How important is supervision for business coaches?

This question is gaining increased attention from coaching industry organisations who are recommending that supervision is an important part of the ongoing development and professional practice of business coaches. In Australia, as in many other parts of the world, coaching industry organisation such as the International Coaching Federation have developed position statements and policies on coaching supervision.

While Supervision is mandatory for many other professions such as Social Work, Counseling and Psychotherapy, the same is not true in the coaching industry. There are many views on what supervision should provide whether support, education, improving professional practice, a reflective practice or all of these things. And there are others who question whether supervision, as it has emerged from other helping professions is the right approach for business coaches.

There have been a number of articles written on this topic in recent years, however, there is as yet little evidence based research in this area, with a few notable exceptions. The Institute for Executive Coaching adopted supervision as part of their coach training program in 2004 (Armstrong & Geddes, 2009). As part of her Masters Thesis through the Portsmouth Business School Barbara Moyes explored what goes on in coaching supervision arguing that “its not a one size fits all approach and to date there is no agreed coaching supervision model” (Moyes, 2007). Following the IECL article, the views of Australian coaches were explored by Grant (2011) and in a recent article, WhyteCo explored the importance of coaching supervision questioning as others have whether a process that has been developed over the past century for counsellors and social workers should simply be applied to coaching.

It is clear that there is a need to provide ongoing support and development to coaching practitioners, that reflective learning will continue to enhance best practice and that supervision offers a strong evidence and knowledge base to support its potential application in coaching.

As for business coaches, the challenge remains having multiple stakeholders, the client or coachee, the organisation, and industry organisation which also has yet to agree what supervision is and what function it performs.