What image does “supervision” conjure up for you?
For me, it’s the manager at the British Gas call centre who told me off for taking too long in the loo! It’s the grey-haired grumpy manager in my first job at Sainsbury’s who always seemed to know best.
A supposed “wise head” who is going to talk down to me and correct me. It’s hierarchical and corrective.
In the world of Financial Advice, supervision has some very specific connotations. The supervisor is someone who gets to tick the boxes to say that you remain competent (or not!) at your job. They’re the people who check you’ve completed your CPD this year, know how to talk about your terms of business correctly, and conduct a compliant client meeting. Oh, and that you’ve passed whatever test you need to prove you still know how a pension works.
These images aren’t surprising really. I looked up the definition of “supervise” and it means “to observe and direct the execution of a task or duty”.
Obviously, it’s important that you prove ongoing competence in some way. I’m ok to call that supervision – it absolutely “observes and directs you in the execution of your role”.
But there’s another form of “supervision” that pretty much all other helping professions engage in, that is missing in the Financial Advice sector. I think it could offer huge value.
The missing piece
This form of supervision is more of a guided reflective practice. A place to go to think about your practice with one or more other practitioners – usually where the person leading the session has more (or different, complementary) experience to yourself.
I notice that the key things people comment on at the end of my training programmes for Financial Advisers & Planners are:
- Everyone’s openness and willingness to share (leading people to realise that they’re not alone in their challenges, that it’s a deeply connecting experience to be vulnerable, and to feel the generosity of others)
- The stimulation of their own thinking that input from me and their colleagues has inspired.
They experience this as unusual. Which seems to be an obvious need, hiding in plain sight.
Financial Planners are in the deeply privileged position to regularly have deeply personal conversations with their clients throughout their lives. This includes deeply emotional transitions like retirement, divorce and bereavement. It includes supporting younger clients to face up to their own mortality and put protection in place in case something happens to them. So many conversations that are deeply human and often hard to navigate.
Yet not only is there little training available, there is little to no ongoing support to help them navigate these challenges.
Perhaps guided reflective practice could be just what’s needed.
A very different starting point
I think that traditional supervision usually works from a starting point of an unspoken assumption:
The supervisor knows best and that they can somehow assess the supervisee’s performance and offer suggestions for corrective action.
The approach I’ve been exploring is based on something very different.
The positive philosophical choice that underpins Thinking Environment practice asserts that:
Human beings are fundamentally good, intelligent, and capable of independent thought.
Therefore, this kind of supervision starts from the assumption that you are the very best person to think about your situation and challenges. At the same time, it recognises that sometimes:
- We don’t know what we don’t know (there is information missing)
- Others think differently to us (because of their social context, lived experiences, personalities and prior learning) and those perspectives can be useful
- We can be in denial, or too close to a situation to be able to see it entirely clearly (perhaps there are untrue limiting assumptions in play, that we are living as true)
This creates a paradox that this approach holds beautifully:
The mind asking the question is the very best mind to think about it AND that mind might be stimulated in new ways by external input.
Because this is so different from the usual experience though, we need to be deliberate about creating the conditions and structures to live this assumption as true.
What makes it different: Equality
When we bring our challenges into any forum, one of the biggest inhibitors to our psychological safety and therefore our ability to think well is, I think, performance anxiety.
We’re trained from such an early age that we need to “think before we speak” and “be prepared”. Because of that, to be genuinely vulnerable, speak as we’re thinking, and put aside (as far as we can) any worries that we are being judged or appraised based on what we are saying is incredibly rare.
Most supervision relationships don’t begin with the assumption that everyone is equal in their ability to think. There is usually an implied hierarchy, demonstrated through behaviour, the offering of advice, answers and ways to “fix” the problem or even the person.
However, this approach does start from that premise. In my experience, more than 80% of the time, time and generative attention are all that the mind needs to make breakthroughs. I have observed the same in this kind of supervision.
Often, when people have brought a topic to think about, the majority of the value has been during their initial time to think. Sometimes that has come from the process of getting beyond initial waves of thinking to unearth the “real issue”. Sometimes from a reflection yielding “I had a similar challenge with that previous client and solved it by… perhaps I could try that here too”.
But here’s the crucial part: when input is given, it’s not driven by what the supervisor wants to say – but by what you want to ask.
That distinction is crucial.
A real example: Information not advice
I had a lovely example of this recently. David (an experienced Financial Planner) shared that his client had spoken uninterrupted for 12 minutes about his aspirations for retirement. He kept his promise of no interruptions, but felt himself worrying about time and it impacting his ability to provide generative attention.
Having thought for a while, David asked me “what do you think about the tension between managing time in a meeting and the promise of no interruption?”
In response I simply asked a clarifying question:
“Were your concerns about time real, did you run over? Or was it more of an internal concern?”
I wanted to make sure I was answering the right question for David, but in fact, the question meant that David answered it for himself.
“Oh… it was just in my head. It would probably have taken 25 minutes if I had led the client, probed and asked more questions. And he might not ever have got to where he got to without me interfering.”
This is the difference between offering advice (“You should have…”) and offering information, experience or a clarifying question. The first tells you what to do. The second keeps you thinking for yourself, but with a fresh perspective.
What people bring to these sessions
I’ve had Financial Advisers bring challenges like:
- Speaking with a recently bereaved widow
- Their own grief at having lost a client they worked with for over a decade
- How to handle an ethical dilemma
- Engaging more effectively with the spouse of a client who couldn’t care less about finances (but presumably does care about what their future looks like)
- How to help a client think about the reality of a reduced life expectancy or even terminal diagnosis and what that means for their financial decisions
- Facilitating conversations between a client and their family about inheritance expectations
This is just a small proportion of the examples I’ve heard. In each case, the person bringing the challenge has left with a fresh perspective and approach that they felt would work for them, in their specific context. This has not been gained through advice, but through the opportunity to think for themselves about the situation AND with the benefit of input from others.
These are not things that are covered in the industry’s technical exams but are the real challenges faced by Financial Advisers and Planners daily.
Groups and individuals
I’ve thought a lot about the advantages of group and individual sessions, and personally have concluded that both offer something valuable.
Individual sessions are able to offer much more time for you to think independently. Dedicated time and attention on your issue only, with a really singular focus.
Group sessions offer the breadth of perspective that a single supervisor cannot. They also allow each attendee to learn from each others’ challenges as well as their own (meaning that even when there isn’t quite time for everyone to have a turn, the experience is not significantly diminished).
I have also noticed that often in a group, a field of learning will naturally emerge. I think this speeds up the process of creating psychological safety. The sense of shared experiences and challenges builds empathy, which in turn creates a sense of “we’re in this together”.
In any field of work, it can be hard to talk about our challenges. We want the world, our bosses, our peers to think well of us. To appear confident and competent. Not knowing, or feeling that we don’t know, can feel shameful.
This kind of space offers a place where we can put down the mask that most of us carry around most of the time. We can instead be amongst equals, respected and accepted because of our flaws, challenges and humanness – not in spite of them.
What’s the opportunity?
My working assumption is that across all helping professions there is a need for non-judgemental, psychologically safe spaces for guided reflective practice. Without the psychological safety, the courage that it requires to bring up something we perceive as a mistake or a shortcoming might be just too much.
I see a fantastic opportunity in creating this kind of space, both for individuals and groups of Financial Advisers and Planners.
Finally, I think the term supervision does a poor job of describing everything I’ve experienced and shared above. Why not call it what it is – guided reflective practice.
So that’s what I’ll be offering in 2026.
Guided reflective practice for Financial Advisers and Planners keen to develop their skills through reflection and collaboration.
I’ll refer to participants as practitioners. And me? Well I think I might be their “reflective guide”.
If this resonates with you, I’d love to hear about it. What’s the challenge you’d most like to bring to a space like this?
Interested in guided reflective practice sessions? Please click here to be kept in the loop or drop me an email to find out more.
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