Leadership Team Supervision: putting collaboration on the table.

What leadership supervision is — and what it is not

Supervision comes from the social and clinical professions, where it serves a clear purpose: people who work with people reflect on that work with an outsider. The same principle applies to leadership teams. Unlike coaching, which focuses on the individual and their leadership behaviour, supervision looks at the interplay: who holds which role, who decides what, where the friction is — and which of that is structural rather than personal.

Supervision is not a team-building event and not a crisis summit. It is a recurring, structured working session in which the team makes its own way of working the subject.

Typical triggers

• A newly composed leadership team after a merger, succession or reorganisation.
• Two managing directors with different ideas about who is responsible for what.
• A conflict in the management circle that is politely steered around in meetings and then fought out in one-to-ones.
• Decisions that are taken and then not implemented — because they were never truly carried.
• An executive team ground down between the owner family and the workforce.
• Leaders who need a protected space to reflect on their role — regularly, not only in an emergency.

How a team supervision runs

Before the first session I talk with the commissioning party — usually the managing director or CEO — about the trigger and the goal. Then:

• Contracting within the team: everyone states what they expect from supervision. That is already part of the work, because the first differences show up here.
• Regular sessions in a fixed rhythm we set together — with the whole team. Each session has a topic the team brings.
• Method: I work multi-partially; every position in the room is legitimate. Circular questions make visible how the participants perceive one another. Roles become explicit rather than implicit.
• Agreements: every session ends with concrete commitments. At the next one we see what held.
• Close: taking stock against the original brief, and a decision on continuing or ending.

One-to-one supervision for leaders

Not every topic belongs in the team. Some leaders need a place to reflect on their role — handling a difficult employee, the tension between loyalty to the team and loyalty to the executive board, the sense of playing a part in meetings that is not their own. One-to-one supervision is the right format for that: 50 to 90 minutes, every two to four weeks, in Vienna, in Leopoldsdorf near Vienna, or online.

The boundary to executive coaching is fluid; in the first conversation we work out which format fits your situation.

Stance and confidentiality

My supervision training is rooted in existential analysis and systemically oriented. To that I add 33 years of my own leadership experience — many of them with leadership teams I built myself. I know both sides of the table, and I have no interest in who in the team turns out to be right.

What is discussed in supervision stays there. In team supervision that applies within the company as well: the commissioning party receives no minutes of individual statements, only the agreements the team itself releases. If your topic is less the team than your own load, read on under executive burnout prevention.