9 January 2020 – Global Coaching Supervision: A Study of Perceptions and Practices Around the World. Kimcee McAnally and Lilian Abrams
This session will present and explore the data underlying the 2019 Global Coaching Supervision study*. This research, undertaken by four (4) U.S. coach supervisor colleagues, received responses from almost 1300 coaches and coach supervisors worldwide, which captured global information about various aspects of coaching supervision. Kimcee and Lilian will discuss the data, including how supervisees report finding their supervisors, the types of supervision undertook, fees for supervision, what supervision assists them with, and other data. This work contributes a broader baseline of data than has yet been captured before on coaching supervision, and also contributes a new, especially larger representation of U.S. and Americas respondents.
*Authors: McAnally, K; Abrams, L; Asmus, M; & Hildebrandt, T (2019) Global Coaching Supervision: A Study of the Perceptions and Practices Around the World.
13/14 February – Resilience: When is Yours Tested as a Supervisor? Dr Carole Pemberton
As coaches our clients bring their resilience loss issues to us: sometimes they use the word, often as we listen, we recognise that their resources are being impacted by the demands on them and their responses to those demands. But what about us as supervisors? How do we recognise our own needs? If supervision is about restoration as well as development, then there are times our needs are restorative as we are impacted by client work that does not go well, by being sucked in by the coach’s own emotions, by dry periods of work or by being overstretched by demands. This session will look at resilience through the lens of how supervisors can manage their own needs. It will provide a space for input through breakout rooms, sharing of experience and co-coaching on resilience loss needs.
5/6 March – “We are one, they are us” – staying in dialogue about ethics in supervision and coaching. Kees de Vries
New Zealand Prime Minister Jacinda Ardern’s much quoted phrase: ‘we are one, they are us’ in the aftermath of the Christchurch killings in 2019 spoke to all of us. It underpinned something that felt ethically important and underlined how ethics is part of our daily lives. On one of the days we meet, March 5th, there is a call for a “Climate Coaching Action Day” by Coaching at Work magazine, another example of ethics in action. In this exploration of ethics, we hope to collectively share how we dialogue about ethics in supervision and stay in relationship in the here-and-now and what approaches are successful in understanding ethics in ourselves and others.
MONDAY 23rd March 2020 GSN SPECIAL – repeating FORTNIGHTLY (6, 20 April, 4, 18 May, 1, 15, 29 June):
The Coronavirus pandemic and supervision – what is the impact of Covid-19 on our practice and ourselves?
In this special for GSN members, facilitators from around the world, including Lily Seto in Canada, Louise Schubert in Spain, Lise Lewis, Carol Whitaker, Lynne Cooper, Anne Calleja and Colleen Harding in England, Sonja Vlaar in the Netherlands, Leanne Lowish and Nancy Tylim in the USA and Hellen Hettinga in France, will facilitate a space for reflection, discussion and sharing among members as we all face this pandemic together. They will use breakout rooms.
2/3 April – How do highly experienced supervisors develop throughout their careers? Natalia de Estevan-Ubeda.
This session aims to extend our understanding of the development of coaching supervisors beyond their formative years. Natalia will present the results of her Master’s research where she interviewed highly experienced (*) coach supervisors. There were fascinating subtleties and apparent paradoxes which brought about an insightful perspective of developmental sources. An example is a connection between the development of the supervisor and the supervisee, and the co-existence of spontaneous and systematic decisions when considering new development. This is a practical session which will encourage us to think about our own development and to consider how we may want to broaden our choices. The session will wrap up with a debate over a couple of interestingly controversial issues that came up throughout the research: power and making supervision mandatory.
(*) Highly experienced supervisors criteria included: scholar practitioners, individuals who have developed the coaching profession through the creation of knowledge and publish their work, authors and with over ten years’ experience.
16/17 April – Supervising the self-care of mental health and fitness coaches. A professional imperative? Anne Archer.
As an advocate of mental health, Anne’s work spans crisis through to thriving. This session will ask:
- How are you taking care of your mental fitness?
- What is our role as advocates and supervisors, in raising the bar?
- Is self-care a professional imperative?
- How do we ensure the right balance is struck between a coach enabling someone to take a step forward and someone ill equipped to spot the signs of someone who is unwell and where coaching may not be the right option?
We will explore our red, amber and green flags to enable us to be serving the mental health agenda well.
21/22 May – Supervision of organisational coaching: where are we? Dr Michel Moral
Organizational coaching (OC) is a growing area in several countries. A key challenge for supervisors is that the object “Organizational Coaching” is not precisely delimited by professional bodies. Also, approaches for such a supervision are almost unexplored. State of the art will be looked at during the session.
28/20 May – The Discomfort of Uncertainty. Dr Carole Pemberton and Anne Archer
As the COVID story unfolds it is becoming clearer that uncertainty will be a continuing feature of our lives and those we work with. There is no clear end point and no clear answers to how our lives and our livelihoods will be.
This participative session will offer a thinking space for supervisors who are experiencing a sense of discomfort around this uncertainty. We plan to use the framework of Otto Scharmer’s Theory U. Prior to the session we will provide a reminder of the framework. Participants can explore their feelings whilst being supported to access the resources from which they can ‘let come’ their adaptability and creativity. In offering this space for supervisors, the session will also be offering a framework that can be used with clients.
11/12 June – Don’t mangle the metaphors: a practical yet effective way of utilising a Clean approach to supervision. Lynne Cooper
Metaphors are fundamental to language, offering a shorthand way of describing something in terms of another thing or experience. This session focusses on how to work with supervisees’ metaphors, how to elicit metaphors, and how not to ‘mangle’ others’ metaphors. You’ll practise tuning your ear for metaphor, eliciting metaphors or symbols and you’ll hear some suggestions about what not to do when one appears – all to support your client to access their unconscious thinking, quickly and easily.
9/10 July – Supervising internal coaches. Jenny Mitchell
We’ll talk about the challenges, risks and delights of supervision and CPD within organisations who run an internal coach network, including
- Building alignment with other processes e.g. strategic objective setting and leadership development
- Skills development across an internal group – keeping consistency and setting standards
- Managers who coach – the directive default
6/7 August. Appreciative Inquiry – let’s play with making magic by using AI to inform our individual and group supervision. Elspeth Campbell.
Appreciative Inquiry is about stories of success, of struggle to create success and the magic we can engender through listening to these. Using the 6-stage method of Appreciative Inquiry, an expanded version of the original 4 stage process from Cooperrider and Whitney 2005, to evoke transformational change. This experiential session will enable you:
- to invite curiosity through asking “what’s critical?” and systemic, circular questioning
- to create alchemy through transformative listening
- to generate a shared vision of “what’s possible”
- to shift yourself and supervisees out of stuckness
- to discover the difference between Appreciative Inquiry and an appreciative approach
24 September (THURSDAY ONLY). Dr Damian Goldvarg and Eve Turner. Advantages, disadvantages and top tips for virtual coaching supervision.
The global pandemic has necessitated professionals to offer their services virtually. In this session, Damian Goldvarg and Eve Turner will present the findings of their survey – with thanks to the many GSN participants – on the advantages and disadvantages of working virtually from the perspective of both supervisees as well as supervisors. They will also share strategies and tips on how to work virtually and draws on insights from those taking part.
25th September (FRIDAY ONLY). Supervision in a Thinking Environment. Anne Hathaway and Eve Turner.
In this session Anne and Eve will be drawing from Nancy Kline’s Thinking Environment©, which creates a space for reflection where attention and listening skills are paramount. How does this approach, where the supervisee seeks input when they want it, rather than when we as the supervisor think they need it, sit with each of us? We will use breakout rooms to practice this approach, so we request that you bring a case for supervision.
8/9 October. Adult learning and how this impacts our coaching and supervision. Nick Smith.
Nick will be using the ‘transformative dimension of adult learning’ developed by Jack Mezirow, in order to look at how we best learn and unlearn as adults. What are the ground conditions we need to create that allow higher levels of learning (ie Bateson Learning Levels)? We will also explore the link between new learning and new meaning creation. Without an active use of these elements in our coaching and supervision, we will be trying to shift what we know without addressing the resistant power of our old assumptions to maintain old views.
12/13 November. Global Practice: The Generative Impact of Diversity in Coaching and Coaching Supervision. Bev Paulin.
Executive coaching and coaching supervision are global practices that are growing across geographical, cultural, social, political and socio-economic borders. Virtual coaching and supervision have enabled the possibility of global or diverse practice no matter where we live and work in the world. And the expansion of coaching beyond leaders is reaching a broader and potentially more diverse group of employees. As practitioners and researchers, this global and expanded practice allows us to look again at our practice and ask ourselves different questions. Where do our frames of practice and research arise? How is diversity present or absent in our practice and research? What are we noticing or learning from the diversity we encounter in clients, teams and systems? How might the diversity we encounter be generative or developmental? This session will explore our experiences with diversity in coaching and supervision contexts, individual and collective learning, and potential implications for coaching and supervision practice and research.
10/11 December. 2020: a review of ‘That was the year that was’! Anne Calleja.
In this session we invite you to be creative and bring your stories of your experience, learnings and discoveries through 2020. You will have the opportunity to share in small groups and reflect on ‘the year that was’. Bring along a picture, cake, model, song, poem, constellation, story, metaphor etc. that reflects the year for them.
28/29 January 2021. Supervision as spiritual practice. Robin Shohet
There is no spiritual being who can be so useful as a good supervisor. (Rowan, J. The Reality Game). I often quote Wilfred Bion who suggests going into a session without memory, desire or understanding. We will unpack this statement together, but basically it amounts to being in the here and now. We will look at some of the beliefs, introjects, conditioning and scripts that might stop this from happening, working towards the idea that when we are open, the answers can come through us. We get out of the way and move towards what is called in Zen, Beginner’s Mind.
GNS members include supervisors working in countries such as India, the USA, Canada, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Kenya, China, Hong Kong, South Korea, Vietnam, Oman and Turkey, as well as throughout Europe such as Spain, Poland, Portugal, France, Finland, Hungary, Germany, The Netherlands, Belgium, Ireland, Italy, Switzerland and the UK. The GSN has established a community that brings together some of the leading thinkers in the field. To date there have been 120+ webinars.
The Global Supervisors’ Network is also proud to have offered to partner with EthicalCoach, the philanthropic arm of WBECS, to support aspiring coaches in Africa with supervision. Trained in coaching by Professor David Clutterbuck, GSN members have given their time, voluntarily, to supervise the coaches since spring 2018, and continue to do so. The aim of this phase of EthicalCoach is to support NGO leaders from Ethiopian non-government/civil society organizations committed to tackling humanitarian and environmental challenges, so aiming to transform the lives of children and families in need. More details of the initiative can be found on the EthicalCoach website.
