In today’s episode of the Safety of Work podcast, hosts Drew Rae and David Provan examine the attributes of effective supervision through analysis of McPherson, L., Federico, M., & McNamara, P. (2016). "Safety as a Fifth Dimension in Supervision: Stories from the Frontline" published in Australian Social Work. The study, focused on child and family practice supervision, provides valuable insights into supervisory relationships that can be applied broadly to safety management. Through interviews with 10 practitioners and 10 supervisors, the research identifies eight core themes including safety, emotional support, learning and growth, and leadership behaviors.
The discussion challenges traditional views of supervision by emphasizing the importance of psychological safety and predictable relationships between supervisors and workers. Through analysis of interviews with both supervisors and supervisees, the research highlights how effective supervision requires balancing organizational needs with worker support while maintaining clear boundaries and expectations. The findings suggest that organizations should focus on developing explicit supervision models that promote both technical expertise and relationship skills.
Discussion Points:
Quotes:
"There is a ton of safety research which says that frontline supervision - that direct relationship between a team leader and the people they're supervising - is really, really important for safety." - Drew Rae
"Supervision is a really important aspect of safety and safety management." - David Provan
"Power is inherent in these relationships... Supervisors don't have a lot of formal power, so the supervisor themselves often won't feel that they have power at all." - Drew Rae
"This is not an exploratory study. This is a properly conducted piece of high quality, qualitative research, and I think it does draw novel insights." - Drew Rae
Resources:
Safety as a Fifth Dimension in Supervision: Stories from the Frontline
The Safety of Work on LinkedIn
Drew: You are listening to the Safety of Work podcast, episode 128. Today we’re asking the question, what are the attributes of an effective supervisor? Let’s get started.
Hey everybody. My name’s Drew Rae. I’m here with David Provan, and we are from the Safety Science Innovation Lab at Griffith University in Australia. Welcome to the Safety of Work podcast. In each episode, we ask an important question in relation to the safety of work or the work of safety, and examine the evidence surrounding it.
David, what are we going to chat about today?
David: Today, it’s in the episode title, Attributes of an Effective Supervisor. We’re going to talk about supervision, supervisory relationships, and ultimately (I guess) those attributes of an effective supervisor.
Looking back through the episode list we’ve done, we’ve talked about leadership a little bit and we’ve talked about some broader climate and cultural aspects. We’ve obviously talked quite a bit about safety practices themselves. But I don’t think we’ve done too much, if anything, on supervision.
I’ve always been of the belief that supervision is a really important aspect of safety and safety management, so we pulled out this article, Drew. Any initial thoughts on supervision?
Drew: Just that there is a ton of safety research which says that frontline supervision—that direct relationship between a team leader and the people they’re supervising—is really, really important for safety. There is very, very little research that digs beyond that to look at what actually makes good supervision. There’s some research on supervision failings and how it goes bad, but less so on the positive side.
David: Supervision as a topic is relevant across all work domains, anywhere where practitioners perform work. Today, we’re actually going to get a review, an article from outside the safety science field of literature. What we’ll try to do is we’ll talk in the context of the paper, and we’ll hopefully also find some generalizable learnings that will translate to specifically what we might be interested in in the safety of work, which is what are the attributes and effective supervisor to enable safe work outcomes.
Drew: One of the things about research is it tends to work better when you narrow the focus of the research itself. If we’re researching supervision, just going out and finding a bunch of supervisors would be too contaminated by the differences in the companies they work in, the industries they work in, the type of teams and so forth. It makes sense to pick one industry, one type of supervision relationship. Then yeah, there’ll be some details of that that are specific, but hopefully that narrow focus helps us draw broad lessons.
I certainly like the type of supervision that I do most often is supervision of PhD students, which is its own weird thing. But I benefit a lot from just reading general work on supervision and general guidance on how to be a good supervisor because a lot of that stuff is very translatable.
David: And as someone who was supervised in their PhD by yourself and Sidney Dekker, I can confirm that that’s a weird type of relationship.
Drew: Well ours was particularly weird because you came into the PhD with far more management experience than I had, so it was much closer to a peer relationship. That’s one of the interesting things, that that particular bit is not that uncommon. Frontline supervision doesn’t have to be strictly hierarchical. There is a fairly large peer element to it. And maybe we’ll get into that as we get into that.
David: We absolutely will. We’re going to talk about collaboration and we’re going to talk about the appropriate balancing of some of those power dynamics and things like that in the paper. Spoiler alert, the paper concludes that collaborative relationships are more effective through both the lens of the supervisor and the supervisee than a power and hierarchical relationship.
Drew, do you want to introduce the domain that we’re going to be looking at today for the paper, and then we can introduce the paper, I guess?
Drew: What we’re going to be talking about is child and family practice in social work. This is work that is sometimes actually physically dangerous, which is a whole other topic, but mostly what we are concerned with here is that it is quite socially and psychologically dangerous. It is really, really hard work, and the practitioners do often suffer and experience harm as a result of the work that they’re doing.
It’s an interesting one as a corner case in safety where we are dealing more with psychological harm rather than physical harm. But it’s definitely not divorced from safety. This is, I think you could say, a hazardous workplace with its own particular set of hazards.
It’s also an industry that is set up with fairly explicit supervision relationships sometimes. Part of setting up good practice is deliberately trying to set up these supervision relationships to protect and guide the practitioners.
David: Absolutely, Drew. We’re talking about organizations and practitioners within organizations that intervene and support children who have been subject to neglect, abuse, and other forms of harm.
When we talk about the role of a supervisor, if we think about the literature really broadly. There are some core (I guess) thoughts in the literature and we’ll talk a little bit more about a detailed definition after we introduce the paper.
We know that supervisors have this role to support, to educate, and to manage their teams that are navigating often complicated organizational and work contexts. So if we can think about the role of a supervisor in relation to the people in their team’s performing work.
Drew, do you want to introduce the paper?
Drew: Okay. Let’s start with the title and it’s a good one this time: Safety as a Fifth Dimension in Supervision: Stories from the Frontline. I like it because it’s both classy and descriptive. Stories from the Frontline is just a nice way of saying that this is a deep interview style research that sounds a lot better than a thematic interview study.
David: And there’s a core supervision model, the 4x4x4 model. They’ve taken one of the most core supervisory models and said, hey look, our researchers potentially found a fifth dimension that this previous three dimensional 4x4 model hasn’t quite covered adequately.
Drew: The authors are Lynn McPherson, Margarita Frederico, and Patricia McNamara. At the time it was written, they were all working for Latrobe University. Professor McPherson is now professor and research director at Southern Cross University.
All three authors actually have long careers as social work practitioners and managers before transiting to academia. From her publication list, it seems like the first author is very much a researcher of practice. The same way, David, that a lot of your and my papers.
Because of their backgrounds, this is very much insider research. The researchers have all had very similar lived experiences to the people that they are interviewing. These are almost like conversations between peers about how the work happens and how it’s experienced. A lot of advantages to that sort of thing when you’re trying to get at these insider topics.
I don’t know if it’s a controversy, but it’s certainly a constant thing that we are aware of, in that insiders tend to take too much for granted and outsiders tend to not notice the important things. Ideally, you might want to balance on the research team rather than all three being insiders. But I think in this paper it just comes across as a very authentic and informed investigation.
David: So Drew, published in 2016 in the Journal of Australian Social Work, and I can pretty confidently say that we haven’t reviewed a paper from the Australian Social Work Journal yet.
Drew: We haven’t. Just because it’s Australian not international, don’t think that means it’s a bad journal. Fields like social work tend to be very localized. There aren’t massive international things just because the work happens so differently in different countries, that actually researching practitioners talking to practitioners. The appropriate place to publish that is in the place that the local practitioners read. In fact, I think you’d probably find that a lot of social workers would read journals like this even though they’re scholarly academic publications.
David: The stated aim of this study was to understand how practitioners and supervisors experience supervision, and to identify and analyze the core functions of effective supervision.
We’ll come back to some research questions in a little while, but maybe we start with the literature review part of the paper. They split the literature review up into three sections.
One was the definition and let’s talk about some different definitions around supervision. The second bit was about theory. Let’s talk a little bit about the theoretical perspectives of supervision. And the third was about the empirical research on supervision and what does that say?
I actually quite liked it as a way of structuring a literature review, and I can’t recall seeing it too often done like that.
Drew: No, but for this sort of thing it’s perfect. You’ve got something where the definitions are a bit contested, so get those debates and discussions out of the way. The theory is a bit contested, so once you understand the definitions, you can talk about the theories, and then you can get onto what your empirical findings have actually been made once you get past clarifying the space that we’re working in.
David: I also really like a 2-page rather than a 10-page literature review in an article, which just tells me the important bits of literature. Don’t try to show me that you’ve read everything.
Drew: Of course do that. You’ve really got to trust that the authors have correctly picked out that, but you’ve got to do that trust anyway.
David: Drew, you mentioned the contested definitional space. Do you want to talk a little bit about some of the definitions and then what’s interesting to you around the definitions?
Drew: To start with, it seems obvious what a supervisor does. But once you try to interrogate that even a little bit, you realize that even just saying what a supervisor does as opposed to what a supervisor is, gives you quite a different perspective.
If you think of what a supervisor does, you’ve got to ask who are they doing it for? And depending on who you think they’re doing it for, you get a totally different answer.
From the point of view of the organization, the supervisor is delivering services using a team. If you look at it from the purpose of someone within the team, they’re providing administration, education, and support. If you look at what it is, it’s essentially just a relationship and how you manage the relationship to achieve those things.
Now all of those might be talking about the same thing, but you’re going to get different ideas about what good supervision is, depending on which definition you’d lead on.
David: I think it’s really interesting, and these definitions have been a bit of a theme for some of these quite complex topics in the last three episodes. We did the safety culture episode and talked a lot about the lack of definition there from the work from the CSRA.
Then last week when we did the StoryCraft episode on narratives, we talked about definitions of narratives. Supervision is one of these terms that when we say it we think we all know what it means, but then when we actually try to describe it we can sometimes take a lot of words to describe what it is.
I like the way you’ve thought about it there, Drew, is what’s the role, what’s the relationship, and what’s the activities that get performed. I don’t think the paper lands on an exact definition. They just pull all of these different definitions together and say this is what we’re talking about.
Drew: And the reason why the paper doesn’t land on a definition (I think) becomes clear in the next section, which is the theoretical perspectives on supervision.
If you start off really early, the same as when people were trying to define leadership, and even when they were trying to define things like safety performance, you start with a very positivist approach.
A positive approach just means you think of it as something that is objectively real and that we can measure it. Your early research is basically saying what makes good supervision.
Your typical paper says classic models of supervision say it’s all about command and control, but we think this model of supervision leads to better results. Even though you’re moving away from command and control to something else, you still think of it in terms of what is the most effective.
Whereas as you move into more modern theories, it starts to just examine supervision as something that is not even necessarily consciously done. You can’t define it as a set of actions or a set of styles. It’s just something that happens and you look at it from the experiences of people.
That’s ultimately where the paper settles on. They’re using a theoretical approach that says it’s not about what supervisors deliberately try to do or what leadership model or leadership style they use. Let’s just study how people experience their supervisor supervising, study how supervisors experience supervising other people, and report what those experiences are like.
It’s a much more descriptive, much less judgy way of looking at supervision, but it’s still got the flavor of we think that there are some things that make good supervision.
David: They did link in the paper the theoretical perspectives on supervision, to the transactional and transformational leadership-type models, and I think it’s that positive is transactional.
The supervisor is there to provide instruction and direction, to monitor compliance, to resolve issues, and thinking of the supervisor as a whole bunch of transactions that are carried out. Those transactions can be right or wrong, so a very normative type of approach.
The counter-theoretical perspective, a little bit more like the transformational leadership where we think about purpose, meaning, guidance, support, is very much more a relational approach to it. Like you said, Drew, how do these different parties in the supervisor relationship experience supervision. And there we think much more of a humanistic type of approach.
It’s not that dissimilar from how we think about Safety I and Safety II in the safety science domain, if that’s starting to resonate with some of our listeners.
Drew: The one other thing I’d throw in on the theories there is they do mention something that we tend to shy away uncomfortably from in safety sometimes, which is that power is inherent in these relationships.
To really understand what’s going on, often you do need to keep in mind that this is a really complex power situation. Supervisors don’t have a lot of formal power, so the supervisor themselves often won’t feel that they have power at all. They might even want to be just one of the team and part of want to be a peer. But from the point of view of someone being supervised, the supervisor has a lot of power.
That asymmetry where different people have got different understanding of how much power exists leads to really complex situations to navigate for supervisors and for people being supervised.
David: And it’s a really good quote. As we get into the details of some of the findings, I actually quite like the way the authors talked about their findings in relation to that. They didn’t say ignore power. They didn’t say minimize power. They were talking a lot about the balance that needs to be found there, so we’ll get into that.
Drew: They did come out of their literature review with three sets of conclusions that they think, okay this is what we currently know. We know that professional values such as honesty, loyalty, and integrity are important. We know that there are certain supervisor behaviors that are important in the relationship. Things like the supervisor is a role model, the use of humor, supervisors offering support, supervisors educating by communicating complex concepts and getting people to reflect and think about the work they’re doing.
A lot of those things are very particular to medical or social work practice where the supervisor is often like a sounding board to help someone do that reflective part of their practice that they’re trained to do as part of their work. It might be a bit less relevant for other types of work.
Then thirdly was that the supervisor needs to be an expert. They need to have a sound knowledge base, which includes expertise in the work that’s being done. I think that’s true, David. Do you think across most organizations that a manager might not be an expert in all of the work, but an immediate supervisor really should be an expert in the work that they’re supervising to be a good supervisor?
David: I actually think it’s an important point that we don’t conflate the different leadership roles in an organization with the same needs when it comes to their knowledge of the work that is in their area. I think as an executive leader, you may not need to have a whole lot of knowledge about how operational people perform their work, although it wouldn’t be unhelpful.
But I think the closer you get to the work itself, the people making decisions about that work need to have a greater and greater understanding of the work. A frontline supervisor of a team—this was reported in this study by both the people being supervised, in fact, probably more so from the people being supervised, saying we actually want to have a need to have a supervisor that understands our work so that we can have this sounding board, get this support, get this understanding and trust—is incredibly important.
Drew: So David, are we right to move on?
David: Let’s move on. We’ve got these things that supervisors need to be, what supervisors need to do, and what supervisors need to know in the broader literature. Do we want to talk about the research questions or just go straight into the method, Drew?
Drew: I think the first three research questions are literally those three things. But then they add in what’s the sort of good conceptual frame of reference. In other words, how should supervisors think about being supervisors? And then what are the implications for, if you’re an organization trying to improve supervision, what should the organization do based on our understanding of what makes good supervision. I thought those were interesting questions to round out the direct examination.
David: Let’s talk a little bit about the method. The research was undertaken in Victoria, Australia, and like we’ve said already, exploring practitioners and supervisors experiences of effective supervision in the field.
They did in-depth interviews. They interviewed 10 practitioners, so people being supervised, and 10 supervisors using a semi-structured interview schedule. Twenty semi-structured interviews, different organizations, some were government organizations, some were community-based organizations.
Drew, how do we feel about this sample and the interview approach to trying to explore this type of an issue or a question?
Drew: The number of people is good for this study. Twenty interviews is a lot, and usually by the time you start interviewing seven or eight people in this focused question, you start having the same topics come up again and again, so you’re not getting a lot from each new interview. You have expanded out to 50 supervisors. I think you’d be hearing the same thing over and over again for the last 40.
The one thing that they couldn’t do just because of the ethics around how they found their participants, where there was no matching between supervisees and supervisors. The people being supervised are talking about different supervisors than the supervisors are being interviewed.
Having a little bit of that matching (I think) would’ve been really interesting to get some of the bidirectional understanding of the exact same relationship, but just ethically it wasn’t possible to do that, and that is a really hard thing to do ethically.
David: What I really liked about this is, to answer this question, they sort out both perspectives. You don’t just say what makes an effective supervisor and go to just workers or just practitioners because of, like you said earlier Drew, what’s the role of the supervisor in the eyes of the organization, what’s the role of the supervisor in the eyes of the supervisor, then in the eyes of the worker and so on.
I like that they were able to use both perspectives for this. I think in terms of if you were able to get a sample of matched pairs, then I actually think you might not want to use this type of a research question. I think if you actually got that opportunity, there’d be far more interesting research questions that you could look into about the nature of that relationship and the experience of that relationship.
Drew: Very good point, David. Yeah, I would much rather have 10 interviews of each than 50 or 100 surveys for this question.
David: Analysis. We’ve done papers on this podcast with a thematic inductive analysis process before, so a step-through model of their analysis where they get these data. They’ve got these transcripts of these 20 interviews and they go through this analysis process where they get familiar with the dataset. What these researchers would do is just read all 20 transcripts, try to actually just get familiar with the responses, the topics, the things that are in there.
Based on that initial familiarity, they generate a set of initial codes for how they then go back and categorize that, that would allow them to search for themes, review those themes, name the themes, so once we start pulling things together and then finally producing the report.
They did report eight themes out of that analysis process. Drew, is there anything you want to say about the analysis before we start talking about the themes and the findings?
Drew: No, this is very straightforward with standard thematic analysis. I don’t think there’s anything particularly interesting or surprising in how they went about it. Often, this analysis is more about what’s revealed in the findings than how they said they did the analysis.
David: We’re going to talk about eight core themes that came out. We’ll talk about each of these eight themes, and remembering we’re talking about the attributes of an effective supervisory relationship as well.
Theme one, they named safety, and it may not be how our listeners think of safety in terms of a supervisor creating a physically safe work environment. It’s very much about the safety of the supervisory relationship. How safe does the supervisee feel in that relationship with their supervisor? Do you want to say a bit more about that?
Drew: I guess the first one is that it’s not really surprising that this psychological safety comes up when you’re talking about the supervision relationship. But the researchers and what I think is just interesting is how dominant it was as a theme, how just consistently everyone talked about it as one of the most important themes.
I think the term psychological safety gets a little bit overused and used in a little bit of a vague sense, but what they’re talking about is the really specific category of relational safety, that is that both people know what the relationship is.
They have clearly expressed what this is, what this isn’t, what’s on the table, what’s not on the table, to talk about how you can expect the other person to react when you say things that you can trust that if you come to them with a problem, or something that’s gone wrong, that they will turn it into a coaching moment instead of a judgmental moment, that you can trust that the feedback is going to be constructive, not criticized, that if you come to them in distress, that they will treat that appropriately.
The opposite of that would be you come to them with a problem and they want to constantly ask questions. What one industry called an inquisitorial relationship, where they’re just trying to analyze and diagnose what went wrong instead of treating it like a safe coaching relationship.
David: The first theme there on safety—I really like some of the language in this part of the paper; talked a lot about trust, about non-judgmental responses, always being constructive feedback, so a lot of those words that we would hear a lot—concluded that the supervisory relationships need to offer supervisees or our frontline workers regularity, consistency, and predictability.
I got to know what the relationship is and it’s got to be like that every time I experience the relationship. Ultimately, it’s got to be constructive, positive, and safe.
Drew: I think that’s something that we overlook sometimes. We talk about what makes a good relationship, but being predictable is almost more important. Someone who is good most of the time and supportive most of the time, but sometimes you’ll catch them in a bad mood and they fly off the handle, so you’re never quite sure which version of the person you’ll get.
That’s almost far worse than someone who is just consistently narky or grumpy. Unpredictability can be really challenging when you are trying to talk about sensitive topics and you don’t know how the other person might or might not react. Your consistency and predictability is a big part of having it being safe.
David: Responding to the emotional impact of work is theme number two. This is really talking about proactively addressing the emotional impact of work and empowering practitioners. This is where, given the domain that we’re talking about here, like you said Drew, just the psychosocial challenges of these practitioners who are working every day with neglected and abused children, is very, very emotionally challenging work.
Having a supervisor attuned into that and having a supervisor relationship, which proactively and supportively responds to the emotional needs of their supervisees, is really important, even though (I guess) some of our work you mentioned Drew, may not be as emotionally demanding as this type of social work.
The way that this theme was talked about reminded me a lot about how we talked about that management response matters principle in HOP, like if something goes wrong or someone’s got a problem, how leaders respond and support matters to (I guess) the individual, but also to the learning that can take place as a response to that.
Drew: This is the one theme out of their whole list (I think) is probably very context-specific. You’d want to be careful in your organization about how to approach it.
It almost sounds from the way they’re describing it, that some of their supervisees, or maybe a lot of their supervisees are using their supervisors for almost self-regulation and grounding, to help them cope and to remain calm, and to debrief after really difficult situations. The boundaries of some supervision relationships would exclude that.
One of the things that we encourage in academic supervision is actually that people don’t seek that emotional support from their supervisors because it can lead to blurred boundaries and actually prevent that predictable safe environment that the first theme talked about.
I think the question is just what is this relationship? If that is an assumed part of it, then maybe it should be an explicit part of it and people should be trained how to do that and do it well. If it’s not, then the boundary should be clear, people should be able to predict and understand that boundary and know where they should be going instead of grounding and self-regulation.
David: I think something that could be a little bit more generalizable is they use this specific word, a calming supervisory presence attuned to the particular needs of the supervisee. I still think that calmness is really important. In this situation, if you’ve got people with a heightened sense of anxiety or concern, just having a calm supervisor relationship could be really helpful in that context.
But some of the quotes I don’t think are specific to this domain, like a supervisee saying having someone that actually cares about me as a human being and on a human level, about how I’m coping with the work and to show that they can cope and remain calm as well. So yeah, I guess different work domains, but I think just reading some of the quotes, I could hear other practitioners in other industries expressing similar things.
Drew: I didn’t want to imply that this was exclusive to social work. It might be just pick and choose exactly what’s relevant there. The remaining calm, I can’t imagine anyone wants a supervisor who panics and gets distressed and angry when things get… that’s probably universal.
The level to which you want them to care about you as a human being, probably like at the most basic level, everyone wants to be cared about as a human being. But how that care is shown and expressed in the workplace might be tailored to the nature of the workplace and the culture of the workplace.
David: Theme number three is titled learning and growth. An effective supervisory relationship was found to extend supervisee learning, promoting safe, critical reflection on practice and performance, and supervised in particular talked about the importance of teaching and learning models.
Definitely, supervisors and supervisees in this relationship see it as, one of the critical attributes of this is learning and growth. I guess that’s got to go both ways. I guess supervisors have got to learn and grow in their supervision, and obviously for the supervisee.
Drew: They mean something very specific here, though, which is trained in some industries, but I think actually gets left out of a lot of thinking about supervision in fields like teaching, psychology, and social work.
When you do university education, there’s a real emphasis on reflective self-practice expressed in various ways. The idea is you do, and then you go away and think about what you’ve done, and you use that to improve. It’s like the primary means of monitoring yourself and getting better.
Then we start to build in formal peer or supervision relationships to help that. You debrief with a peer or give way to a supervisor to help you reflect and improve. And people get trained how to do this.
Then in other industries, we expect this same learning, but without any of the training in how to do the self-reflection, or as a supervisor guide reflective practice. It’s a trained skill that we could train our supervisors in. We just often don’t.
I think that’s one where if you’re looking at ways of enhancing supervision, like giving them explicit training, not in supervision but in coaching and in reflective practice, might be a way to really upskill that role of the supervisor as someone who builds learning for themselves and other people.
David: An extension of that, even in other domains outside some of those professionals you mentioned like in military, aerospace, aviation, healthcare, there are models of debriefing. There are models of after-action reviews, some industries following events, some industries involving following high-risk activities.
But if we think about some of the more core, industrial-type industries, resources and things like that, there’s not that same culture of task debriefs, after-action reviews, and reflective practice like what we’re talking about here.
Drew: There is a very practical side of this that they tucked in. It doesn't always belong under this theme, but I think it is still relevant, which is that people expect their supervisors to be experts in bureaucracy.
They want to be able to go to their supervisor to know how to get stuff done by navigating policy, legislation, processes, and how the organization really works. They just want their supervisor to be more experienced in that navigation, which just makes everyone’s life easier.
If you’ve got someone you can go to and say I don’t know how to do this. Just tell me who I talk to or tell them what form I need to fill out.
David: So talk about three core areas of knowledge and experience that supervisors need to have in this theme. They talked about expert theoretical knowledge, and here they’re almost talking about the supervisor’s worldview.
In this case, it was particularly in relation to their perspectives on child abuse and neglect. They actually wanted a supervisor to have an expert theoretical outlook on how to manage work.
It’s a little bit like we train our leaders in human organizational performance principles, to actually give them a certain type of mindset about the work itself. They talk about that as one category.
They talk about organizational awareness as another category, like you mentioned, about experts in navigating the bureaucracy of the organization.
Then the third was this practiced wisdom and self knowledge, which is this expert understanding of the work that their people are doing, and their ability to demonstrate their wisdom in relation to that work being performed, and do that in a calming, constructive, professional way.
Drew: David, can I just pull you back to the expert theoretical knowledge for a moment? Because there’s just a particular quote from this paper that, “Supervisors needed wider theoretical knowledge, in particular complexity theory and ecological development theory.”
Could you imagine, just like safety in the mining industry, someone saying I really need my supervisor to be able to explain to me the difference between Safety II and high reliability organizations.
David: I actually think that, and that’s why I talked a little bit about worldview and a little bit about how you might train supervisors in their understanding and outlook on work itself. If I think work is a simple yes-no, black-white, right-wrong, follow-paint by numbers sort of activity, and all I need to do is supervise, make sure people have the colored pencils they need and can count.
It’s very different to supervisors having an outlook on their people and their work, that our people are working under really challenging, conflicted, and constrained environments. While the complexity, science, and ecological development, that language may not be the language you’d use, I actually think the principles are critical to train supervisors in how to think about work in 2025.
Drew: That is the argument we make in education, that understanding theory broadens the perspective you bring to situations. It’s not that you can write an essay about the theory. It’s that you look at situations differently because you’ve got those theories sitting in the back of your head helping you look at the world.
Should we move on to the next one?
David: Yeah, I just skipped over those words when I went through the theme. Theme number four is about leadership. Modeling leadership behaviors was emphasized by supervisors. This is supervisors talking a lot about the importance of leadership behaviors amongst themselves and other supervisors.
Leadership behaviors talk about self-regulation, self-awareness, and they brought up again this need for consistency, respectful behavior, transparency, openness to dissent, specifically, so a supervisor being open to a practitioner having a different view to them, was really considered important for building supervisees’ confidence in their supervisors.
Drew: It’s interesting that almost everything they brought up under leadership was really just about modeling good workplace behavior, so always being calm, being respectful, letting people disagree without jumping down their throats, being transparent, being reliable, things that you’d want from any staff member, but specifically they want the supervisors to be doing that within the supervision relationship.
David: And if you think about it, there’s a quote in there from a supervisor that’s saying I need my supervisor to be great at doing the walk around, talking to staff, making sure that they’re knowing, that they care about how everyone’s going, they have a presence, they’re fair and just. That general description would be a universal expectation of people and their managers, right?
Drew: But that very much overlooked in the workplace sometimes is I want my supervisor to be there, just be physically present when I’m doing the work, when I have to show up to do an extra thing on Saturday, looking over and seeing that my boss has also shown up on the Saturday to be there at the same time.
David: So halfway through the theme, Drew. Theme number five, integrity and justice. As we talked about in the leadership theme above and earlier we talked about the first theme on safety, we talked about values such as integrity and honesty, commitment to social justice and natural justice principles, which contributed to the creation of safe, mutually respectful relationships. How do I think I’m going to be treated? If something goes wrong, how’s my supervisor going to respond? What process are we going to work through?
They also talked about keeping the child at the center of decision-making, then things rarely go wrong. As I extrapolated that out, I thought in this relationship the work itself should probably be central to the supervisor-supervisee relationship. It’s not actually about the practitioner. Well, it is about the practitioner but it’s about the practitioner and the work.
I think that’s where in this domain a number of the participants really talked about both the supervisor and the supervisee being jointly focused on the case and the child involved.
Drew: The researchers didn’t pull this out. I am reading a little bit between the lines from the quotes. But the sense I got was that it’s taken for granted that the frontline worker cares about their clients. What they wanted from a supervisor was someone who had their back when they did that.
Did you get that same sense like the opposite of this would be a supervisor who wants to protect the organization, even though the frontline worker wants to protect the child. They want someone that when they make a decision that they think is in the best interest of the child. They want the supervisor to have that same value and to back them up and to fight for what they want to fight for.
David: And we’re going to talk about a theme a couple of times about organization. What was interesting here is that practitioners tend to come from one of two types of organizations. One was a statutory or government-run organization, and the other organizations are more community support–type organizations.
They appear from this research anyway to have very different cultures, very different organizational policies, and in those environments, I think I also read between the lines a couple of the quotes where the supervisee, the practitioner really wanted as always as you’d expect practitioners to be focused on the best possible outcomes for (in this case) the child involved in the case, but never always felt that the supervisor had the same objective.
Drew: Just staying on this integrity and justice for a moment, the other sub theme that came up here was about power. The particular way they talked about it was, it’s important for the supervisor to be sensitive to the potential misuse of power.
I thought that was a really good way of putting it, because that’s really what the problem here is. It’s not that there is power, it’s that supervisors often don’t just even realize that they have power, so they don’t stop and think about how their use of that power might be perceived.
It’s really important when there’s that potential misuse for the supervisor to do things like be transparent about how workload is allocated, so it doesn’t appear as if there’s favoritism going on, and to make sure that when they’re doing things like you’re correcting or reprimanding someone, that there is some procedural fairness and procedural protections.
It’s obvious that it’s not just a supervisor having it in for someone or disliking them, that there’s some structural protection there against the misuse of power, that the supervisor is conscious of and is consciously building into those sorts of decision making processes.
David: Absolutely. The last thing I’d say in this theme as well is they actually talked about the willingness of supervisors to advocate for a particular outcome for a child or to secure resources for the family. Reading through these types of quotes for me it was a bit like we talk in safety about amplifying the voice of the frontline.
If a practitioner or a worker in any domain goes to their supervisor and says, I really think this needs to happen, I need something to do this case and it’s outside my authority to go and get these resources for this family in this case, knowing that they had a supervisor that would secure those resources and use, we talk about power, but be able to do the things that practitioners think needs to happen. I think that’s a really important role of a supervisor to balance, really fighting for their team members, and navigating organizational constraints.
Drew: And indeed, that next theme is literally balancing supervision functions and goes more into that. There was a tiny little pullout quote from this one about balance, David, that I would’ve loved to hear explained more. They talked about external supervision versus internal supervision. I think what they’re hinting at there is that in some of these situations, the supervisor was not directly part of the team delivering the work.
That’s something that happens often with peer supervision in psychology. You might be working almost like a sole practitioner of someone else that you go to for supervision, who obviously doesn’t work with your clients or have any ownership stake in those clients. I don’t know quite how it works in social work.
I do know that you get these weird situations all through the public service and government work, where your line manager and your HR supervisor are different people. Someone responsible for your workload, performance review, and supervision has nothing to do with the work that you actually do, and has no understanding of it. And that can lead to this real difficulty in balancing what’s actually the job of the supervisor here.
David: The two things that I think about in that space related to what we think about in safety would be solid lines and dotted lines in organizational structure charts. I report to a manager I dotted line to a safety person, or I report to a safety person I dotted line to a manager. They’re both supervision relationships. You could think of some of those a little bit like internal-external in some ways.
I also thought a little bit about contracting relationships, because very often a company person will be supervising the work of contractors who have turned up one day or one week to do work. It wasn’t really explained in this, but I guess there are a few contexts in safety where it would be really interesting to see if that is the same or different in terms of attributes of the supervisor or the relationship.
Drew: There is a project that I’m desperately trying to get off the ground at the moment. Listeners, if you want to fund it, jump in please, and that is contract labor and who is their supervisor.
There are some preliminary results that say that older contract laborers tend to pick up the phone back to the labor hire organization for supervision, but the younger workers seem to be really unsure about who is actually supervising them when they come from a contract labor organization into a large organization. It may be that no one is providing the full suite of supervision functions and all the supervision relationships are a little bit ambiguous about what to expect in them.
David: Wow. Let’s see. After 128 episodes, if we can get you some funding, Drew.
Theme six was about balancing supervision functions. We’ve talked about the functions of the supervisor in relation to what the organization needs, what the supervisee needs, so really looking at a supervisor who is able to combine their administrative, managerial power, and accountability with their relational responsibility for support, development, and mediation in the work context of their practitioners. There’s a quote in there, “If you don’t address all of these functions really effectively, then you fail the supervisee.”
Drew, theme number seven, organizational processes. There’s a theme here that organizational policy and culture had a significant bearing on the perception of the supervisors’ and supervisor relationships with their supervisees. This is where they pulled in the different types of organizations in saying, it seems that the supervisee relationship is impacted by the underlying set of organizational policies and organizational culture.
Drew: Just give you a quote, David, this is talking about the statutory workers. Their experience of organizational support was mixed, ranging from appreciation of constructive policy frameworks and support for training to discernible anger and disillusionment.
I would think that’s inevitable, that if the organization isn’t backing you and giving you what you need, then the supervisors are not going to be able to do much about it, and they’re just going to be the target for your anger, because they’re the ones who are telling you I’m trying to do my best for you but constantly.
David: And when we talk about the system doing exactly what it was designed to do, or something like context drives behavior, in the context of this paper would say that the broader organizational context, the most policy and cultural context really does heavily influence the behavior of supervisors in their supervisory relationship. As you’d expect, what the organization expects of its supervisors influences that behavior.
The last theme, Drew, theme number eight was about the community’s understanding and valuing of the practice of the work of these practitioners. I guess specifically in the social work domain, particularly in the child abuse and neglect, and some of the challenges around (I guess) family in the community, people felt like there was a very negative community perception of the work that they do in this particular aspect of the community, and really didn’t feel like that the community valued the work itself.
Child protection is not a celebrated service, and I think these practitioners really felt like the work that they were doing should be celebrated in very difficult situations. The only thing I could think about in relation to organizations more in the safety context, was how often does the organization celebrate the work of the frontline people as being really good valuable work?
Drew: David, the weird thing about this last theme though is it’s got nothing to do with supervision. This is something that happens sometimes when you’re doing qualitative work. You can’t force your interviewees to talk about what you want to talk about. When you’re doing active listening and you’re encouraging them to talk, there are things that will come up that aren’t in direct response to your research question.
Now, normally what we would do is we would basically just remove those from the analysis to say that’s really interesting, but that’s not what this paper is about. I think the problem here, though, is that the researchers needed to be respectful to their participants. Being respectful for the participants sometimes just means giving them a voice, even if it doesn’t answer the research question.
I suspect if you’d interviewed them about anything, theme number eight would’ve come up. I think this is something that seriously affects the lives of people doing this work. It’s something the organization needs to be conscious of. The community isn’t always going to value it. There’s going to be negative press. It’s going to affect their working lives.
The organization just needs to just not ignore that. Needs to do things about the fact that workers still need to be supported when they’re doing valuable work that other people don’t understand or agree with.
David: Thinking about myself and my own research, researching safety roles after doing safety roles for 20 years, and being quite clear upfront of my research that I had great respect for the role, I was a strong advocate of the role, I thought the role was really important. I think given that we actually shared at the start that the three researchers were also long careers in doing this type of work, there may be a little bit of advocacy going on in this paper as well. Not in a way that wasn’t representative of what the data said, but in a way that both the practitioners and the researchers felt that this theme needed to be part of this supervisor discussion.
Drew: Should we start moving towards takeaways, David?
David: Just before we do that, this paper really does tentatively say this is one exploratory study in one domain. We’re not claiming to produce new evidence about supervision. We think there’s scope to look further at this, but what we might try to do is build on what we’ve talked about today and give our listeners a few takeaways.
Drew: Just before we do, David, I want to say this. This is the one part of the paper that I don’t think is well-written and that I don’t agree with is their conclusions. This is not an exploratory study. This is a properly conducted piece of high quality qualitative research. And I think it does draw novel insights.
I think when the authors say it’s a small exploratory study that can’t claim to produce new evidence, don’t do that to yourselves, guys. This is good work. Okay, you haven’t invented a brand new theory of supervision, but you’ve made a meaningful contribution to our understanding of what is important in supervision rather than just vague platitudes.
I think it’s genuinely useful in stopping to think and using some of these things to reflect on, like what are we actually trying to do in supervision? Yeah, I don’t like it when authors oversell their work and I really don’t like it when they undersell good quality work.
David: And we don’t know if that was an edit that was made after peer review, right?
Drew: Yeah. If a peer reviewer made them do it, then the peer reviewer can just go get stuffed. This is good work.
David: Okay, the takeaways. Let’s talk about a couple of takeaways. Takeaway number one that I think we’ll talk about—I might introduce each of these, Drew, and get your perspective on thumbs up, thumbs down—the importance of having a model in your organization about how you want supervisory relationships to be experienced.
What do we want the experience of supervisory relationships to be for the supervisor and for the supervisee? Looking at all the different language that we’ve used today, what do we want that to be and how do we talk very openly about how we want these relationships to be experienced. I can’t recall really many or any real organization I’ve been to where I think there’s an ongoing conversation about how we want people to experience supervision.
Drew: I think one of the clear things that comes out of this paper that the authors might not even realize is interesting because they’re so used to it in social work, is things like explicitly saying, okay, this is a learning reflective practice relationship and we are going to have that as an explicit part of this is what the supervisor is meant to be doing, and this is how we train supervisors. It’s not just you vague be a good leader. It's to go through this reflective practice approach with the people you are working with.
Now that might not be what you want in your organization. Maybe you want it to be more of a coaching, or maybe you want it to be more of a coordination, or maybe you want supervisors to explicitly have three things that they try to do that you don’t just think about good supervision. Think about specifically what you want your supervisors to do and help them have those skills by both modeling it and training where appropriate.
David: That was the second takeaway there, Drew, about knowing what supervisors need and how you’re going to develop and equip them with those things, to be able to know what they need to know, say what they need to say, and do what they need to do.
Drew: Before we go on, David, the big, big one I want to say is make sure you address recommendation one before recommendation two. The number of people who roll out safety leadership training or supervision training, before they have identified what they actually want from their supervisors results in really ineffective training because you don’t know what you want. You just get this generic stuff that doesn’t actually improve things.
David: The third takeaway here is about how well organizational policies and the leadership culture more broadly enable these relationships. It’s not just about training the people in supervisory roles, but it’s to set up these safe and effective supervisory relationships. Do the organizational resources, policies, procedures, leadership, culture, language actually support relationships to be how we say we want them to be?
Drew: That’s not something this paper is really set up to explore, but there are all sorts of things there, like where are your direct lines and dotted lines? And do those fit with what you want? Do people have time and space to have these sorts of conversations? Where are you expecting the people to have these conversations? When are you expecting people to have these conversations?
All of those things are setting the relationship up for success, not just telling the supervisors what they’re supposed to do and then leaving them to try to do it in whatever time and space they can make.
David: And the final takeaway that I had, barring any further from you, was just how (I guess) interesting this would’ve been to do, to conduct research. Go and talk to a bunch of frontline workers about, in a semi-structured way, their supervision experience. Go and talk to a few supervisors and ask them some clear questions about how you would describe really great supervision? Can you tell me a story of a time when? These types of questions.
I guess takeaway number four is have you spent any time asking people in your organization what they want and what they need? Because this research was done in a specific social work–type of context, but in your own context you can replicate this type of work by talking to your people and using that to (I guess) address recommendation number one, which is what the model of supervision in your organization should look like.
Drew: This is not complicated research. It’s the sort of thing that you could do yourself. And if you’re not confident doing it, then just with a small collaboration with a consultancy or researcher with the specific brief, grab 10 people in our organization, just have conversations with them about supervision in our organization. That would be really useful data to very quickly make some improvements.
David: So, Drew, I always usually try to get in to throw you the concluding answer. It may not be a shorter answer, but the question that—
Drew: Okay. Listeners, I just need to point out here that our script here says our usual in one sentence, what’s the question we asked this week? And David has already written a paragraph with five different dot points.
David: And it goes to the complexity of the question, Drew. But maybe you might be able to summarize it. The question we asked this week was, what are the attributes of an effective supervisor?
Drew: And the answer is, everything you expect, but with a new emphasis on the safety and predictability of that relationship.
David: Wonderful. That’s it for this week. We hope you found this episode thought-provoking and in shaping the safety of work in your own organization. Send any comments, questions, or ideas for future episodes to feedback@safetyofwork.com.