• Be willing to be open to reflect and be challenged. We learn more when we are stretched outside our comfort zone.
• Accept that some sessions you just need to debrief. Try and do so with purpose and intention and recognise that sometimes we just need someone to be there with us and hold the space.
• Consider whether there are things you can do in between sessions that helps develop you as a person and as a professional.

External professional supervision extends beyond line management supervision, counselling, or EAP. At Inner Vision Consulting, I co-create with the client a reflective space of trust and learning. We create a space where we are permitted to grow and learn from our actions, our values and belief system. The supervision relationship will enable us to truly stretch our thinking and consequently continuously improve in our work through this working relationship. A positive external professional supervisory relationship offers you mentorship, appropriate management of power within that relationship, and it supports you to define who you are as a practitioner.