Nicki Weld - A Practical Guide to Transformative Supervision for the Helping Professions: Amplifying Insight

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Supervision is becoming of increasing importance in the global environment. Where there is economic pressure to compete for resourcing, and for services to become more efficient, justifiable, and effective, in public terms, there is a corresponding call for more interventionist management practices.

Supervision thus becomes a political site, where the often competing demands for managerial accountability, professional support and development are often played out in interpersonal interactions between supervisors and frontline workers. This micro level of practices is thus increasingly significant in terms of how globally affected policies are enacted and possibly transformed.

It is therefore timely to see a book which addresses the transformative potential of supervision. Weld draws appropriately on contemporary frameworks, such as relational social work and narrative approaches, to weave an approach to supervisory practice which seeks to rise above purely material, technical and bureaucratic motivations for supervision. She manages to carve out an image of supervision that aspires to self and professional development which largely transcends these possibly more transient concerns.

It is a well written work, drawing on a wealth of experience, and disparate but inspiring sources, to provide a picture of supervision which provides learning for both supervisor and supervisee. It will make readers think again about what they are expecting to provide in, take to, and take away from, supervision.

I have been providing supervision for the past 15 years, mostly within a social work context, and believe that the time has come for supervision to further advance by becoming more dynamic in purpose and function.

Most supervisors are now clear about the purpose of supervision, contracting, how to structure a session, setting an agenda, managing challenge, and working from reflective practice models. In this book, I am interested in exploring how supervision can become more transformative as a way of amplifying insight to contribute to positive professional and personal change. We must approach exploring and applying transformative supervision from the key principles of respect, dignity, kindness, and integrity, and always from the place that what we do as supervisors is in the best interests of the practitioner and ultimately those whom they serve.

First I need to openly name my own philosophical motivation and possible bias behind exploring transformative change as a function of supervision. I see my life purpose as fundamentally about learning to support the development of awareness, knowledge, and self actualisation. As Pierre Teilhard de Chardin expressed in his work The Phenomenon of Man (1955, translated into English 1959), human beings are challenged to learn through physical, biological and spiritual processes that increase consciousness. It is through these processes that we truly awaken to our own divinity and embrace our capacity for transformation and contribute to evolution. The key to this is about learning, and I believe that as human beings the place where we most often learn is within relational contexts. It is through our interactions with others that we learn a great deal about ourselves, other people, and the world that we share. If we have chosen to put ourselves directly in the pathway of relational experiences through being in work that is of service to others, then we have a responsibility to be always reflecting and opening ourselves to the learning that this brings. Learning is about ways of enhancing and expanding our analytical and intuitive knowledge base that in turn increases the potential for professional and personal development.

Being prepared to be involved in this type of continuous insightful learning is what enables our true selves to be most evident in everything we do. It is through openness and honesty that we truly connect to others, and supervision, through being a protected relational space, is naturally a part of this. If we embrace supervision as a place of learning we have nothing to fear from it. The possibilities of expansion and self actualisation (being psychologically whole or complete) become an exciting journey that we can engage in to support positive change in ourselves and our world. Marsha Sinetar in her book Ordinary People as Monks and Mystics talks about our own growth as containing two co-existing and equally necessary elements: self knowledge (knowing who the self within us really is and awakening to the values, needs and wants of that self), and the ability to act out that real self in our lives (1986, p.14). Our growth is about paying attention, developing awareness, and using this to translate into expanded and enhanced knowledge.