Zorica Patel

Supervision in coaching: supervision, ethics and continuous professional development

The focus of this insightful book is mainly on supervision in coaching. Many definitions of supervision are utilised throughout the book. The one that stood out for me is: ‘Supervision is an opportunity to bring someone back to their own mind, to show them how good they can be’ (Kline, 1999). Also, Hawkins and Smith (2006) state that it provides ‘a protected space in which the coach can reflect on particular client situations and relationships, the reactivity and patterns they invoke for them, and by transforming these live in supervision, can profoundly benefit the client’. In this respect, different approaches to supervision offer a variety of ‘mirrors’ for coaches and coaching psychologists to reflect upon their practice. It is almost impossible to consider supervision without having an overview of the ethical dilemmas coaches and coaching psychologists are faced with in their practice. At the same time, continuous personal and professional development is crucially important in order to enhance overall coaching practice. These topics are skilfully interwoven in this well-written volume that addresses how ‘coaches need to work simultaneously on three aspects of their personal development: their relational engagement capacity, their ethical capacity and their cognitive capacity to embrace and work with complexity’ (Hawkins, 2006). The book is organised in four parts. Part 1 sets the general context by outlining different approaches and models of supervision. The first chapter provides an overview of supervision and continuous professional development (CPD) in coaching while Chapter 2 outlines the reflective coaching practitioner model. Chapters 3 and 4 address issues such as action learning supervision and the Gestalt supervision model. Subsequent chapters elaborate on self-supervision using a peer group model, leading nicely into an interesting set of ideas on narrative supervision from the perspective of the experiential field and the so called ‘imaginal’. The topics of the remaining chapters are supervision from a non-directive perspective and attempts to answer the key question: What is shaping our understanding of ‘presence’ in coaching supervision? Part 2 (consisting of three chapters) sets out the main ethical and legal framework by tapping into a conceptual understanding of ethics and covering the ethical codes of various UK coaching bodies. Also, the ACTION model of ethical decision-making is Coaching: An International Journal of Theory, Research and Practice Vol. 5, No. 1, March 2012, 62 64