Dialogical Supervision E-Book

Kai Alhanen

• Herausgeber: Books on Demand
• Kategorie: Geisteswissenschaft
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 237

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021

Beschreibung

Dialogical Supervision: Creating A Work Culture Where Everybody Learns is a guide to professional supervision in various fields of expertise. It is written especially for professional supervisors and students of supervision, and yet it also provides insights and tools for those team leaders and managers who act as "everyday supervisors" for their employees. The work is composed as a practical handbook which offers a coherent theoretical description and practical implementation of a new kind of professional supervision. The book addresses the fundamentals of supervision: learning, reflection and dialogical interaction. It then presents guidelines for practical implementation, diverse orientations, and methods of supervision. The work also includes sections dealing with various types of supervision relationships: individual, community, group and managerial supervision. The different chapters of the book also contain several practical methods which together form a "toolbox for supervisors". The basic premise of the book is to emphasise the importance of dialogue in creating a fundamentally different work culture to that which predominates. In celebrating economic growth, ruthless competition and individual achievement, this culture has led to an increasing fragmentation of people's experiences and the loss of their sense of agency. At the same time, we need to solve extremely complex problems that require unprecedented creativity. In order to deal successfully with the challenges of modern work, we need to utilise the skills and knowledge of every single employee. This book offers clear methods for this to be realised.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

For the Reader

I.

THE FUNDAMENTALS

1. The Role of Supervision in Work Culture

The Challenges of Professional Work

Supervision as a Response to Challenges

Supporting the Organisation

Supervision and Other Forms of Development

The Roles of a Supervisor

2. Supervision as a Learning Process

Learning as Change and Development

Learning at Work

Successful Learning in Supervision

Connecting New Experiences to Old

Directing Attention

Transfer

3. Directing Reflection

The Significance of Reflection in Supervision

The Reflective Cycle

Supervisor’s Action within the Reflective Cycle

4. Dialogical Interaction

Dialogue in a Supervision Session

The Principles of Dialogue Supporting Learning and Reflection

II.

EXECUTION AND METHODS

5. Practical Conditions

Supervisor’s Education and Expertise

Initiating the Supervision Relationship

Sessions

The Process

Professional Ethics

6. Orientations

Learning to Use Supervision

Theme-orientation

Case-orientation

Process-orientation

Supervision in a Crisis Situation

7. Action Methods

Why Use Action Methods?

Symbols

Concretising Relationships

Empty Chairs

Role Reversal

III.

SUPERVISION RELATIONSHIPS

8. Individuals

Special Features of Individual Supervision

Starting Phase

Advancement of the Process

Ending Supervision

9. Communities

The Effects of Community Dynamics

The Tension between Individuals and Community

Leadership in Community Supervision

Stages of Community Supervision

10. Groups

Forming the Group

Starting the Group

The Advancement of the Process and Different Orientations

Ending Group Supervision

11. Managers

The Role of The Leader

Use of Power

Supportive Working Environment

Dialogical Collaboration with Employees

Epilogue

The Supervisor’s Checklist

Literature and Sources

FOR THE READER

This book is written especially for professional supervisors and students of supervision, but we hope it also reaches many managers who act as “everyday supervisors” for their employees. The work is composed as a practical handbook in which we offer a coherent description of the fundamentals and practical implementation of supervision. The central ideas are based in constructivist learning theories, John Dewey’s philosophy of experience, and theories of dialogue. On many occasions, we also rely on solution-focused and resource-oriented methods as well as sociometry and psychodrama. We have aimed to write as smooth and readable a text as possible, and for this reason have left out direct references to our sources. At the end of the book is an overview of literature and other sources, in which we state where and from whom many of the ideas originate.

The first part of the book addresses the fundamentals of supervision: learning, reflection and dialogical interaction. In the second part we focus on the practical implementation and methods of supervision. In the third part we go deeper into different types of supervision relationships and their special features. All the examples in the text are imaginary, but they are based on situations and circumstances encountered in our own work. The different chapters of the book contain methods we have found to be effective and which together form a kind of a “toolbox for supervisors”. The methods we describe are used in many professional fields and yet are ultimately derived from humanity’s ageless traditions.

Dialogical Supervision is the result of the persistent professional work undertaken at Aretai, as well as the examination of and reflection upon that work. We strive to work consciously as a learning community and to pursue shared dialogue in which we can unhurriedly and experimentally both deepen the points of view of all participants and develop new ideas. This is something, we have noticed, that is definitely worthwhile, leading to the enriching of one’s own experiences and the possibility to create together something that is larger and more diverse than the thoughts of any individual. All the writers have participated so fundamentally in shaping the contents of this book that the result is truly shared.

The original Finnish version of this book was published in 2011, and we would here like to thank its sharpeyed proof-readers. Harri Hirvihuhta was the “godfather” of our book from an early stage. Harri delved into our manuscript and gave us the confidence to bring forth our own views. Many of the ideas presented here have come from Liisa Valve-Mäntylä, in whose supervision sessions we were able to develop many of themes of the book. Liisa also offered rigorous but constructive comments and ensured that we did not lose our investigative outlook and diversity of thought. Liisa Raina kindly read the contributions of writers she did not know, focusing in particular on the chapter on community supervision. She expanded our thoughts through many sharp observations and questions. Anna Länsitie commented on the text from the point of view of a supervisee and as a graduating supervisor and highlighted what we had been able to express clearly and what still needed addressing. We have also received valuable help with the book’s conceptual content, language and expression. Tuuli Hirvilammi improved our text at a stage when we were already completely blind to it. Finally, the masterful Sara Heinämaa offered her confident sense of style and her marvellously logical wit to refining our book. We would also like to thank all our supervisees, who all share in our expedition into Finnish working culture.

The Finnish version was well received in our country’s field of professional supervision. Although we still think most of the content is relevant, we have continued to develop our understanding of dialogue and wish to include some new insights in the English edition. The most important of these is a clearer understanding of the multiple ways in which the supervisor can use her own experiences and her own acts to engage in dialogue with her supervisees. In addition, we emphasise more strongly the importance of dialogue in creating a fundamentally different work culture than that which currently predominates to celebrate mainly economic growth, ruthless competition and individual achievements. We live in a world that faces unprecedentedly intertwined economic, political and ecological crises. These crises impact more and more upon the everyday work of many professionals. In order to deal successfully with the challenges we encounter, we need to utilise the skills and knowledge of every single employee. We also need to build networks and to facilitate encounters through which professionals from different fields join forces and strive to understand together the complex phenomena of the modern world. Such tasks seem unlikely to succeed unless dialogue becomes a basic skill of every employee and a more widely spread practice.

In preparing the English edition the group of the original writers was joined by Katriina Lehti who, along with Kai Alhanen, has re-written parts of the text. In particular, the fourth chapter, on Dialogical Interaction, has been updated to reflect our developing understanding of dialogue. We would also like to express our sincere gratitude to Helena Lehti and Donna Roberts for preparing and polishing the English text. We also thank Vappu Rossi for the design of the book and Auli Kurvinen for her assistance in grooming the book for print. In addition, we greatly appreciate the help of our colleagues Janne Kareinen, Tomi Lamppula and Pekka Lavila for checking the final version of the text.

1

THE ROLE OF SUPERVISION IN WORK CULTURE

We present supervision as a tool for responding to the challenges encountered by professionals today. Although supervision originally developed in very specific fields of expertise, we believe it can benefit a wide array of professionals. To understand the diverse potential of supervision, we must understand the challenges of current expertise, the state of supervision in organisations and its relationship to other forms of developing work culture.

The Challenges of Professional Work

Constantly changing working conditions demand many kinds of tools to process the experiences arising from work. We live at a time of large-scale shift from an industrial society, and the labour it entails, to service and information work. The change has been rapid, profound, and is still ongoing. At the same time, the complexity of the world’s phenomena has increased and the skills to deal with them need to be updated constantly. One of this era’s most characteristic features is that growing amounts of people work in different expert roles. Moreover, the significance of expertise is also emphasised in tasks in which employees consider themselves practical professionals rather than experts.

The high pace and continuous changes make current expert work both challenging and straining. It requires independence, the continuous development of expertise, and an ability to adapt and respond to different kinds of changes. Experts are expected to manage a large amount of information and continuously adopt new skills. At the same time, they are required to be independently responsible for completing their work, to collaborate in diverse ways, and to be able to work in a consistently changing environment. At its best, the independence and challenges of the tasks might inspire employees to be creative with their work and to develop their expertise. At worst, however, increasing demands can lead to diminishing professional agency, stress, and acting in a short-sighted and reactive manner. This situation can be described as the fragmentation of the worker’s experience. In this context and in later sections, by experience we mean a person’s comprehensive relation to their surroundings and not just to singular events in life. Experience, therefore, includes memories from the past, perceptions, thoughts and feelings from the present, and desires, imaginations and anticipations for the future. People always act in their surroundings depending on their experiences, and experiences change and evolve because of people’s actions.

Meaningful work requires a person to be able to ground her actions on a subjectively structured, comprehensive and continuously enriching experience of herself and her surroundings. If this experience and the whole framework it provides is fragmented or broken, organised and purposeful action and work first becomes difficult and with time will become impossible.

When experience becomes fragmented, the worker can no longer establish sensible aims for her work or perceive why she should act in a certain way, what consequences her actions may have, and to what conclusions these consequences should lead. Instead of examining her actions, she rushes from one situation to another, from one change to another, without genuine understanding of how things are connected and what she should be aiming towards through her actions.

Fragmentation of experience also leads to the complication of the purposeful, structured and flexible cooperation that work requires. Professionals who are exhausted and look at things in a narrow way are not genuinely receptive to the views and experiences of other experts or clients, which may often feel annoying or strange to them. The pursued collaboration is then replaced by power struggles or weak and unsustainable compromises. As a result, work and society are progressing at a fast pace, but does anybody really know where to and how?

The writers of this book believe that supervision can function as a tool to attain better quality and greater meaning in work culture. It can help with securing and developing factors of success, and with preventing the fragmentation of experiences as well as mending already fragmented experiences. In this way we can build a more humane and inclusive work culture which can also flexibly face the challenges set by the complexities the modern world. Nonetheless, we think that both professional supervisors and their clients should understand more clearly the role and potential of supervision as part of work culture. We thus provide a general description of the means and assets of supervision. This requires both breaking away from certain traditions within supervision and developing new ways of perceiving the supervisor’s own profession and role.

Supervision as a Response to Challenges

Professional supervision originated from social work and psychotherapy. These fields are connected by demanding client work that is emotionally taxing, especially for those at the beginning of their career. Originally, supervision took the form of training and mentoring by experienced seniors to their younger colleagues, which is different to its current practice as reflective and structured interaction. But even these days supervision is still used as a support within professional training, where it is more reminiscent of the actions of an instructor or mentor in relation to her students.

In Finland, supervision first became widespread in psychiatric care, social work and education, where it slowly evolved into a tool of continuous professional development and improving the quality of work. At the same time the tone of the supervision changed. It was no longer necessary for the supervisor to be a highly experienced professional of the same field as the supervisees. Instead, the emphasis of the supervisor’s tasks fell on helping the supervisees with regulating straining work, examining difficult situations and promoting professional development. A supervisor had to be an expert in professional reflection.

Now, supervision has slowly spread to different areas of professional work, and studies have shown that it improves the quality of work and increases the wellbeing of employees. Supervision is no longer only used by professionals doing demanding client work but also by experts of many different fields in both the public and private sectors. It is perceived as a means of gaining better understanding of one’s tasks, of regulating strain and stress, accelerating professional development, and dealing with the challenges presented within work communities. Professionals of many different fields become supervisors. Nowadays, they are not solely therapists, psychologists, social workers and nurses; instead there is an increasing number of teachers, engineers and economists employed as supervisors. From this point of view, we can say that supervision has become a tool for developing many types of expert work and many kinds of work communities.

Theoretical approaches, guidebooks and other presentations of supervision are, however, often stuck in old notions. Such literature focuses on questions concerning demanding client work and the writers’ experiences from within their own limited fields of expertise. Furthermore, the supervision of an individual professional is set – often unconsciously – as the basis for all the structures and procedures of supervision. In many cases, supervision has also been developed on the basis of the theory and practices of psychotherapy. These foundations have of course brought a lot of valuable and beneficial understanding, but frequently, subtle assumptions direct the big picture that writers create about supervision. This has led to the inability to develop a comprehensive theory or general model for supervision which would fit a wide array of different areas of professional work.

This book is the result of developments in our work on both levels of theory and practice. We thus strive in this book to summarise the model of supervision that we have thereby developed; which is one that we believe can be applied to many different professions.

We see significant opportunities in supervision especially when developed in the direction of reflecting the everyday work of professionals. Reflection in this context means a process whereby employees pause in their everyday work to examine their actions and the starting points, objectives and results of these actions. In supervision, this reflection is guided by an external professional.

Supervision, therefore, should be understood above all as learning through one’s own work. This emerges on different levels, and the process teaches one to identify the phenomena of work and one’s own relation to them. Through this, the objectives of work can be clarified, and suitable means to reaching these aims developed. At the same time, the goal of supervision is to learn professional reflection in a way that it can also be carried out in different situations amid everyday work. This is how learning at work can deepen even outside supervision sessions.

This kind of supervision makes it possible to develop one’s own actions by examining their consequences and learning from them. It is a question of the critical examination of one’s own acts and their creative and unprejudiced development. In this way supervision can also become a method for restoring the fragmented experiences of workers. We believe that in this fundamentally simple but practically challenging starting point lies the power and wisdom of supervision.

What, then, can be achieved by reflecting on everyday work? First of all, when a worker learns to see the consequences of her actions and understands them diversely, her sense of her agency is strengthened. By understanding more clearly what she is striving for with her work and what the result of that work is, she can consciously direct her actions and surrounding conditions. Previously uncertain or mechanical actions become structured and deliberate.

Reflection also aims for a clearer perception of the broader and more common aspects that affect one’s work. This allows changes to no longer feel like uncontrolled riptides during a storm, but for us to have a conscious relationship with changes and the ability to affect their course.

Supervision is always cooperation, an interaction between two or more people which aims at shared goals. Often, supervision may also address issues from work connected to cooperation. The supervisor helps the supervisees to develop forms of collaboration in their everyday work: in relation to their clients, colleagues and associates. In a supervision session, the most meaningful and crucial cooperation happens between supervisor and supervised and between the supervisees themselves. In actual work, cooperation extends to broader work communities, organisations and many different types of networks.

Our understanding is that a person’s experience of her own agency evolves best in cooperation with others. It is extremely difficult, if not impossible, to become aware of and understand more widely the consequences of one’s own actions if one cannot observe and understand how others experience these effects. Only by listening to others’ experiences in an open and respectful way can we create a learning process in which the grounds, ends and means of one’s own actions can be renewed.

We believe that supervision should be a tool for maximising the benefits of cooperation and all its possibilities. This requires the supervisor to offer her own experiences and understanding to serve the supervisees and enable them to strive continuously to learn from their experiences.

Our view is that the core of cooperation is in polyphonic dialogue, wherein each participant’s experiences are listened to with equanimity and the thoughts and forms of action that emerge are developed together. The main aim of dialogue is to enhance people’s ability to learn from one another. It can improve our understanding of multiple dimensions: the world’s phenomena, other people, and ourselves. This sort of shared learning is also able to generate mutual trust between people and provides a creative way to invent the new ideas required to solve the complex issues that beset modern societies.

Developing supervision in a dialogical direction requires the supervisor to abandon the role of an all-knowing mastermind and instead to embark with the supervisees on a shared expedition into their work. This does not mean that the supervisor would hide her experiences and ideas but that she presents them as part of a broader common interaction. Dialogical interaction strives to deepen and to diversify one’s own points of view as well as to bring forth completely new ideas. In dialogical supervision no one needs to downplay her knowledge and expertise, but there is also no need to be afraid of ignorance or momentary helplessness. At its best, dialogue helps to build an open, supporting and exciting work culture where everybody can learn – including the supervisor.

Supervision that strengthens learning and the agency of workers ultimately pursues a democratic way of life at work as well as in society more broadly. By democracy we do not mean simply a political decision-making process. We mean a moral way of life that pursues equality and freedom for all. In a democratic way of life, each individual can participate according to her own abilities to directing common action and, in turn, the community supports all its members to develop their own capabilities to enrich both individual and communal life. A democratic way of life is based on interactional learning from experiences: everyone learns from each other and also about themselves with the help of others.

In this way, developing a democratic way of life is not a futile pursuit of an unobtainable ideal, but rather a guiding and meaningful cooperation in practice. With this objective, supervision can guide employees to shape their working conditions, their own role in the work community, and the development of work culture in a more deliberate and powerful way. Ultimately, this type of supervision is also capable of spreading forms of a democratic way of life through society and all its functions and services.

Supervision always has broader effects, whether the supervisor is aware of it or not. Supervisors should therefore not step back and become an outside observers of society but must understand the influence they have as a highly esteemed professional. They must, therefore, take responsibility for the effects they have through their supervision at both an individual and societal level.

Supporting the Organisation

Although supervision is practiced with different compositions (individual, group, work community), it should always also serve the overall development of the employees’ organisation. The confidentiality that is a necessary part of supervision should not lead to it being separate from everyday work or to a situation where the employees complain about the problems in the organisation without considering the effects of their own actions. Instead, supervision should help to build organisations that can learn from the different experiences of all its members.

Because of this, the supervision practice must from the start develop open and direct interaction between the supervisor, the supervisees and the management of the organisation. Sometimes individual professionals order and pay for their supervision themselves. In these situations, they naturally have the right to use it for the needs they define themselves. But when the employer has ordered the supervision, it should serve both the participants of the supervision and their whole organisation.

An organisation that is concerned with its own development will also be interested in the supervision practiced within it. This means that the management responsible for the structures of the work views supervision as an integral part of their own actions and not merely as some sort of peripheral action that supports the employees’ comfort. Sometimes, supervision is perceived one-dimensionally merely as support for the employees’ personal professional growth and wellbeing. This attitude and approach separates supervision into its own area far from the work’s basic functions and broader activities thus losing the outstanding potential it has for developing work. The situation is greatly improved when managers take responsibility for the practical organisation of supervision and strive to fit it into the organisation’s everyday work and development.

Harnessing supervision to benefit the work of the whole organisation does not, however, mean that the supervisor and supervisees would conform uncritically to the procedures and aims of the organisation. Because supervision is based on dealing with supervisees’ experiences, it usually also reveals problems in the work and the shortcomings of the organisation. On the other hand, supervision can reveal and clarify the strengths of the employees and the developmental potential of the organisation. Our book presents different ways in which supervision can be assimilated as a natural part of the operations and development of the whole organisation, without the honesty and confidentiality of supervision being endangered.

Supervision and Other Forms of Development

Because supervision is relatively new, its aims and the possibilities it offers are easily mixed up with other forms of development and guidance. For this reason, it is important to clarify the relationship between supervision and additional professional training, consulting, mentoring, coaching and therapy. Supervision occasionally has features in common with all the above, but it also differs from all of them in many aspects. The basis of our description is our view of supervision as a process of learning that happens in everyday work and which supports and improves the structuring and regulating of work.

Supervision differs from training in that it does not have specific predefined content. Training is intended to add to the knowledge and skills of the learners in certain predetermined topics. The content of supervision is, however, the everyday work of the supervisees as a whole. A supervisor does not primarily act as an expert on the content of the supervisees’ work but, rather, is the director of their learning at work. This means that the supervisor does not improve the supervisees’ expertise by offering them more information but by helping them to reflect on their own actions and the requirements and consequences of their work.

It must be emphasised that supervision is not consulting. A supervisor of course continuously analyses the work of her supervisees, the surrounding organisation and prevailing conditions as a consultant does. A supervisor does not, however, analyse these things from a specifically predetermined objective nor does she strive to give clear instructions based on her analysis. Rather, she analyses the work along with the supervisees in order to increase their understanding of their everyday work. The understanding that emerges from supervision can thus be used as a support for consultation. The resources of many experts are lost if the consulting carried out in an organisation in no way encounters the supervision that is also carried out there. It must nonetheless be remembered that the use of information gained from supervision must be approved by the supervisees and must not endanger the confidentiality of supervision.

Mentoring had a very central role in supervision in the early stages of the development of the field. Supervision may still be requested of a more experienced professional from within one’s own field with the hope that she will at the same time teach work practices and share experiences from her extensive career. This may benefit the success of the supervision but it may also hinder it. At its best, a supervisor working as a mentor can offer her own expertise and experiences to the supervisees in a way that allows them to develop their own learning and not merely copy the supervisor. At worst, however, the supervisees become dependent on the supervisor’s authority and instruction.

In recent years different coaching services have also spread in many professional fields. Of the different ways of developing work and organisations, coaching is perhaps the closest to supervision. Both focus on the client’s immediate work situation and a personal learning process. Coaching, however, differs from supervision in that coaching sets a clearly defined concrete goal at the start of the process and strives to reach this goal. This means that coaching processes are usually more restricted in content and have shorter durations than supervision. The strength of coaching is in its clear orientation and temporary nature. The strength of supervision is in the diverse, flexible and long-term learning processes it entails. Coaching and supervision should not be set against each other: they can be used for different needs and goals.

In some cases, supervision can be close to therapy. Many drastic things may happen in the supervisees’ personal lives that also affect their work. The fringes of therapy are particularly met in individual supervision, in which it is possible to address very personal issues, considerations, and emotions. Nevertheless, it is important that the border between therapy and supervision is kept clear during the course of the process. Therapy addresses people’s private lives, their internal mental processes and personal relationships. The goal of supervision is to develop the supervisee’s professional practice, her role as an expert and her work-related interactions. When the supervisee brings forth questions and issues from her own personal life, the supervisor must help her reflect primarily on how they affect work.

The Roles of a Supervisor