News & Insight
September 2021

What is Coach Supervision and Why is it Important?

What is Coach Supervision?

Being an executive coach can be demanding. As a coach, you are often required to support your clients through daunting phases of transition that require skill and agility from both the coach and executive to accomplish. However, the support that executive coaches themselves need can often be overlooked. That's where coach supervision comes in.

Coach supervision does not refer to literal supervision. Rather, it offers coaches an opportunity to continually pursue professional development using dialogue and reflection in a safe, supportive, and confidential space. Supervisors and coaches partner together to examine the coach’s practice with an eye towards improving skills, growing their capabilities, and creating positive impact for the client organizations.

Coach supervision focuses on five key areas:

Competence: Enabling coaches to improve existing competencies and develop new ones

Context: Helping ensure the coaching delivered by the coach is relevant and focused on what makes the client leader effective in the context in which they must lead, and benefits the organization at large

Boundaries: Clarifying that the coach is limited within their professional capability and will recommend other professionals to the executive if required

Integrity: Supporting coaching that is delivered with honesty and candor while ensuring that confidentiality and other appropriate codes of conduct are maintained

Professionalism: Acting professionally and in the best interest of the client and his/her organization

Benefits of Coach Supervision

Coach supervision offers extensive benefits to coaches, and by extension, their clients. Supervision helps coaches:

  • Ensure standards and ethics are maintained, including confidentiality
  • Establish good boundaries
  • Handle contractual issues
  • Develop new perspectives and systemic thinking
  • Work better with difficult clients or resolve ‘critical incidents’
  • Gain insights and learnings from other coaching engagements in the same organization
  • Become more self-aware and use the awareness in service to their work

WJM Associates, Inc.

Since 1996, top corporations have trusted WJM Associates to deliver, manage and measure executive coaching for their top leaders, whether single engagements or large global programs. WJM offers a dedicated, certified Coach Supervisor for each coaching engagement.

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