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nts are not only taught psychotherapy by their supervisors, they are also evaluated by them. . . . Supervisors are thus not only admired teachers but feared judges who have real power. (Doehrman, 1976, pp. 10–11)

Supervision’s evaluative function means that the relationship is hierarchical. To the extent that hierarchy recapitulates issues related to ethnicity and gender, this can be problematic. Feminists, for example, have wrestled with the best means by which to balance their collaborative stance of work between two equals with the fact of hierarchy in supervision (see, e.g., Prouty, Thomas, Johnson, & Long, 2001). Some (e.g., Edwards & Chen, 1999; Porter & Vasquez, 1997), in fact, suggest the term covision as an alternative to supervision to signal a more collaborative relationship. Yet hierarchy and evaluation are so intertwined with supervision that to remove them makes the intervention something other than supervision.

Evaluation is, then, an important and integral component of supervision, but it is one that often is the source of problems for supervisors and supervisees alike. Therefore, we devote an entire chapter of this text to the topic of evaluation (see Chapter 10 ) and address it as well in our chapter on ethics (Chapter 11 ). Although there is no way in which evaluation could (or should) be removed from supervision, there are ways to enhance its usefulness and to minimize problems attendant to it.

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Supervision Extends over Time

A final element of our definition of supervision is that it is an intervention that extends over time. This distinguishes supervision from training, which might be brief, for example, in a short workshop intended to impart a specific skill; it distinguishes supervision, too, from consultation, which might be very time limited, as one professional seeks the help of another to gain or regain objectivity in his or her work with a client.

The fact that it is ongoing allows the supervisor–supervisee relationship to grow and develop. Indeed, many supervision theorists have focused particular attention on the developing nature of this relationship. In recognition of this, we devote Chapters 3 , 4 , and 5 to the supervisory relationship, including the ways in which it evolves and changes across time.

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Purposes of Supervision

Our definition suggests that supervision has two central purposes:

1. To foster the supervisee’s professional development—a supportive and educational function

2. To ensure client welfare—the supervisor’s gatekeeping function is a variant of the monitoring of client welfare

Vespia, Heckman-Stone, and Delworth (2002) show how central supervisors find these two purposes. When supervisors rated the extent to which each of 53 supervisee behaviors characterized individuals “who use supervision well” (p. 59), two of the three highest rated items corresponded to one of these purposes: “Implements supervisor’s directives when client welfare is of concern to the Supervisor” and “Demonstrates willingness to grow.” Each is an essential focus, although it is possible for a particular supervisor to emphasize one more heavily than the other. For example, a student working at a field placement might have both a university-based and an on-site supervisor. In this situation, it is possible for the university- based supervisor to give relatively greater emphasis to the teaching– learning goals of supervision, and the on-site supervisor to give relatively greater emphasis to the client-monitoring aspects. Feiner (1994) alludes to this dichotomy of goals when he suggests the following:

Some supervisors assume that their most important ethical responsibility is to the student’s patient. This would impel them to make the student a conduit for their own expertise. Others make the assumption that their ultimate responsibility is to the development of the student. . . . Their concern is the possible lowering of the student’s self-esteem when confronted by the supervisor and his rising fantasy that he should become a shoe salesman. (p. 171)

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It is important to acknowledge other possible purposes for supervision. For example, Proctor (1986) asserts that supervision serves three purposes that she labeled (a) formative, equivalent to our teaching–learning purpose; (b) normative, generally equivalent to ensuring client welfare; and (c) restorative, providing supervisees the opportunity to express and meet needs that will help them avoid burnout (see Hyrkäs, 2005, for results that provide preliminary support for this function). Howard (2008) extends the restorative purpose by drawing from positive psychology to suggest as well that supervision should also have the goals of enhancing work engagement, “flow” (see Csikszentmihalyi, 1990), and resilience.

Occasionally, too, supervision is mandated as a method to rehabilitate impaired professionals (see, e.g., Frick, McCartney, & Lazarus, 1995). This overlaps with both the training and client-protective purposes of supervision, but really should be considered an additional purpose. Although we do not specifically address this purpose of supervision in this text, interested readers might consult discussions by Cobia and Pipes (2002) and Walzer and Miltimore (1993).

Both the restorative and rehabilitative purposes of supervision are important. Knudsen, Ducharme and Roman (2008) found, for example, that being supervised reduced substance abuse counselors’ emotional exhaustion and job turnover. However, restorative and rehabilitative purposes are not common across all supervision, whereas the two purposes that are part of our definition of supervision (i.e., client protection and development of supervisee competence) are. Each is addressed in turn in the two subsections that follow.

Before turning to those discussions, however, we add one additional, ultimate goal, which is to prepare the supervisee to self-supervise (Dennin & Ellis, 2003). At the point of licensure, practitioners, at least in the United States, no longer are required to be supervised and so must be able to

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monitor their own work, knowing how to learn from it and also when to seek consultation. Supervisees work with a number of supervisors; a psychologist will work with about eight supervisors prior to obtaining a doctorate (M. V. Ellis, personal communication, August 31, 2006, from data obtained as part of an instrument validation study). In the process of that work, they should develop a sort of internal supervisor that incorporates what they have learned from each of their supervisors.

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Fostering the Supervisee’s Professional Development We state the teaching–learning goal simply as “to enhance professional functioning.” This is a pragmatic definition that meets our need to provide a succinct and generally applicable definition of supervision. It is silent about any performance criteria that supervisees are to meet or even about the content of learning. To that end, however, the APA’s competency benchmark task group (Fouad et al., 2009) performed important work in articulating those expected performance criteria, breaking them out by level of training. In Chapter 10 , we also address performance criteria.

To enhance professional functioning speaks to the development of supervisee competence. The form of that competence typically derives from some combination of the supervisor’s own theory or model, the supervisee’s particular developmental needs, and the supervisee’s expressed wishes.

In addition, the supervisor almost certainly wants the supervisee to develop skills and competencies necessary for eventual licensure or certification. This utilitarian goal has the virtue of specificity—that is, supervisors generally know what competencies the supervisee must demonstrate for licensure, at least in his or her own state. Moreover, this is a logical target in that to attain licensure is, at least in the United States, the point at which the supervisee makes the transition to an autonomously functioning professional who no longer has a legal mandate to be supervised.

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The truth is that no one knows or tracks in any systematic way what transpires between therapist and client once the therapist escapes the onus of training and supervision, and unlike most medical procedures of significant consequence, there’s generally no one present to observe other than the provider and the recipient—neither of whom is apt to be vested with an unbiased view or recollection. (Gist, 2007, personal communication via email)

The assumption undergirding this right to practice without supervision is that the person has developed metacompetence (Roth & Pilling, 2008), or “the ability to assess what one knows and what one doesn’t know” (Falender & Shafranske, 2007, p. 232). It is a professional’s metacompetence that allows him or her to seek consultation when faced with an issue beyond his or her expertise; to engage in the self-supervision to which we alluded earlier.

In a now-famous statement to the press, U.S. Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld (2002) describes “known knowns,” “known unknowns,” and “unknown unknowns.” Metacompetence reduces the number of “unknown unknowns” a professional will face; however, until they develop it, they must rely on their supervisors. We suppose it should go without saying that it is essential that supervisors’ own metacompetence is an important means of helping to ensure that supervisees develop that in themselves.

Whereas it is the norm in the United States to permit licensed professionals to work without formal supervision, this is not true in other countries, which may be wise given Gist’s observation earlier. In the United Kingdom, for example, many mental health professionals are expected to continue receiving supervision throughout their professional lives (West, 2003). This is codified in the British Association for Counselling and Psychotherapy’s (BACP) ethical code, which stipulates: “There is an obligation to use regular and on-going supervision to enhance the quality of the services provided and to commit to updating practice by continuing professional

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development” (BACP, 2007, p. 3). BACP expectations are that practitioners will participate in supervision at least 1.5 hours per month. Australia has a similar rule (see Grant & Schofield, 2007). This convention recognizes that professional development is ongoing and extends even after a professional develops expertise; supervision in this context is understood to have more than a training function.

Fried (1991) offers the folk wisdom that it takes 10 years to become a really good psychotherapist. In fact, Hayes (1981) estimates that it requires about 10 years to become an expert in any skill domain, an assertion that others (e.g., Ericcson & Lehmann, 1996) document as well. Yet, for many professionals, time alone is insufficient to attain expert status or clinical wisdom. However, even if a mental health professional attains expertise or wisdom, it still is useful for him or her to have continuing supervision to foster lifelong learning and help address our field’s knowledge half-life (see, e.g., Lichtenberg & Goodyear, 2012).

In fact, many—perhaps most—postgraduate, credentialed practitioners want and do continue some level and type of supervision, even if it is not mandated (see, e.g., Borders & Usher, 1992; McCarthy, Kulakowski, & Kenfield, 1994; Wiley, 1994). This is good not only for them, but for their clients as well. Slater (2003, p. 8) states: “I remember a patient once asking me, ‘Who do you talk about me with?’ He wasn’t asking out of fear, but hope. What suffering person doesn’t want many minds thinking about how to help?”

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Monitoring Client Care. In addition to their responsibilities to the supervisees’ professional development, supervisors must also ensure that supervisees are providing adequate client care. In fact, this was the original purpose of clinical supervision. Supervision in the mental health disciplines almost certainly began with social work supervision, which “dates from the 19th-century Charity Organization Societies in which paid social work agents supervised the moral treatment of the poor by friendly visitors” (Harkness & Poertner, 1989, p. 115). The focus of this supervision was on the client.

Eisenberg (1956) notes that the first known call for supervision to focus on the professional, rather than exclusively on the client, was in 1901 by Zilphia Smith. This supervisory focus became more prominent two decades later, when, as Carroll (2007) observes, “Max Eitington is thought to be the first to make supervision a requirement for those in their psychoanalytic training in the 1920s” (p. 34).

However, the need to ensure quality of client care is one job demand with particular potential for causing dissonance in the supervisor. Most of the time, supervisors are able to perceive themselves as allies of their supervisees. Yet they also must be prepared, should they see harm being done to clients, to risk bruising the egos of their supervisees or, in extreme cases, even to steer the supervisee from the profession—an ethical obligation we have to the public.

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Person-Specific Understandings of Supervision A formal definition of supervision is important, but it is inevitable that supervisors and supervisees also will operate according to their own idiosyncratic and personally nuanced definitions. Because these more individualized—and usually implicit—definitions can affect supervision processes in important ways, they too should be acknowledged as complements to the more formal definition.

To consider these nuanced definitions, it is useful to invoke the concept of the schema (in the plural, schemata) that Bartlett (1932, 1958) introduces and that now is widely used among cognitive psychologists and mental health professionals. A schema helps us interpret our world by providing a mental framework for understanding and remembering information. More formally stated, a schema is a knowledge representation based on our past experiences and inferences that we use to interpret a present experience. In short, people have a tendency to understand one domain of life experience in terms of another. Our perceptions and responses to a new situation are organized and structured as they were in a previous similar situation.

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FIGURE 1.2 Life and Professional Roles That Affect Supervisory Role Behavior

Because of their apparent similarities, we respond to the new situation as if it were the earlier one. Moreover, the more ingrained the particular role we have learned, the more it is likely to intrude on later learned roles. The schema people develop for supervision is shaped in this manner. Figure 1.2 shows, for example, that gender and ethnicity roles are among the most ingrained, and therefore permeate much of our behavior, including supervision (see Chapter 5 for a discussion of these roles in supervision).

Professional roles are learned later and are therefore less an ingrained part of ourselves. Yet, even so, earlier learned professional roles (such as that of counselor) are likely to affect later learned professional roles. For those taking on the later learned roles, it is natural, perhaps inevitable, to attempt to understand them in terms of things we do know. It is merely human to attempt to understand that which is new in terms of that which is familiar.

It should be no surprise, then, that the roles of supervisor and supervisee are at least partially understood as metaphoric expressions of other life experiences. Proctor (1991), for example, invokes the concept of archetypes, which actually could be understood as schemata:

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A number of my colleagues asked me what archetypes went into taking the trainer role; we immediately identified a number. There are the Guru, or Wise Woman, from whom wisdom is expected, and the Earth Mother—the all-provider, unconditional positive regarder. In contrast there is the Clown or Jester—enjoying performance, and cloaking his truth in riddles, without taking responsibility for how it is received. The Patriarch creates order and unselfconsciously wields power. The Actor/Director allocates roles and tasks and holds the Drama; the Bureaucrat demands compliance to the letter of the law. The Whore gives services for money, which can be indistinguishable from love, and re-engages with group after group. There is even the Warrior—valiant for truth; and of course the Judge—upholding standards and impartially assessing. The Shepherd/Sheep-dog gently and firmly rounds up and pens. (p. 65)

These are some possible metaphors for the supervisor. There also are metaphors that speak to the process or experience of supervision, independent of other life roles. Therefore, a supervisee (or supervisor) might understand supervision as akin to a lighthouse beacon that provides one with bearings in often foggy situations. Participants in workshops led by our colleague, Michael Ellis, describe supervision as a shepherd and flock, as an oasis in the desert, and (more ominously) as going to the principal’s office. Milne and James (2005) use the metaphor of supervision as tandem bicycle riding.

We believe that these metaphors exist at various levels of awareness, but they are often present and affect participants’ expectations and behaviors. The following discussions of more frequently occurring metaphors are therefore in the service of making them available for consideration.

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Family Metaphors

Family metaphors (middle of Figure 1.2 ) seem especially common in supervision. The most basic of these is that of the parent–child relationship. Lower (1972), for example, uses this metaphor in alluding to the unconscious parent–child fantasies that he believed are stimulated by the supervisory situation itself. In fact, Itzhaky and Sztern (1999) caution supervisors against allowing themselves to behave without awareness of what they term a pseudo-parental role (p. 247).

Of course, many theorists use this metaphor of parent–child relationship as a way to think about therapy. As it may apply to supervision, the metaphor is simultaneously both less and more appropriate than for therapy. On the one hand, it is less apt in that personal growth is not a primary goal of the intervention, as it is in therapy, but rather is an instrumental goal that works in the service of making the supervisee a better therapist. It is more apt, on the other hand, in that supervision is an evaluative relationship, just as parenting is—and therapy presumably is not.

Just knowing that they are being evaluated is often sufficient to trigger in supervisees an expectation of a guilt–punishment sequence that recapitulates early parent–child interactions. Supervisors can, through their actions, intensify such transference responses among supervisees, triggering perceptions of them as a good or bad parent. We have heard, for example, of instances in which supervisors posted publicly in the staff lounge the names of supervisees who had too many client “no-shows.” The atmosphere created in situations such as this can easily establish supervisory staff as “feared parents.”

Still another parallel between parent–child and supervisor–supervisee relationships is that status, knowledge, maturity, and power differences

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between the participants eventually begin to disappear. The parties who today are supervisor and supervisee can expect that one day they might relate to one another as peers and colleagues.

The parent–child metaphor is suggested, too, in the frequent use of developmental metaphors to describe supervision. We describe these in Chapter 2 .

A second family metaphor that can pertain to supervision is that of older and younger siblings. For many supervisory dyads, this probably is more apt than the parent–child metaphor. The supervisor is further along on the same path being traveled by the supervisee. As such, she or he is in a position to show the way in a nurturing and mentoring relationship. However, as with siblings, issues of competence can sometimes trigger competition over who is more skilled or more brilliant in understanding the client.

The older–younger siblings metaphor is structurally similar to the relationship between master craftspersons and their apprentices. Such relationships have existed for thousands of years and are perpetuated in supervision. In these relationships, master craftspersons serve as mentors to the people who aspire to enter the occupation, showing them the skills, procedures, and culture of the occupation. In this manner, too, master craftspersons help perpetuate the craft. Eventually, after what is usually a stipulated period of apprenticeship, the apprentices become peers of the craftspersons.

These metaphors, particularly those of parent or sibling, occur at fundamental and often primitive levels. Because they influence in an immediate and felt way, they have a special and probably an ongoing influence on the supervisory relationship. Moreover, such metaphors probably operate outside the awareness of the supervisor.

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If it is true that supervision is a unique intervention, then one might reasonably infer that there is a unique role characteristic of supervisors in general. In a broad sense, this is true, and we can identify at least two major components of this generic supervisory role. The first of these is the perspective from which the supervisor views his or her work; the second pertains to the commonly endorsed expectation that the supervisor will give feedback to the supervisee.

This topic of supervisor roles is one to which we give greater attention in Chapter 4 , where we discuss social role models of supervision. There are, however, aspects of it that are important to cover at this point.

Liddle (1988) discusses the transition from therapist to supervisor as a role-development process that involves several evolutionary steps. An essential early step is for the emerging supervisor to make a shift in focus —that is, the supervisor eventually must realize that the purpose of supervision is neither to treat the client indirectly through the supervisee nor to provide psychotherapy to the supervisee, a point which Borders (1992) also makes. She maintains that the supervisor-to-be must make a cognitive shift as he or she switches from the role of counselor or therapist. To illustrate how difficult this often is for new supervisors, she gives the example of a neophyte supervisor who persisted for some time in referring to his supervisee as “my client.” Until he was able to label the supervisee’s role correctly in relation to himself, his perceptual set remained that of a therapist.

This shift, then, requires the supervisor to give up doing what might be thought of as therapy by proxy, therapy by remote control, or what Fiscalini (1997) calls therapy by ventriloquism. We would note, however, that the pull to doing this may always remain present, even if unexpressed in practice. In part, this is reinforced by the supervisor’s mandate always to function as a monitor of client care and remain vigilant about how the client is

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functioning. Similarly, the longer the person has functioned as a therapist, the harder it may be for the supervisor to make the necessary shift in perspective. It is interesting to note, for example, that Carl Rogers talked about having occasionally experienced the strong impulse to take over the therapy of a supervisee, likening himself to an old fire horse heeding the call (Hackney & Goodyear, 1984).

Borders (1992), in fact, observes that untrained professionals do not necessarily make this shift on their own, simply as a result of experience as a supervisor. As a matter of fact, some “experienced” professionals seem to have more difficulty changing their thinking than do doctoral students and advanced master’s students in supervision courses.

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A Conceptual Model of Supervision The conceptual model depicted in Figure 1.3 , an adaptation of the competencies cube developed by Rodolfa and colleagues (2005), provides a complementary perspective that influenced our organization of this text. This is a three-dimensional model in which the three dimensions are what we have labeled Parameters of Supervision, Supervisee Developmental Level, and Supervisor Tasks.

Parameters of Supervision

The parameters of supervision are the features of supervision that undergird all that occurs in supervision, regardless of the particular supervisory function or the level of the supervisee. For example, the supervisor’s model or theory is a factor at all times, as is the supervisory relationship and each of the other of the parameters listed in the figure.

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Supervisee Developmental Level

We assume that supervisees need different supervisory environments as they develop professionally and that the manner in which supervisors intervene differs according to supervisee level. As well, the expression of each parameter (e.g., relationship, evaluation) is affected by the supervisee’s developmental level.

As we discuss later in the text, different supervision theorists suggest a different number of stages through which the supervisee progresses. Figure 1.3 , however, is drawn in a way to suggest

FIGURE 1.3 Conceptual Model of Supervision

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that we do not take a stand on exactly how many of these stages there actually are. We believe it is sufficient here simply to make clear that developmental processes affect all that we do as supervisors.

Supervisor Tasks

Supervisor tasks are the actual behaviors of the supervisors. In this text, we discuss the four tasks depicted in Figure 1.3 (i.e., organizing supervision, individual supervision, group supervision, and live supervision). It is possible, of course, to think of more, but we believe these four are the most frequently used.

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Using the Model

We assume that the three dimensions interact with one another. To illustrate, consider the supervisor using individual supervision: He or she does so within the context of a relationship, and that work is guided by the supervisor’s particular theory or model, attention to supervisee’s individual differences (e.g., ethnicity, gender), and ethical and legal factors; the fact of evaluation affects it as well. The developmental level of the supervisee, then, moderates each of these things.

We should note that we are not attempting in this model to capture all that occurs in supervision. This is especially true with respect to our discussion of supervisor tasks. We recognize, for example, that individual, group, and live supervision are not the only modalities. Kell and Burow (1970), for example, discuss the use of conjoint treatment as a supervision modality. However, although this is not a modality included in Figure  1.3 , it is easy enough to see how conjoint treatment might fit into the conceptual model.

The next 10 chapters each address features of this model. We hope that with this conceptual framework, the reader will more readily see how the particular topic being covered fits within the larger picture of supervision, as least as we envision that picture.

The text’s final chapter does not speak specifically to the conceptual model. Instead, it addresses topics—the teaching of supervision and supervision research issues—that have the purpose of enhancing supervisory practice.

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