Coaching supervision helps individuals reflect on their professional practice, develop skills and maintain wellbeing. It offers the benefit of a critical eye and support of a learning partner as you grow.
The supervision process helps the coach work through dilemmas, as well as to understand cultural and system interdependencies via a two-way feedback process. Supervision encourages knowledge growth and deepens a coach’s maturity in their profession.
Just because someone has worked as a coach for a while, if they haven’t participated in continuous professional development and supervision, their capability and grounding in their field may still be somewhat shallow, making them stuck on the coach maturity model. Adding a supervisory element to their practice could significantly speed up their development.
While supervision develops the coach’s soft skills, one of the overall aims is to improve the service the coach provides to their clients.
Development should always take a holistic approach, working with the coach, understanding the systems and relationships interplay, client systems… and so on.
Within the supervisor-coach relationship, supervisors create spaces where coaches can be vulnerable, reflect and learn. Although the supervisors are more experienced in their coaching practice (which can create a power-imbalance in the relationship), supervision can be applied through a supportive lens while still maintaining the integrity of the profession. The ‘do no harm’ principles are always at the centre and shame should never enter the supervision learning space.
Individuals who have not previously participated in this process might have the perception that supervision is about policing the professional standards. In reality, supervision is a catalytic space of reflection and mutual development. Authenticity and vulnerability are normalised as part of this learning process.
What can you expect from a supervision session?
When I supervise coaches, the initial session covers chemistry conversations and detailed contracting, which helps us choose the best ways of working together. This enables us to discuss the types of topics we’ll cover in our sessions and the style most suitable for your development.
Once the contracting phase is completed, our supervision sessions commence, covering the agreed topics. Depending on your chosen focus, supervision can include a variety of approaches. One I like to use is the normative, formative or restorative functions from Bolton (2020). Let’s explore these in more details.
3 Functions of Supervision
The normative function is concerned with maintaining good practice, professional standards and the quality of the coaching profession, which is particularly important when the coach is early on in their career.
The formative function supports overall learning, helping individuals to understand and identify new perspectives. This function also provides new tools and techniques to be used in future coaching sessions.
The last function is the restorative approach, which equips the coach with the relevant support to increase their capacity and maximise their ability to show up fully for their clients. This is where their self-confidence improves as knowledge is shared and reflected on, so the coach is able to put effective, healthy boundaries in place.
According to Michelle Lucas (2016), supervision can develop competencies and increase capability and capacity. Naturally, I agree with this. Good supervisors create effective spaces where the coach can understand the true complexities of their practice. The aim is to move away from simply setting and achieving goals, towards holistically improving the experience and development of the human being, while working and understanding the wider systems in place.
The 7-Eyed Model
My approach to supervising is based on Hawkins’ 7-Eyed Model (1985) combined with creative visualisation. As part of the supervision sessions, we look at the systems in place as you bring client dilemmas to the table.
As a supervisor, I help you interpret your own experiences; a key part of my role is to observe the information you share. Depending on the discussion points you’ve raised, we reflect using 7 different ‘eyes’. Think of these as perspectives (or lenses) that we use to look into your situation, beginning with lens 1 which focuses on developing deeper insights into your client.
Our discussions cover the tools you’re using as part of your coaching sessions and lens 2 helps us investigate these in more detail, as I offer and share experiences or resources, as needed. If a tool isn’t working, this lens can help identify alternatives.
Lens 3 looks at the relationship between the coach and the client, looking at various dynamics in play, using tools of change management, transactional analysis, positive psychology and mindsets. In my coaching practice, I like to use metaphors, pictures and other creative methods to discover the wider system implications, relationships and plays.
Lenses 4 and 5 help you enhance your self-awareness and identify any parallel processes. Lens 6 can be helpful here too: as supervisor I’ll share my own self-reflections on the situations you present, especially around thoughts and feelings, a process that can be beneficial for you to see.
Lens 7 brings together the whole process: we discuss the wider system interplays, cultural sensitivities and organisational behaviours (if relevant for you).
The below list can help you identify relevant points for each ‘eyes’:
Eye 1 – Client focus, all about the client
- What are the client’s goals, challenges and issues?
- Context of work
- Changes since the last session
- What the client wants or needs to do?
- Behaviours, patterns and emotions.
Eye 2 – Coach interventions, what did you do as a coach
- Coaching tools and models used
- Structure and pace of the session
- Interventions which are effective or ineffective
- Missed opportunities or alternative approaches could be identified
Eye 3 – Coach-client relationship
- How are the trust and rapport in the relationship
- Are there any power dynamics or dependencies
- Contracting and boundaries
- ‘Ahha’ moments, rupture, tensions in the relationship
Eye 4 – The focus is on you
- What are your emotions, thoughts and feelings?
- Do you have any assumptions, biases and blinds spots? If so, what are these? Name these.
- Triggers and anxieties?
- What are your development needs?
Eye 5 – any parallel processes
- Any repeated processes of avoidance, control or rescuing?
- Mirrored emotional states or communication blockers
- How can awareness of parallels unlock movement in the coaching relationship?
Eye 6 – Supervisor – coach relationship
- Style of intervention (safety, challenge or support)
- What do you need right now from this relationship?
- How are the supervision style impacts on your learning?
- How do you experience the supervision?
- 6A – feelings of the supervisor shared
Eye 7 – systems in play
- What are the systems which are influencing the client and the relationships?
- What are the considerations around ethics, power and diversity?
- What are the systemic constraints or enablers for this relationship?
- How are the coach, the client and the supervisor navigating and fitting into this wider system context?
To help you get the most out of supervision, I’ll encourage you to use effective reflective notes and mindfully identify relevant topics you want to discuss. To help, I offer this form which you can use for session preparation.
| The focus for this supervision session | |
| What feels important to talk about in this supervision session? (A specific session, dilemma, pattern, client…) | |
| Lens 1 – The client | |
| What’s happening for the client in their journey? (themes, challenges, transitions…) | |
| Lens 2 – Interventions | |
| What tools, interventions and approaches did you use? What worked and what needs changing? | |
| Lens 3 – Coaching relationship | |
| How do you see and describe the coaching relationship? (dynamics present, tensions, moments of significance…) | |
| Lens 4 – Your internal experiences as a coach | |
| Your thoughts, feelings, bodily responses, assumptions, beliefs and triggers… | |
| Lens 5 – Parallel processes | |
| Are you mirroring the client’s wider systems? What is impacting the client’s dynamics? | |
| Lens 6 – Supervisor-coach relationship | |
| What support or challenge do you need from your supervisor? How should the supervision sessions look and feel? | |
| Lens 7 – Wider systems | |
| Are there any considerations to think about? Who else is involved with the client and how this is impacting their system? Are there any PESTLE considerations which impact the client? | |
| Focus of intervention | |
| What type of intervention do you need for this session? What is the focus on? Normative function – help with boundaries of counselling and coaching, ethics, professional standards. Restorative function – wellbeing support, energy management. Formative function – tools, learning, advice. | |
You can use the questions in this form as reflection points after coaching sessions, especially in preparation for future supervision. This helps provide a more natural structure, more of like a conversation, that’s guided by you and your needs.
What to Bring to Supervision Sessions
To make the most of the supervision experience, the most important thing to be is open and curious. Supervision is about you, your needs and those of your clients.
During the discussion, be honest about your experiences and own the learning you’ve gained, then reflect between sessions to maximise this learning. This makes naming doubts, mistakes, boundary wobbles easier and helps you prepare to explore those ‘I don’t know’ moments.
Supervision releases the shackles of things like self-doubt and low capability, empowering coaches to improve exponentially. It can make a good coach into a great one. It’s one of the best investments you can make in your career – for you and your clients.
References
Bolton, N. (2020) 3 core functions of coaching supervision. International Centre for Coaching Supervision. Available at: https://iccs.co/3-core-functions-of-coaching-supervision/ (Accessed: 31 December 2025).
Clutterbuck, D., Whitaker, C. and Lucas, M. (2016) Coaching supervision: a practical guide for supervisees. London: Routledge.
