Análisis de resultado

I shared the tension I was holding around the SG that fell into a number of areas. This group had felt “messy” from the start with our difficulty finding dates, for some in choosing their supervisees for the Project, not sending many session notes, attendance at the ALS meetings (neither of the first two meetings had been fully attended) and already I knew I had to

organise two sessions for this second round of ALS Meetings in March. I really felt that I didn’t “know” this group yet.

“(They’re) not methodical like my coaches. And that’s Action Research and it’s the world in which we are living. So, holding the anxiety of what’s messy and how do I - what are the - may not be so tidy in gathering the themes - one thing is whether I will meet the Uni protocol and maybe that’s not a problem. Another thing is - there is something going on - in group evolution terms - each time we’ve met we are a new group and whatever the implications of that are - each group has been ok and I have an underlying voice - in group

development terms, we are starting afresh each time - so what does that do to the trust, the relationship, the sense of belonging, the support and engagement and therefore their capacity to reflect publicly...And I think - what is going on here? I feel it’s a “what is going on here?” (AH Conversation with Sally Kleyn 21 January

2012).

Together we explored my assumptions around the SG’s level of

understanding of group dynamics and whether they all had to be there for the group to develop (which may not be the case), and whether group development was a necessity for me to gather data. I realised that my job

was to have co-researchers who were giving me the data. At the same time, I also hoped and intended that they would gain something for themselves in their practice. So how could and would I “tolerate” the balance between acknowledging people’s busy lives alongside their commitment to the Project? I knew it was easy for me to get hooked into their needs at the expense of my need to get data, but intuition led me to suspect that one specific participant might not actually want to continue but did not know how to tell me. And of course, what was my part in this? I wondered if there might be a parallel between this participant and an ambivalent supervisee in the wider field. Again I revisited the question about what stops people having supervision, from bringing themselves in, from giving themselves to supervision, allowing themselves to be

vulnerable enough to learn. I chose not to draw conclusions around these questions at this stage.

I wondered what might have been the unconscious processes, “based on

psychological defences” (Schein 1999) that might or might not have been

sabotaging or supporting us until now. Perhaps it was just co-incidence that the SG were not having many sessions with their clients. Perhaps because we were all supervisors there was an element of competition between each other and with me as lead researcher. Perhaps I was not as clear in my requests as I had been with the coaches, not wishing to appear too directive towards “peers”. Perhaps I had not paid enough attention to creating an appropriate level of safety. I noticed that some of my musings here were also connected with me wanting “to do it right”.

We revisited the issue that in SG ALS1 we had gathered very little data around their supervisees or their own changes to practice. I was informed by what had emerged from the CG where we agreed that supervision can (and as is currently defined possibly “should”) play a significant part in bringing about changes to practice, and yet both Groups had identified barely any attributable changes as a result of their actual supervision. I therefore wanted to bring this into the SG’s foreground when we next met

to explore more deeply what links these participants saw between

supervision and change to practice. This was also informed by my original intention that the Project would model my purpose as a supervisor. With changes to practice also lying at the core of Action Research the Project was providing a lived, shared experience of how reflecting on practice might be impacting on their practice.

By now, January 2012, I had had very few session notes from anybody since the first ALS Meeting in November and notwithstanding that December is a quiet time in terms of professional work, I was anxious about this. Through my conversation with Sally I was able to reframe this as “data” and again get in touch with my curiosity around what might be happening for these particular supervisors and how this might potentially inform the larger community of practice.

I considered the difference between the CG who cooperated consistently by sending notes and attending the ALS Meetings, whereas some

members of the SG appeared to be giving other business and life events precedence, at least over the ALS Meetings. So, what might be

happening? Is this a coach/supervisor phenomenon? So were the coaches cooperating with me, knowing me as a supervisor and as lead researcher? Was there an element of compliance therefore with the CG? And what place does cooperation and compliance play within a peer relationship, which might be how the supervisors perceived our group and me within it (Hawkins & Smith 2006)?

There was clearly something for me around holding the ambiguity and erratic experience of the SG who were not behaving as I had hoped they would. There was also the reality for some that their supervisees showed up for supervision irregularly. And my tidy little self wanted to be a proper “practitioner-researcher” (Barber 2009) and do what I had said in my Project Proposal - was this me wanting to comply? And yet, maybe it was ok to be “good enough” and just hold the tension (Winnicott 1958 cited in

Heard 1978) as I do in the real world where clients do not show up, do not have sessions when they say they will, do not have supervision as

regularly because they do not have much work on - life, business,

personal crises occur and supervision is compromised. That is my reality, so what was going on for me with my idealised intention as lead

researcher? This led me to consider the tension between practitioners and the coaching associations advocating or even mandating that

executive coaches must have a certain number of sessions, over a certain period of time, with a certain number of hours of supervision (e.g.

Association for Coaching 2012).