Supervision of Supervision: Who Supervises the Supervisor?
Stepping one level up
There is an interesting transition in our professional lives when, after years of taking our own work to supervision, we become the person sitting in the other chair. For a long time there has been somewhere to take the difficult questions, the client who unsettles us, the ethical dilemma that does not have an obvious answer, or simply that vague sense that something is happening in the therapeutic relationship that we have not yet quite understood. Supervision gives us another mind alongside our own and, over time, we become accustomed to the value of having somewhere to think.
Then we become supervisors ourselves, and gradually other practitioners begin bringing those questions to us.
With experience this can feel quite natural. We listen, reflect, challenge, encourage and sometimes teach. We notice risk, consider professional responsibilities and help another practitioner look at their work from perspectives they may not have considered. If we continue to work clinically, we may still have supervision for our own client work, yet there is another part of our professional practice that can quietly receive much less attention: the supervision we are providing.
It is one thing to wonder what is happening between a supervisee and their client. It is another to become curious about what is happening between the supervisee and ourselves.
Perhaps there is a supervisee we find ourselves wanting to rescue, or another whose decisions seem to irritate us more than we would expect. We may notice that we are repeatedly stepping in with suggestions before a supervisee has had time to think, or doing the opposite and remaining reflective when clearer direction is actually needed. There may be a difficult conversation about competence that we keep finding reasons not to have, or a supervisee whose admiration feels rather pleasant and makes it just a little harder to challenge them. These are no longer simply questions about clinical work. They are questions about our work as supervisors.
This is where meta-supervision, sometimes called supervision of supervision, offers another level of reflection. Rather than concentrating primarily on what happened with the client, we begin to look at how we guided the supervisee who brought that client to us, what we noticed, what we prioritised and perhaps what we missed. The focus moves from the clinical story towards the supervisory relationship and the decisions we make within it.
That shift can reveal things that are surprisingly easy to overlook.
Every supervisor develops a style, and inevitably our strengths travel into the supervision room with us. So do their shadows. A naturally supportive supervisor may create a wonderfully encouraging relationship while finding performance conversations more difficult. Someone who values independence may give supervisees considerable freedom but occasionally step back when firmer guidance is needed. A supervisor who loves teaching may have an abundance of knowledge to offer, yet discover that providing information can sometimes occupy the very space in which a supervisee might otherwise have begun thinking for themselves.
None of this means that something has gone wrong. It simply reminds us that supervision, like therapy, is a human relationship, and that our own personality, experience, preferences and blind spots inevitably enter the room with us.
Experience does not make us immune to this. If anything, years of successful practice can sometimes make our habits less visible because the way we work has become so familiar that it no longer occurs to us to examine it. What began as a thoughtful choice may gradually become simply the way I supervise.
Meta-supervision gives us somewhere to become curious about that.
It provides an opportunity to notice patterns across supervisees rather than viewing every supervisory difficulty in isolation. We can explore how we balance support with challenge, when we step in and when we step back, how comfortably we exercise authority, how we respond when competence concerns us, and whether the feedback we believe we are giving is actually the feedback the supervisee is receiving. It also gives us somewhere to think about the quieter emotional weight of supervision: the knowledge that our decisions may influence not only the practitioner sitting with us, but also the clients whose care they carry beyond the supervision room.
Perhaps this is why becoming a supervisor should never be regarded as reaching the top of a professional staircase. There is always another level from which we can look at our work.
In therapy, our attention is largely directed towards the client. In supervision, the view widens to include the practitioner, their work and the responsibilities surrounding it. Meta-supervision widens the view once again and asks us to consider ourselves as supervisors: how we think, how we influence, what we avoid, what we may be carrying unnecessarily and what we might not yet be able to see.
Each step changes the view without making the one below it any less important.
And perhaps that is one of the more reassuring things about supervision of supervision. It does not require us to become supervisors who never get things wrong, never become uncertain and never have blind spots. It simply asks that we remain interested in the possibility that there is still something about our own practice worth discovering.
Becoming the person in the other chair does not mean we have run out of things to learn. Sometimes it simply means that we need another chair.