From the history of supervision Kadushin points to a rupture that occurred at the turn of the 19th and 20th centuries, when the structure of staff in organizations began to change. Given the growing demands that organizations providing social services had to face at the beginning of the twentieth century, the challenges of continuous monitoring, training, and recruitment of volunteers became limiting. With the growth of industrialization and urbanization, by the end of the nineteenth century there was increased movement of people seeking employment, which in social work manifested as an increase in the number of paid employees in organizations. Although newly hired staff also needed orientation by more experienced supervisors, by that time the core of experienced workers had already been established and the need for supervision education and support became relatively less burdensome. Supervision, as individual reporting on a specific practical case, was organized from 1911 by the American Charity Organization Department of the Russel Sage Foundation. At the beginning of the last century, supervision was rather about informal conversations between a less experienced beginner and an experienced colleague.

Kadushin's view on individual supervision in three phases At the start of the supervision process, the supervisor organizes, plans, and prepares for the meeting. In the middle phase, the supervisor transfers the main content to the learning process and provides feedback to the worker. Supervision is concluded by setting the next meeting.

1. Initial phase of supervision An individual supervision meeting is a dyadic conversation that fulfills the managerial, educational, and supportive function of supervision. For the purposes of educational supervision, it is an individual consultation. Like all conversations, individual supervision requires certain formalities, structure, and role division. It should be a regular, pre-prepared meeting, held at a time convenient to both participants. It should take place in a setting that guarantees privacy and prevents interruptions by a third party, is comfortable, and contributes to clear communication.

It happens that besides pre-planned meetings, an informal meeting becomes necessary because of an unexpected situation. A social worker's job is full of stressful situations whose solution cannot be postponed to a scheduled supervisory consultation. In a critical moment, the motivation of the social worker to learn to adapt is at its highest. As a result, it is useful to use the moment when the worker is in this state. On the other hand, ad hoc consultations of the “I can only stop for a minute” type also have their drawbacks. Because they happen without prior agreement, there is no time to prepare. Assessments are therefore made without thorough evaluation of all alternatives. Since they are called at short notice, they take time away from other tasks assigned to the supervisor.

The planned meeting in reality begins before the meeting itself begins. It starts already with preparation by both participants—the supervisor and the supervisee. The supervisee provides records of their work—written notes, recordings, completed reports, etc. The selection of cases that will form the content of the supervision meeting is the supervisor's choice. Different supervisors apply different forms of selection.
Some balance the choice with random checks of all cases, others try to cover all cases within an agreed period, and others assess only the cases selected by the worker themselves. After selecting the topic for discussion, the supervisor studies the selected materials in advance. Taking into account the responsibility of educational supervision, the supervisor prepares a syllabus for the next meeting, possibly for subsequent meetings. At the same time, they review their own notes and study relevant literature they intend to draw on during teaching. Individual supervision sessions dealing with clinical work usually have two related goals. One focuses on case management, emphasizing understanding the client and their situation, planning intervention strategy, etc. The second goal is developing the worker’s knowledge and skills, their professionalism, and professional identity. During meeting planning, the supervisor must be prepared to:

  1. assess and clarify the educational needs of supervisees,
  2. evaluate legal and ethical matters,
  3. monitor and document the progress of supervisees and their clients by reviewing current examples of their work,
  4. evaluate supervisee performance and obtain their feedback.

2. Middle or central phase of supervision The supervisor helps the worker organize and understand experience and identify the essence that determines the actions to be taken. This is accomplished through questions: clarifying, giving space, supporting, stimulating, confirming, guiding, and challenging the worker’s thinking. The supervisor points out mistakes, unused possibilities, obvious misunderstandings, gaps, and incompleteness. They also present new ideas, share knowledge and experience, explain and illustrate similarities and differences between various situations, thereby broadening the supervisee’s perspective.
The goal, for example, of educational supervision is to transform information into knowledge, knowledge into understanding, and understanding into action. If the supervisor chooses an approach that is not only aligned with the supervisee’s learning patterns but is also appropriate to the content of the information and prompts provided, an environment for effective learning emerges. Organizational forms and procedures can be learned didactically through relevant materials, but not necessarily through interview technique alone. A more suitable form for effectively acquiring new skills is, for example, role play.

In individual supervision, we most often focus on educational supervision, which aims at overall assimilation of content, where behavioral change stems from newly gained experiences and prompts conveyed through supervisory support. The process moves from information to knowledge, from knowledge to understanding, from understanding to behavior change. New behavior can then be tested in interaction with the client to determine whether the change was effective. Feedback from the client and supervisor allows the social worker to correct any shortcomings acquired through learning, then further change behavior, retest it, and again verify the changes through feedback.

Different approaches to the learning process and learning itself have developed within supervision. The supervisee-oriented approach makes the central interest of supervision focused on developing self-awareness, self-understanding, and emotional growth of the supervisee. Emphasis is placed on the social worker’s feelings. The supervisee has primary responsibility for what they want to learn; the core of supervision is the way the worker performs their job and the nature of their relationship with the client. Thus, the center of interaction is the supervisee, their feelings and understanding of the problem, their reactions and feelings toward the client, the client’s perception of the supervisee, and how the supervisee experiences that, etc. The supervisor reflects, clarifies, and interprets the supervisee’s feelings. In this case, the goal of supervision is to help the supervisee find their own orientation through analysis of their own experience. The supervisor acts as a catalyst who helps the supervisee arrive at self-discovered solutions. At this stage, the supervisor also provides effective feedback, which should be offered:

  • as soon as possible after performance,
  • must be specific,
  • must be concrete,
  • should be more descriptive than evaluative,
  • aimed at highlighting the results of correct steps,
  • about the supervisee’s behavior, not their person,
  • offered tentatively for discussion and review, not authoritarianly for agreement and adoption,
  • as clear as possible about what you want the supervisee to learn and what you believe they need to know,
  • aimed at sharing ideas, not lecturing, exploring alternatives, or providing answers,
  • selective in terms of the amount of information that the supervisee can absorb.

3. Ending the supervision meeting It is said that if a supervision meeting lasts longer than an hour, it ceases to be productive. The end of a meeting should be planned at the beginning so that the chosen content can be completed during its course. Ending a supervision meeting includes summarization and recapitulation of points that were part of it, and therefore a good supervision meeting should meet the following characteristics:

  1. it includes planning and preparation by both participants—the supervisor and supervisee,
  2. its content is a jointly selected issue,
  3. its focus is activities related to the supervisee’s professional practice,
  4. it places analysis of supervisee performance, aided by supervisory guidance, at the forefront,
  5. it provides the supervisee with clear and unequivocal feedback, designed to improve their work performance,
  6. it occurs within a context that facilitates learning,
  7. it follows desirable principles of learning and learning how to learn,
  8. it ensures coherence of individual sessions while creating continuity for future meetings.

The advantages of individual supervision sessions are individualized attention to the supervisee, full focus on their problems, greater openness, and the possibility of building a closer relationship. Their disadvantages can be excessive cost, fewer creative inputs, fewer alternative perspectives, and the possibility of over-dependence on the supervisor.

Supervision versus therapy Differences between supervision, which is concerned with the development of self-awareness, and therapy, according to Kadushin, relate to purpose and focus, as well as relational tasks.

Center and purpose of focus It is the supervisor’s responsibility to help the supervisee become a better professional worker, not unconditionally a better person. The focus is the supervisee’s professional activity, not their private life. The goal is not to change the worker’s personality, but to change their professional identity. “In supervision, we aim for a change in skills, a change in the use of the professional self, while in psychotherapy we aim for changes that involve an overall change in an individual’s functioning.” In supervision, we do not address the person as a whole, but only a single role—the role that constitutes a worker’s identity, the role of an organization employee. Unlike the therapist, the supervisor does not deal with the causes of personality pathology; they deal only with the consequences of such disturbances on the supervisee’s work performance. A supervisor is not authorized to intervene in behavior, feelings, and attitudes, no matter how problematic or deviant, unless they affect the supervisee’s work performance. In therapy, the client sets their own goals. The therapist does not have an overriding interest in a specific degree or direction of change. In contrast, in supervision, the representative of the clinical context, namely the supervisor, sets requirements and goals regarding professional performance and the services currently provided and delivered.

The therapist is authorized to work toward achieving any goal that the client sets. The supervisor is responsible for the supervisee and should not try to achieve any goal set by the client. The supervisor’s commitment is to ensure that the supervisee becomes a high-performing employee of the organization. The therapist helps a client achieve an individually satisfying solution to their problem. The supervisor helps achieve a solution that meets the needs of the organization. The aim of supervision is improved work performance, while therapy is focused on personality change. Supervision is oriented to the client’s situation and experience, not to the supervisee’s situation. It is oriented toward the work, not the worker. Emphasis is on what the worker did, not why they did it. Therapy clarifies the personal meanings of problems; supervision is professional.

Unlike therapy, in supervision the helper’s problems are mentioned only marginally and are not explored in depth. The supervisor’s task is education, not therapy; we should address the supervisee’s emotional difficulties only insofar as they interfere with their learning process.

Differences in relational tasks The supervisory relationship includes an implicit agreement that the worker is responsible for efforts to maximize their work performance and continue their professional development; the supervisor’s responsibility is to help them achieve these goals. An interest in the personal development of the supervisee is an improper overstepping of this agreement. Therapeuticizing this relationship suggests that the supervisor enters areas of the worker’s life over which they have neither organizational authority nor sanctioning authority. The worker may perceive this as an intrusion into their person and adopt a defensive stance, which ultimately blocks the whole supervision process. The result of such blocking is then the provision of selectively disclosed information by the supervisee.

In therapy, unconscious feelings are uncovered and work is done to resolve them. In supervision, such feelings may be identified, but the aim is neither to examine them nor to resolve them. If the supervisor–supervisee relationship turns into a therapeutic one, the supervisor risks harming the supervisee. It is not impossible, however, for the supervisor to alert or give feedback to the supervisee that prompts them to address their own problems in collaboration with a therapist.

Factors influencing the supervision process In our view, the supervision process itself is influenced chiefly by these factors:

  1. character of the institution,
  2. the educational level, professional orientation, and “enlightenment” of the leading employee,
  3. forms and types of supervision used,
  4. the focus of supervision in line with the client’s/commissioner’s requirements,
  5. the level of professional development and motivation of the supervisee,
  6. the counseling orientation of the supervisee and supervisor,
  7. the contract between supervisor and supervisee,
  8. material, technical, spatial, and time conditions for the supervisor’s work.

The supervision process, along with its external and internal frameworks, plays an important role in supervision. Similarly, Kadushin also sees this, noting societal acceptance or perception of supervision itself. He argues that supervision, like other processes, is rooted in an ecological system whose components affect its course. We can present this topic in the following modified graph:

Figure 1: Factors influencing the supervision process (modified model)

Supervisor personality and their characteristics Kadushin also holds the view that a good supervisor is one who is considered good by their supervisees. Based on this knowledge, he identified the characteristics of a good supervisor:

  • accepts, applies, and respects the managerial function of supervision in a non-coercive way; controls the worker within the scope of assigned tasks, sensitively and at the same time clearly evaluates the performance of supervisees,
  • leads, confronts, provides constructive criticism, gives honest feedback in a way that respects the supervisee’s growth toward independence,
  • seeks to integrate organizational requirements with the social-emotional needs of workers,
  • is in contact with both higher and lower levels of the organization’s hierarchy, clearly and understandably presents workers’ requirements to leadership and, conversely, management concerns to supervisees,
  • is generally available to supervisees, psychologically available and approachable,
  • has a positive attitude toward supervision and embodies professional values in their behavior,
  • is prepared to and interested in recognizing good performance and is prepared to decline inappropriate commitments,
  • has a genuine interest in the development of supervisees,
  • has up-to-date knowledge from social work theory and practice and is willing to share it by informing the supervisee of relevant procedures,
  • is prepared to tolerate and accept errors and setbacks, recognizing them as a natural part of the learning process,
  • is sensitive to stress manifestations in the worker and flexibly adjusts work requirements,
  • establishes sincere and open communication in an atmosphere that not only allows but also encourages expression of supervisees’ true feelings,
  • grounds case-solving orientation in consensus, cooperation, democratic participation, and does not use power practices,
  • establishes positive relationships with supervisees, characterized by feelings of psychological safety formed by acceptance, warmth, empathy, respect, support, flexibility, and openness.

Conclusion Our aim was to present some ideas of the author, who has been actively engaged with supervision in social work for several decades. Supervision in Slovakia is only at its beginnings; it remains with supervisors as well as with social workers and team leaders in organizations operating in the social sector to what extent supervision, already incorporated in legal regulations, will be used, supported, and gradually improved through further development of the theory.

Authors: prof. PaedDr. Milan Schavel, PhD. PhDr. Milan Tomka, PhD.

The paper was presented at the International Conference on “Social Counselling and Supervision as a Means of Improving the Professional Competence of Social Workers”, which took place on 7.–8. April 2010. The conference organizer was Vysoká škola zdravotníctva a sociálnej práce sv. Alžbety n.o