“This can be taxing, emotional work. An inevitable part of it is working with trauma and loss.”
These two sentences, in a call for expressions of interest that I’d been sent from The Decelerator, made me sit up and pay attention.
I was already intrigued by the work that the team was doing and I’d been sent this document, calling for people who might be able to provide emotional and relational support.
What was interesting is the way it described the practice of ‘supervision’.
In a professional context this word can often mean providing oversight and accountability on another person’s work - making sure they’ve been doing a good job.
However the way it was being described here was more aligned with the world of counselling and therapy.
You may be aware but if you’re a practicing and accredited counsellor in the UK, you’re required to put supervision in place.
This means having someone that you can regularly go to, to discuss what comes up in the sessions that you have with your clients.
The reason for this is two-fold - firstly because you’re holding space for people to deal with difficult issues. This can take its toll or touch on issues that are also personally difficult for you, being the imperfect human beings that we all are.
Secondly, having a space to reflect on your practice, where you can unpick what’s coming up and be challenged to refine your own thinking, allows you to be constantly developing as a practitioner.
While here at The Decelerator we’re not providing a dedicated therapeutic space in the work that we do, organisational endings can be very difficult for the people who go through them.
It can put individuals under enormous pressure as they try to navigate the administrative complexities of winding things down but even more so, it can create incredible emotional and relational stress through guilt, shame and inter-personal conflict.
Our job, as individuals and as a team, is to provide the best support that we can to those people and the wider sector.
We do this through our Hotline service, where people in organisations that are facing closure can book in a call to discuss what’s happening and receive advice and guidance.
Sometimes people come to these calls in distress, feeling very lonely and isolated, or just needing someone to offload on to. Our Hotline Navigators need to be able to hold space for any and all of what comes up, but we want to ensure they don’t suffer as a result of absorbing the difficulty and not having any way of processing it.
We also provide support to the wider sector through advocacy, relationship building and just continually developing our work to better meet its needs.
This might not be so immediately and emotionally taxing as providing direct support, but comes with responsibility and also, as we’ve found in recent months, a huge demand for more by a sector that’s under pressure.
The role that I have taken up as supervisor is to hold space for everyone doing this work, at all levels, when they need it.
In simple terms this means regular meetings with most individuals, the service delivery team and the whole organisation on a regular basis.
The individual sessions always begin with a check-in, allowing them to feel settled and comfortable while creating the conditions to connect to what’s going on for them that day.
Our sessions are never structured, instead we listen for what’s coming up which feels important and needs our attention.
Using reflective inquiry, we gently peel back the layers which sit underneath the difficulties, challenges, and questions that surface.
This provides the person receiving supervision to both listen to their own feelings and needs but also to challenge and see more clearly what’s happening for them. The sessions then also become a means to prod and test some of the assumptions they might not realise that they are making about themselves or the work.
The intended outcome is that the person can feel well-held within the conversation - providing a sense of safety and support - but also that they come out of it with new insight that they can use to develop as a practitioner.
We also meet for supervision as a service delivery team - the Hotline Navigators - each month and as a whole team every quarter.
These sessions are run in a very similar way but the nature of being together provides an opportunity to hear one another and understand what’s going on in the group, which helps to maintain (and grow) empathy and connection.
It also allows us to surface difference - how we think in different ways or do our work differently - which strengthens what we do and has let us celebrate how this contributes to a well-rounded and multifaceted organisation.
There’s also some interplay between the different spaces - the quiet insight from individual supervision, where someone is able to really dig into their personal experience inevitably leads to a higher quality of insight and conversation in the group spaces too.
And the feedback loop closes as the sense of support and connection from those group conversations then allow individuals to be more open, honest and vulnerable with themselves in their work and as they head back into their next individual supervision sessions.
In an ideal world - and generally this seems to play out - this is a virtuous circle that supports both the individual emotional health of people within the team but also builds relational strength across it, directly impacting the quality of what we deliver as a team.
When I talk about supervision at the Decelerator to friends and colleagues in my wider network, it’s always met with pleasant surprise.
And I too still feel a quiet sense of admiration for the organisation having put this in place, while also wondering why more organisations don’t.
People working in far more stressful and difficult roles in civil society often don’t have much - or any - support of this nature and the cost is not only to the individual but to the whole.
I understand that traditionally, in a cash-strapped sector, we might think of this as a rather ‘soft’ strategy or luxurious extra.
However, I feel confident that the work we do is of a higher quality and perhaps more successful as a result of making supervision an integral part of our organisational life.
My reflections are limited, of course, by being the person delivering supervision, so I canvassed our team for their experience of it:
“It feels luxurious. Surprising. Healing. And there’s still some resistance and guilt. It feels both unfamiliar and also very welcome.
It’s enabled me to really make sense of where I am in this work and played such an important part in supporting us as a team and collective.
It’s allowed us to have some of the more tricky conversations we could easily have avoided, which might have otherwise built resentment and strife.
I now don’t know how any organisation survives without this function.”
- Louise
“I was deeply sceptical about this at the beginning and am now a total convert.
I think all organisations, especially at the start up, should make time, space and money for this sort of thing.
Our joint supervisions have allowed us to get to know each other's working ways and how to work best together.
On an individual basis, the reflection has enabled me to think more clearly and to acknowledge needs as well as feelings.”
- Linda
Addendum: Underneath the hood
We thought it might be helpful for people working in other organisations if we were open and transparent about the finer details of how supervision works at the Decelerator.
This has been part of our pilot phase, so we’re still regularly reviewing and finetuning our approach.
In terms of the time we have to put aside and the financial investment in a supervisor, it looks something like this:
Individual supervision for three people at one hour, per person, per month
Hotline navigator team: one hour every month
Whole team supervision: 90 minutes online each month and one day in-person each quarter.
This means we have to budget an average of two days of a supervisor's time for a team of two full time and five part time staff.
The recruitment for my role was framed within a label of ‘a therapy-informed supervisor’ - someone to ‘nurture and support the emotional and relational strength of our small team as individuals and as a group.’
The role description focused more on the outcomes for the work than on a specific set of skills and experiences.
The core of this was:
Proactively supporting the team collectively to process and reflect on the work in ways that create strength, not weakness or division, between us.
Offering individuals the opportunity to reflect on and process their experiences, to minimise the risk of overwhelm, and learn better and faster along the way.
We hope this might be helpful for other organisations that might feel supervision could support the wellbeing and practice of their team.
This is absolutely stunning and vital work. Really excited to discover this blog and The Decelerator in general. Keen to connect!
Thanks for this. I've never heard of this outside of in the therapeutic space. Do you think the supervisor needs to be embedded in the organization in order to be effective?