A feedback that changed how I supervise
“Very great change starts from very small conversations, held among people who care”
Margaret Wheatley
Early in my supervision practice, one client offered feedback that I still carry.
During our session, I had been attentive, reflective and careful. I noticed metaphors and shifts in energy. I asked Clean Language questions and explored parts of the client system. Yet, I remained slightly outside the relationship - as though I were observing the work rather than participating in it.
At the end, the supervisee said they wanted more of me in the space: more mirroring and more of what I was noticing somatically - the impact of their discoveries were having on me.
The feedback matched something I could already feel, but had not been named. An anxious sensation remained in my gut after the session. When I returned to it in reflection, I saw power dynamics I had overlooked. The supervisee’s coaching experience and authority had entered the room, and I had quietly placed myself in an invisible, one-sided contest. I also recognised a parallel process: each of us was trying to be useful to the other.
That feedback did not give me a technique. It gave me permission and responsibility to bring myself more fully into the relational field. In many ways, it unlocked the supervisor in me, even more that the course itself did.
Research on coaching supervision helps explain why this mattered. Alison Hodge’s action-research inquiry involved six executive coaches and five supervisors. It described supervision as a co-created learning relationship in which reflection, dialogue and feedback can broaden perspective, support wellbeing and maintain professional standards. The study is small and interpretive, so it cannot establish causal effects. Its value lies in illuminating what participants experienced inside supervision.
Professional frameworks place similar emphasis on relationship and reflection. EMCC Global defines supervision as a safe space for reflective dialogue that supports practice, development and wellbeing. Its revised framework also stresses reflexivity: the practitioner’s capacity to examine not only the work, but their own participation in it and the cultural or systemic influences shaping what becomes visible.
This is why useful feedback is more than a verdict about performance. It is data entering a relationship. And this is why is important to fully receive it.
In my work with coaches and clients I feel that feedback may reveal an intention that had an unintended impact. For an HR or L&D professional, it may expose the gap between programme design and participant experience. For a senior executive, it may arrive in the hesitation before an answer rather than in the annual survey.
Here is a way to reflect in 5 steps to a feedback (today’s article was inspired by 30 Day Journaling Challenge)
After receiving feedback, stay a bit with it and don’t dismiss what the other person had to share with you, notice what information is giving you - might be a sensation in the body, an emotion or just an instinctual reflex. Now write briefly under five headings:
Words: What was actually said, without interpretation?
Body: Where did I feel a response?
Meaning: What story did I immediately create?
System: What roles, power or expectations may be present?
Choice: What will I test, ask or contract differently?
The body is a source of information, not a verdict. A tight throat does not prove that something unspoken belongs to the other person. A heavy chest is not a diagnosis. Somatic responses become useful when held as hypotheses and explored with consent in the field.
Coaching supervision is not therapy, mentor coaching or performance management. It is a protected, confidential reflective and developmental partnership around the practitioner’s work. Confidentiality has agreed legal, ethical and safety limits, and what the coach is bringing into the space creates an impact on all the elements of the system, and while left unexplored might bring an energy that influences how the coach works, it can also have an impact on the client without any intent from the coach.
Some feedback changes what we do. The most important feedback may change how fully we are willing to be present.
Professional sources that you can add to your reading list if you want to know more about supervision:
Hodge, A. (2016), The Value of Coaching Supervision as a Development Process, International Journal of Evidence Based Coaching and Mentoring.
EMCC Global Supervision Centre for Excellence and revised framework.
International Coaching Federation, Supervision: A Safe Space to Process Feedback — practitioner education rather than an outcome study.
