This chapter explores emotion within supervision, and consider how the best supervision elucidate the opportunities, challenges, and contributions of the emotional content of practice.
Emotionally sensitive supervision requires willingness within the supervisory relationship to engage in complex and uncertain conversations about practice in a manner that requires a degree of emotional exposure. Simulating emotionally sensitive supervision requires ensuring the space is a place of reflection, and peer based reflective discussion. Peer based reflective discussions can built team cooperation as well as reduce stress and burnout (Fook, 2016). This can be done by way of the Intervision approach to group supervision which consists of the following key aspects:
- Three key roles – facilitator, reflective team, and presenter. These roles rotate in order to benefit all members and to create a shared ownership of the process
- The presenter shares a practice issue that is clarified by questions from the reflective team. Through this process the presenter refines the key question
- The reflective team discuss the issue (not directly involving the presenter) and produce hypotheses
- A wider discussion may take place to complete the process.
This approach places explicit learning culture at its root. “Additionally, the permissions and trust required to explore complex feelings and uncertainties are essential”. However, supervisee’s also find value in informal support which includes: availability of support (i.e., on the spot), shared experiences (the knowledge that colleagues had experienced similar situations is reassuring), un-minuted (lack of formality allowed issues to be explored without pressure to “get it right”), and preparation (informal discussions could act as pre-supervision exploration of issues).
Richard Ingram, “Emotionally Sensitive Supervision” in Kieran O’Donoghue & Lambert Engelbrecht, eds, The Routledge International Handbook of Social Work Supervision (Oxon: Routledge, 2021).
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