Julie’s Ideas Blog 66: Supervision – Part 3

Multi-Party Contracts and Supervision

Continuing my theme of what I wrote about supervision in 2004 and 2007 (Hay, 2004a, 2004b, 2007), I looked at what I saw as one of the key differences between psychotherapy and other forms of practice that are about helping people develop - the number of parties involved in the process.  I often joked with my colleagues that developmental applications of transactional analysis needed more skill than TA psychotherapy: for the psychotherapist there was often only them and their client, whereas those working developmentally as trainers, educators, coaches consultants, facilitators, and so on, often had to deal with the client, an organisation, an HR director, a line manager and maybe even more senior managers – or perhaps they had a classroom of children and also had to deal with the parents, the head teacher of the school, the education authority, etc, etc. 

I did recognise that psychotherapists also sometimes work with families, need to keep in mind that their clients often work within organisations, and they too sometimes work within organisations such as therapy centres, in-house services, hospitals, charities, etc.  Like other practitioners, psychotherapist may also be paid for by an organisation.

This adds to the complexity of the contract, both for the professional work and for the supervision. 

In addition to supervisor and supervisee, therefore, it may be important to take into account:

the organisation(s)	who pays? who ‘represents’ the organisation(s) and what are their expectations of the practitioner? of the supervision? is there more than one organisation involved e.g. where the client works, where the practitioner works, where the supervisor works?
the client(s)	who is/are the client(s)? what responsibility towards client care does the supervisor have? has the client given permission for the practitioner to present their work with them for supervision? has the client agreed that the sessions with them may be recorded for later analysis?
the professional bodies	under the auspices of what professional body (bodies) is the practitioner’s work being conducted? what are the implications of this? under the auspices of what professional body (bodies) is the supervision being conducted? what are the implications of this?

In addition to considering who else, apart from the supervisor and the supervisee, are ‘stakeholders’, the supervisor and supervisee need to consider:

• How aware are the various stakeholders of the contract details between the other parties to that contract?  The greater the awareness, the less likely are there to be misunderstandings.
• If something were to go wrong with the contract, how might that happen, and which parties might it involve?  Considering this beforehand allows action to forestall potential problems.
• Who gets access to what information – what are the confidentiality arrangements necessary if the client is expected to talk openly about their problems and/or development needs?

Examples of complex multi-party contracts were shown in Blogs 21 and 22  and are reproduced below– and for each of these we need to imagine that there is an additional stakeholder – the supervisor – who has a connection with the practitioner and an implicit connection with all of the other stakeholders.

Supervision with multi-party contract - consortium (adapted from Hay 2007, p.117)

Supervision with multi-party contract - educational context (amended from Hay 2007, p117 - diagram corrected)

References

Hay, Julie (2004a) Supervision for Coaches Self & Society 32:3 Aug/Sept 34-40

Hay, Julie (2004b) Supervision Train the Trainer, 11

Hay, Julie (2007) Reflective Practice and Supervision for Coaches Maidenhead: Open University Press
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