Supervision and counseling for professional development in organizational settings

Counseling

"Supervision leads to a mental and emotional education that can guide practical work, frees from fixed patterns of experience and behavior, and promotes the willingness as well as the ability to act suitably, carefully, and courageously." (Koster, 2003, pp. 1-2).

The objective of this paper is to explore the above statement with relation to supervision ad counselling.

Exploration of supervision in counselling

"Supervision is a . . . negotiated contractual relationship between supervisors

and supervisee in which the worker gives an account of her work with the expressed purpose of developing her competence in providing the highest quality of service to the client or customer" (Claveirole, & Mathers, 2003 P. 52).

In a modern organizational setting, it is widely accepted norm that supervision plays a key role in the professional development of the supervisees. A supervisor provides the emotional support, the mentoring roles as well as information and guidance for the supervisees. Supervision enhances better quality of service because the supervisees are able to improve on their work based on the reflection from the supervisors. Supervisory practice is very critical within an organization because supervision enhances high quality professional practice. The role of a supervisor is to monitor and review the work of employees within an organizational setting. Supervision aims to facilitate the professional development and personal skills between the supervisor and supervisee within a work environment. Typically, supervision provides guidance towards the future where a supervisor applies new insights, reflection, and guidance to guide the employees.

Similar to supervision, counseling creates opportunities and awareness for personal, professional, educational and social growth of an individual. (Nwokolo, et al. 2009). Within a work environment, both supervision and counselling are aimed to achieve the personal and social development of workers. .To enhance a quality counselling, supervision and counselling are the effective methods for the quality service delivery. The major component of supervision is to provide the trainee the opportunities to develop more skills and instil changes into an individual to achieve organizational goals. Essentially, a supervisor needs to understand the counselling technique to guide the employees in achieving the organizational objectives. For example, a line manager within an organization should understand counselling and supervision techniques. (Copeland, 2006). Counselor whether professional or non-experience will benefit from regular professional supervision. To guide the employees in a work environment, counselors need appropriate supervision since supervision is the component to develop a competent practitioner and professional identity.

(Australian Institute of Professional Counselors, 2011).

Nwokolo, et al. (2009) argue that academic advising and counseling is a program that helps an individual to attain self development in order to make better decision in life. Without regular advising and counseling, it may be difficult for the students to attain academic goals.

There are several benefits of supervisions with reference to how supervision is practiced.

Identification of Benefits of Supervision

To evaluate the benefits of supervision with reference to how supervision is practiced, I conduct survey and email interviews with some supervisors, top executives of different organizations across different industries and some professional psychologists. Moreover, I conduct the phone and face-to-face interviews with some selected professionals. The major objective of the interviews and survey is to evaluate the benefits of supervision in different professional settings. The selected professions are health sector, private business organizations, and social services.

The sample population is selected from different professions to evaluate the benefits of supervision across different industries. It is essential to note that different professions implement supervisions within the working environments. Individual, and group supervision are being applied across different organizations and based on the organizational culture, the method each profession uses to implement supervisory practice may be different. (Carroll 2007). Based on the feedback from the interviewees and survey respondents, I am able to evaluate the benefits of supervision across different professions.

Difficulties arising in Supervision

Janssen (2011) identifies several difficulties that could jeopardize quality supervision. First, there may be difficulties to implement quality supervision when a supervisor is too busy to be effective in their role. In my own case, my supervisor is too busy to perform an effective supervisory role. Most of the time, I always send her the sample of work, and the encouraging feedback from the clients. However, my supervisor hardly sends her own feedback on my work despite that I have been entrusted to perform a very good project.

"My job is to facilitate a circle of support around a young girl and her family. Identify her goals and with family and friends to help her achieve her goal." (Extract from my working experience). We are on this assignment for over six months and the assignment is still continuing. In this job, I have performed excellently; however, I heard nothing from my supervisor. The problem is that she is always too busy to perform her role. While I am performing a good role in my work place, I still need to the word of encouragement from my supervisor. As Janssen (2011) points out, supportiveness is very essential is the supervisory roles. This involves a supervisor encouraging, and mentoring the subordinate in a place of work. The motivation theory points out that motivation are the key to the performance improvement. A supervisor should be able to motivate employees, and understanding the needs of the employees and providing necessary advice that could enhance the performance of his subordinates. (ACCEL, 2011).

Poor feedback is another problem that may jeopardize the quality supervisory roles. When a supervisor only provides little feedback on the work of his subordinate, the action may not encourage the supervisee in his work. Moreover, poor communication could jeopardize quality supervision. In some place of work, there is a lack of effective communication. A supervisee may not have the opportunity to have face-to-face communication with the supervisor, and this may jeopardize the quality supervision. From my work experience, the communication between me and my supervisor is very limited. We hardly have face-to-face communication. Really, I need face-to-face communication with my supervisor because the avenue will give me the opportunity to ask questions based on my work since I believe that a reflective comment from my supervisor will improve my quality of work. Instead of giving constructive comment on my work, my supervisor always keep telling me that I am doing a good job based on the paper work presented to her, and she hardly sees the practical work I have done. Lack of proper attention from my supervisor is frustrating since I believe that without giving me her full supervisory attention, I may not be able to develop the required skills I need to facilitate my professional maturity. Frankel (2008) argues that formal on-to-one supervision facilitates positive staff development. . Effective supervision practice promotes professional growth and development. An individual staff needs to interact always with a supervisor to enhance knowledge development. With the shortcoming identified in the supervision practice in various professions and my work place, the paper provides recommendations to enhance supervisory practice.

Recommendations to enhance Supervisory Practice.

Ideal supervisory practice requires good communication. Within a work environment, an organization should make it mandatory for a supervisor to implement effective communication with the supervisees to enhance the professional development.

Moreover, an organization should provide enough time for a supervisor to implement an effective supervisory role. For example, in my place of work, my supervisor always complains of lack of time. This means that my supervisor has been given more jobs that she can cope with, and this has affected her supervisory role. To avoid this issue, an organization should allow a supervisor a free work place to perform his or her supervisory roles.

In addition, supervisors should go for the regular trainings to enhance their skills in the supervisory practices. By going for regular trainings, supervisors will understand their commitments towards the supervisees. They would be able to understand that they perform important roles towards the professional development of supervisees, and this understanding will make them to be more committed to their jobs.

Conclusion

The essay explores the statement of Koster (2003), which states "supervision leads to a mental and emotional education that can guide practical work, frees from fixed patterns of experience and behaviour and promotes the willingness as well as the ability to act suitably, carefully and courageously." (pp. 1-2). The paper identifies several important contributions of supervision towards the professional development. The concept counselling is also been viewed to go hand-in-hand with supervision. To implement effective supervision within an organization, a supervisor needs develop counselling skills to perform his supervisory roles.

Several benefits of supervision have been identified. Supervision plays a critical role in the professional development of supervisees. Through mentoring, advising and counselling, a supervisee will able to attain a professional maturity. Despite the benefits identified in supervisory practice within a work environment, there are difficulties identified in the supervision. For example, poor communication and poor feedback from a supervisor may jeopardize an effective supervisory practice. To address these shortcomings, the paper recommends good communication practice and the training for a supervisor to enhance quality supervision.