Supervision for organization consultants and the organizations they work with.

Abstract

Supervision is a collaborative learning practice to continually build the capacity of anyone working in the helping professions, such as social workers, therapists, pastors, organization consultants, and coaches. The social-work profession claims a significant role in the development of supervision in the helping professions with arguably the mast established tradition, which originates from the late 19th century. Supervision has become critical to the development, quality control, emotional processing, and competence enhancement of social workers, then therapists, then coaches. Supervision is now regarded as a foundation for sound and accountable professional practice among coaches, but growing numbers of organization consultants are also benefiting from the supervision of their organization consulting and design work. This applies both to those working as internal practitioners within large organizations and to those working independently or as part of a consultancy. In this contribution we look at the various forms of organization-consulting supervision, and we reflect on the pros and cons of different approaches. We argue that organization-consulting supervision is a distinctive field in its own right because of the way it can capture and observe organizational dynamics. We argue at the same time that the issues it faces are also of relevance to coaching and mentoring supervisors. We end with a few dilemmas that may arise for the supervisor and consider how supervision can also help to research and evaluate the consulting intervention.