My philosophy as a supervisor

In the years that I have been a social worker, I have had ok supervisors to pretty good supervisors. This led me to thinking, about what I hope to strive for as I become a supervisor myself. Below are some of my reflections

THE SPACE I STRIVE TO CREATE

A supervision space should be able to include

1) Eliciting expertise from the supervisee: The goal is being able to get the you (the supervisee) to be able to think for yourself. You are the expert on your client, therefore I will often go to you for answers and support you to think out loud about your clinical understanding. This include supporting the creative ways in which you want to go about helping your client. Of course, this does NOT mean that I don’t challenge you or steer you when there is a clear mistake. Speaking of mistakes…

2) Being able to make mistakes: A supervisee can’t feel safe to admit mistakes if there a real possibility that this mistake will be used to justify not getting raises or promotion. I strive to set up a culture or understanding that it’s only a mistake if you don’t learn from it (Thank you Bob Ross for this one).

3) Affirming and validating talking bluntly (I do NOT equate talking bluntly with talking unprofessionally) about the hard work that is being done: There needs to be space to talk about how the work you’re doing is affecting you as a human being. Especially when you are just starting out in your professional career, stressed out with not so great wages, long hours, hard clients, etc not to mention everything else going on outside of work.

This may include speaking more informally about how you feel about a client. For me, I see this blunt talk as a rich opportunity to talk about transference, counter transference, and most importantly discussing burn out. I think that if we don’t allow our supervisee to talk about things bluntly, then we can’t do a good job of assessing burn out. And it’s a moment for me, the supervisor, to help the supervisee reorganize their thoughts in more helpful ways.

For me, I often see these blunt conversations not a reflection of a supervisee’s unprofessionalism, but of a person who have strived really hard to build connections and create changes in a client’s life, and the person is feeling helpless or disappointed with the results.

GOALS OF SUPERVISION

It is important for me to be able to first and foremost negotiate with the supervisee what they feel would be important to work on in supervision. Again, I want to always affirm the inner wisdom of you, the supervisee.

With that being said, below are just some things I think universally, I should touch on and support you to be able to develop and/or strengthen.

1) Critical Thinking: The end goal is that you feel secure in your decision making regarding how to guide and interact with the client, but also your conceptualization of the problem. Furthermore, I want you to be able to justify the decision as well. I find that it’s just as helpful to discuss decision making behind a good decision making, as oppose to only when we have made a bad decision (with hindsight being 20/20).

2) Documentation: This is one the most important part of the job, and yet I don’t think there is enough support for what a good note should look like. There are many ways to write a good case note, but in my years working in different agencies, EACH AGENCY AND FUNDING SOURCE WILL HAVE DIFFERENT EXPECTATIONS FOR WHAT A NOTE SHOULD LOOK LIKE. My goal is to help you understand the standard parts of a case note, but also learn skills to assess and figure out how to personalize each case note type to the funding source.

3) Burn Out: It is important for burn out to be discuss proactively and not reactively. It’s my job to make sure that I am assessing how you are managing your day to day, handling case loads, emotional load, and discuss what skills or competencies you are using in response those all of these things.

4) Relationship with liability and law: This point is really about finding and feeling that you have a healthy relationship with ideas of liability and professional code of conduct. For me, when I was supervisee, I felt this immense pressure that I would be liable for whatever happens to my client leading me to cross my own boundaries mulitple times in the name of “doing my due diligence.” It took me a while to find the balance between my own boundaries and what is required by the law/code of conducts.

IN SUMMARY

At the end of the day, my hope for you as a supervisee is the same hope I have for clients - that you are able to take ownership of how you want to go about things personally and professionally.

Hello, you have come to the end of the blog. If you found anything here helpful please feel free to reach out and connect with me by clicking HERE.