#184 Ending CMS* relationships well
(*Coaching, Mentoring and Supervision)
This week, a client ended a longstanding working relationship with me. Or rather, we ended it together. I’m reflecting on supervision relationships here (they represent 90% of my work these days); however, I believe these ideas would relate to coaching and mentoring relationships, too.
When I began offering coaching supervision in 2020, I wondered how long each relationship might last. While there are significant benefits from a longstanding supervisory partnership, I could equally see how coaches might want to keep things fresh and switch supervisors from time to time. I figured about five years would represent an expectation on my part. So, five years from 2020 would be 2024. Here’s my experience of the number of supervisees who have departed since 2024, and the length of our supervisory relationship:
Reasons for ending a supervision relationship
With involuntary leavers, you don’t always get the chance to end well, but when I do get the opportunity for a planful ending, I’ve been honing my approach to the final session.
Firstly, I review my notes from our sessions, drawing out what we discussed, looking for themes. In a supervision context, I’m not looking for case-based outcomes, although these are important; I’m looking more for the conversations where we explored who the supervisee was becoming, how they were discovering important aspects of themselves, their beliefs, capabilities and intentional behaviours. In the session, I invite my client to express their view of what happened, and share my own.
Then, I aim to explore three questions that help to reflect on the time we have had together. These are directly linked to the contract. In essence, we are celebrating the fulfilment of our contract in terms of outcomes, process and relationship:
What have you learnt about yourself and your coaching?
What have you gained from the supervisory process?
What are you taking from our relationship that might also serve you going forward?
And finally, Now what? In other words, we discuss what is happening next, for both of us. I also usually ask for a testimonial or referrals (if this has not already happened) and, often, this question leads to a conversation about how we might work together again in coaching, mentoring or supervision, or in collaboration as peers, depending on the context.
The result is a genuine partnered celebration, the sense that it has been worthwhile, plus the bonus of conversational feedback, a testimonial and the potential for more work in the future.
What questions do you ask clients as the CMS relationship comes to an end?
