Gerald Corey et al, Clinical Supervision in the Helping Professions

This chapter, entitled “Becoming a Multiculturally Competent Supervisor”, explores the importance of ensuring that supervisors incorporate diversity perspectives into their supervision through a multicultural supervisory practice. This chapter goes on to provide practical suggestions for incorporating multicultural strategies into supervision.

Culture, as applicable to supervision, has been described as such:

“By defining culture broadly, to include within-group demographic variables (e.g., age, sex, and place of residence), status variables (e.g., social, educational, and economic), and affiliations (formal and informal), as well as ethnographic variables such as nationality, ethnicity, language, and religion, the construct multicultural becomes generic to all counseling relationships (Pederson, 2000)” (122).

The following guidelines which operationalize multicultural actions and attitudes in the supervisory relationship:

1. Explore multicultural dynamics in the supervisory relationship;
2. Include multicultural competencies in the supervisory agreement;
3. Assist supervisees in developing cultural self-awareness;
4. Accept your limits as a multicultural supervisor;
5. Model cultural sensitivity;
6. Accept responsibility to provide knowledge about cultural diversity;
7. Teach and model multicultural sensitivity in assessment;
8. Provide the opportunity for multicultural case conceptualization;
9. Promote culturally appropriate interventions; and
10. Model social advocacy;

However, when some supervisors are not multiculturally competent it is difficult to operationalize culture in the supervisory relationship. The lack of cultural competence in supervision is often evidenced in one or more of the following ways:

“failures of respect and mutuality; issues of power; boundary violations; failure to take into account social forces that have an impact on supervisees’ and clients’ lives; incorrect assumptions regarding supervisees’ abilities; insufficient knowledge of multicultural case conceptualization; unintentional racism; inappropriate assumptions regarding supervisees’ racial or ethnic identification; excessive attention placed on visible ethnicity; lack of attention to cultural similarities and differences; and inaccurate assessment, diagnosis, and treatments” (136).

In light of such, the authors set out the multi-cultural counseling competencies as applicable to the supervision process, to assist supervisors in becoming multiculturally competent. These include:

1. Being aware of personal cultural values and biases;
2. Understanding the worldview of clients and supervisees; and
3. Developing culturally appropriate intervention strategies and techniques.

Gerald Corey et al, Clinical Supervision in the Helping Professions, 2nd ed (USA: American Counseling Association, 2010) ch 6.