Supervision is a meeting with your manager, about once a month, where you talk through your cases and how you are. It is the most useful hour in the job. It is also the first thing to be cancelled.
I have had good supervision and I have had supervision that was a list of my overdue visits read aloud. This is what I know about telling them apart and getting more of the first kind.
What it is for
More than most people get out of it.
The cases. What is happening, what you are worried about, what you are going to do.
You. How you are. What it is costing. Whether you are sleeping.
Getting better at it. What you did not know last month that you know now.
If yours is only ever the first, you are being managed. That is a different thing, and you are entitled to say so.
Before you go in
Write down three cases you want to talk about. Put the one you least want to talk about at the top.
You will be tempted to bring the ones that are going well, because it is pleasant to be told you are doing well. Bring one of those. Then bring the one where you drove home and could not remember the drive.
In the room
Start with the hard one. If you leave it to the end, there will be eight minutes left and a knock on the door.
Say what you think is happening, and then say what you are afraid is happening. They are not always the same and the gap between them is usually where the work is.
If you do not know what to do, say that. It is what the hour is for.
When they ask how you are
The honest answer is allowed.
In the book, Ray asks Maisie how she is, and she says fine, and he puts his pen down. “I know what ‘fine’ looks like,” he says, “and I know what ‘pretending to be fine’ looks like. Which one are you?” Then he waits.
I gave him that line because it is what I would have liked somebody to say to me sooner. When somebody did, I found that I could tell the truth and still be trusted with a caseload afterwards.
If yours does not wait, tell them anyway. Say it to the top of their head while they are typing.
When it gets cancelled
It will. Something will happen on duty, and your hour will be the thing that gives.
Rebook it before you leave the room. Do not accept “we’ll catch up next week”. Next week there will be something else, and the month after that you will realise you have not been asked how you are since the spring.
If it is cancelled twice in a row, put it in an email. Be pleasant about it. Put the date in.
What to write down afterwards
What was decided, and who is doing it. Not the whole conversation.
If a decision was made about a child, it goes on the child’s file as well, with your manager’s name next to it. That is for the child’s sake, and it is also for yours.
If yours is bad
Some are. Some managers have never had good supervision themselves and are passing on what they were given.
Ask for what you need in plain words: “Can we start with how I’m doing, and then do the cases?” It works more often than you would expect. People often want to be better at this and have not been shown.
If it does not change, find it somewhere else as well. A colleague you trust, a group, somebody who has been doing it for twenty years and eats lunch at the same time as you. It does not replace the real thing. It will keep you going while you ask for the real thing.
And if you are the supervisor
Shut the laptop. Ask the question. Count to ten before you speak again, and if you get to ten, keep going.
Maisie x
Next in the notebook: Room 2.14