I am including Supervision in this Chapter on Training because I believe that supervision can be considered to be ongoing training.
Now I’m not going to assume that you know what supervision in the general area of helping people is, so I’ll describe it very briefly – because it is different from supervision in other areas of work.
For example, academic supervision is generally a checking of standards to ensure that a paper or publication for a major academic award is up to the exacting standard that academia demands.
Supervision in boat-building would involve an experienced crafts-person, following work done by me, checking my work to ensure that I had finished it not only to an acceptable level of competence, but offering me advice and guidance so that my boat-building skills would continually improve and I could build boats to higher standards in the future.
Virtually all the academic type supervision involves intellectual and writing skills, precision, proper formatting, organising, and structuring etc. The boat-building supervision will encompass physical measurement, beauty, functionality and (of course) whether or not the finished product floats! Even though in best case scenarios there will be meaningful dialogue and support, both lean towards the summative type assessment described above.
Neither directly concerns our emotional state. Supervision in helping people in distress, however, does involve our emotions.
Unlike the two examples above, where the finished product (or the work in progress) can actually be seen by the supervisor, very often, in the helping professions, the work is one step removed from the supervisor.
The work has to be brought by the practitioner to the supervision session – so, naturally it is filtered through the experience of the practitioner himself. The supervisor must trust the practitioner to give as honest an appraisal as is possible for him so that the world of the person in distress can change for the better.
And, it needs to be remembered that while a practitioner is practicing his craft people are suffering – i.e. those who we are supervising are learning from others’ suffering!
To sum up, perhaps an analogy can be drawn between working with vulnerable people and parenting. If we don’t have regular supervision to iron out difficulties we are like parents who assume that they know it all and never seek help or advice from anyone in the challenging task of bringing up children.